Selling and Buying of Steemit accounts
The sale of Steemit accounts is a lucrative business. In my search for a Steemit bot I stumbled on a forum where the sale of accounts is booming.
Multiple accounts
A hot topic here on Steemit, a lot of Steemians have more than one account setup. There are various reasons why an alternative account may come in handy (not judging by any means). Steemit's current verification system seems incapable of preventing people making more than one account. There are even Steemians with hundreds and even more than a thousand accounts active.
The Black Market
In my search on Google for a python script for a bot I stumbled on the https://bitcointalk.org/ forums. My search for a bot had let me to the following post:
Now I am kind of new to Steemit but I never knew that you could buy accounts or in this case an army of bots that could net you $40-50 dollars a day.
I searched the forum for more mentions of Steemit and found more people selling accounts for money/BTC.
Against the rules?
So is it against the rules? I can not find anything prohibiting multiple accounts and a lot of well known Steemians have multiple accounts.
There is also nothing against selling your account (at least not that I could find) in the TOS (here).
So selling an army of bots that can net you 40 bucks a day does not seem to be against the rules.
Social Control
So it is up to the community to enforce the law (I love this about Steemit).
The community as a whole decides which behavior is acceptable and what is not. This is probably the reason why the sale of accounts is on forums like blackhatworld.com and bitcointalk.org and not on Steemit. These posts would probably get flagged into the ground.
Devil's Advocate
So hypothetically speaking what would happen if I decided to buy one of the bot armies? Officially I would not be breaking any "Steemit" laws (I probably wouldn't make much friends either). Would I get flagged, banned, my account(s) disabled or ostracized by the community?
My guess is none of the above. The seller of the bot armies (he has 4) has been making multiple accounts for a long time probably and has been getting away with it (as far as I know).
My take on the matter
If Steemit wants to grow, the multiple accounts issue and the use of bots has to be addressed.
Multiple accounts
Give people the option to make "shadow accounts" linked to your main profile and take away the ability for the "shadow accounts" to vote for the main account. Also we need a way to make it harder for creating multiple main accounts. The verification system that is now in place is very easy to circumvent.Bots
Bots are cool, bots are the future. Give people also the option to create bots linked to their account and take away the possibility to vote on the main account just like the "shadow accounts".
Selling and buying accounts, good or bad? What do you think, let me know in the comment section.
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message me if you know anywhere I can buy established steem accounts.
[email protected]
Still interested? Looking to sell mine
Multiple accounts
Give people the option to make "shadow accounts" linked to your main profile and take away the ability for the "shadow accounts" to vote for the main account. Also we need a way to make it harder for creating multiple main accounts. The verification system that is now in place is very easy to circumvent.
I like that !!
yup, that way people can have multiple accounts but won't abuse the self voting
Agree with that; And although the system makes it possible, I find it stealing.
Then again; after that there will be always be new "smartasses" who'll find others ways to "cheat" with the system
That's true, nothing is full proof, but at the moment it feels more like anything goes. Maybe it was designed that way on purpose.
I hope not, otherwise my "career" here won't be till the end of days, hahaha. And I'm shure a lot of others think the same way.
I have not read anything about sale of accounts. But regarding the multiple accounts In steem whitepaper you can see that this is already mentioned. 100SP whether it is distributed between 10 accounts or 1 account it will still have the same clout. So I don't think there is any issues with creating multiple accounts.
Over the time we will see more serious publishers getting on to steem. Once they create their brand and if they consider selling their whole company they might also need to transfer the steem account to the new owner. In cases like these it doesn't make sense to selling of accounts.
Looking at these scenarios I think the creators of Steem were ok with creation of multiple accounts and buying/selling of accounts.
I have nothing against multiple accounts really. But like everything there is a balance. I find the idea of buying not legions to tap rewards quite disgusting
Yup, I agree. Weird thing is that there is nothing about it in the TOS (rules). So basically I could make a 1000 accounts and still not be violating the rules. That's why I suggested "shadow account" where you could link 2 or mayby 5 accounts to you main account but won't be able to upvote your main account.
It's a good idea but with proxy stuff it might be almost impossible to enforce
Yes, I've been thinking about how to enforce people only signing up once, but it seems almost impossible. you need an unique identifier for that to work. Best thing I came up with was linking the account to google authenticator....But that is also not full proof.
Sadly it make steem accpunt creation false information. If 1000 users join each day, how many are the same one?
It does, only active accounts should be counted. All the others could be bots or fake accounts.
Very true
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by jocasta from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
This post has received a 1.56 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @banjo.
I have seen posts that have insane upvotes, like hundreds or a thousand maybe, and there are hardly any comments. Actually since there's nothing about the Steemit account currently that's linked to anything real about me (name, address, credit card, etc.) there is almost a feeling that it's just floating there, somewhat unreal. There is also a sense that for the nearly 300,000 people registered, there doesn't seem to be that many thousand actually circulating on a daily basis. Great Post / Peace
Hey @clumsysilverdad, thanks. Minnowsupport's bots also add to the insane upvotes. Also people are using steemvoter and streemian to automatically vote on posts. It is impossible at the moment to say what accounts are real and which ones are fake. Connecting your real identity to your account would help but I fear this won't be a popular solution. People value their privacy.
Have you seen my Bunghole? My people; we are without Bungholes...
I was wondering when I'd come across a post highlighting the selling/buying of Steemit accounts. Good find.
Thank you, I didn't know it was a "thing" until recently.
This is obviously abuse of system, I believe stellabella and many other steemians are doing their best to prevent abuse of rewards pool by flagging bot armies
Yeah, this advertising of a bot army is on the one hand shocking but on the other hand the IT-guy in me is wondering how he is pulling this of. He even advertises that his bots can post content. I wonder if flagging will work, this is fighting the symptoms and not the source of the problem.
Yes but flagging is best that can be done at the moment.
Good investigation. This kind of behavior really bogs down the website and the block-chain, which is bad for everyone, including Steemit inc. That thread you screenshotted (thanks btw) just reeks of hardcore abuse.
To enforce stuff like this would lost the ability to stay anonymous, no? Isn't this also the same thinking the Government has on how they look at us? I say let people be free. There will be abuse, but like in life it's only a small % of people. It's better than the other option to completely lock down the normal people to 'protect' us from the bad people. It sounds like the same argument for the TSA and Patriot Act.