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RE: [Analysis] Whale Delegation And the Infinity of Bots: A Love/Hate Story
So amazing analysis! Thx a lot! I'd like to follow your example and try to answer two questions:
- How whales (dolphins) got rich.
- How the wealth of whales changes over time.
I plan to use raw data from the blockchain, but you are using SteemData. Is it more convenient?
These are actually pretty simple questions to answer:
They turn fiat currency into steem. You might be laboring under the misapprehension that they acquired their money by being active posters or involved in the community. By and large, not the case. They acquired their money by buying their money.
Interestingly, given the decrease in the value of cryptocurrency over the last several months, that means that Steemit has something very much in common with Hollywood. It's one of the best ways in the world to turn a big pile of money into a little pile of money, short of burning.
There is also the opportunity to engage in all of the behaviors which you are socially pressured not to do by people who already have stake on the platform, like self voting or engaging with bots. Though examining the return on investment from bots over the last several months, you might be better off flying to your local gambling casino and betting everything on black, because bots are essentially betting pools which convert steem and SBD into, statistically, smaller piles of SP – which enable you to do more things which you are encouraged not to buy people who already have stake in the platform.
I know these weren't the answers to that particular question you were expecting to hear, but that's why I make the tiny bucks.
It goes up. Unless they have decided that the market has done the best it can, in which case they take value as fast as they can go off of the blockchain, convert it into something they can actually use to spend on real things, and wait for the bottom to come – which apparently it has not quite yet.
Part of the reason that the wealth of whales only goes up over time is that there is no real use for steem or SBD as a currency. A currency which has no way to spend it is no form of currency at all; at best it's a commodity, and commodities are only as valuable as what someone wants to pay for it. With real money.
Again, pretty sure that's not the answer you expected or wanted to get, but there it is.
I find working with SteamData far more convenient than any of the raw data modules available, in part because there is one for languages I am likely to use: the Python steem module. Except that it doesn't really work on Windows boxes for various reasons, so I use Beem. Or I would, except that it's not really complete and doesn't actually have all of the functionality that I need. The SteamData MongoDB interface does, and it's relatively easy to work with to get large-scale data out of the blockchain and into data structures which I can work with.
You basically have two choices when it comes to programmatic interface with the steem blockchain. There is JavaScript, which most of the core tools/clients are written in, and Python, which is a far better in every way language. I go with the latter.
Hope this was helpful.