Lextenebris ZAP - 20180330t165546419z

lextenebris (62) in steem • 7 years ago

Weird discovery of the day: There are a pile of blockchain delegation transfers which are _literally_ no value. #steem #blockchain #steemanalysis #WTFmate

steem blockchain steemanalysis WTFmate

7 years ago by lextenebris (62)

$0.26

12 votes

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!

Sort Order:

Trending

[-]

lextenebris (62) · 7 years ago

And, in fact, of the 8369 current delegation actions in the last week, 1239 are operations which literally transfer no value.

$0.08

1 vote

[-]

glenalbrethsen (68) · 7 years ago

Any chance the delegations didn't take because they were put in wrong, but registered as an attempt anyway?

Or is it possible that's what it looks like when a delegation ends?

I looked up both bearwards and kmyang62 and neither of them are showing a delegation connection of any kind.

$0.00

[-]

lextenebris (62) · 7 years ago

Honestly, no idea. Though you would think that if they were put in wrong, the operation wouldn't even hit the database. That is the job of everything on the front end to check before it's committed.

It might be possible that's what it looks like when a delegation ends, but that would be a silly way to do things. Of course, that wouldn't be the first time that digging around in the Steemit blockchain database revealed something that was incredibly silly as a way to do things.

Looking at the history of kmyang62, there is a lot of delegation and fill order activity going on here. If I didn't know better, I might suggest that this account was just a tentacle of a larger bot swarm which does operations for buying and selling votes/delegation/etc.

Which is kind of annoying since I'm doing my best to try and filter out all of the known bots in my working lists and I keep falling all over things like this.

Aside from the fact that this is effectively a no-op, it's taking up space on the blockchain.

I'm going to proceed under the assumption that delegating 0 SP is effectively removing the delegation that previously existed, because anything else both makes me a little crazy and frustrates me to no end.

Messy.

$0.14

3 votes

[-]

glenalbrethsen (68) · 7 years ago

Well, and if it's showing up when no delegation was even attempted, another remote possibility perhaps, that wouldn't be good either. Something's obviously happening, which means someone or something is initiating it.

As far as bot swarming transfers go, that sounds akin to money laundering, moving transactions all around. I can feel the madness in that myself.

The few amateur forays I've made using the apps available (not a straight up server client connection), it's been just bizarre at times.

When I've looked at posts from arcange and I see the number of dead accounts floating there, but then go in and look and see that there's delegations galore going on back and forth between supposedly dead fish accounts, it's like well, okay, those folks aren't participating directly, but they would seemingly be having at least a significant indirect effect on the reward pool and what's going on here.

It's got to the point where I just have to pull away from it because I don't get what's going on. It's great when someone who does know what they're looking at can tell the rest of us.

$0.11

2 votes

[-]

lextenebris (62) · 7 years ago

In theory, one of the people trying to figure out what's going on in here – is me.

Unfortunately for me, a lot of the time digging around in this stuff is like doing deep research in the Cthulhu Mythos. Every bit of extra-cosmic knowledge which slips into your mind erodes just that much more sanity, leaving you a gibbering mess, locked in a room, scrawling on the walls with your own feces.

Though I think it's safe to say that anyone who has been reading most of my stuff already knows about my scrawling on the walls with my own feces.

$0.04

2 votes

[-]

glenalbrethsen (68) · 7 years ago

Oh, I wouldn't go that far.

But then I'm the guy going through two month old to two year old posts trying to find out what this place was intended to be, and reading all the back and forth comments, which means I'm reading some of your so called feces wall-scrawl. :)

I read the comments you had on a post (steemitblog maybe?) where others, witnesses, devs, both, were trying to tell you why things were done the way they were while you were telling them, essentially, okay, but what you've done isn't stopping that, or it's doing the opposite of what you want it to, so why do it?

I don't claim to know what needs to be done to make things work, to incentivize behavior or execute sound game theory. But I can take the 30,000 ft view and say, these are the things we want to have happen, they're not, how do we get there, and who knows how if you don't? When no one seems to know, or no one seems to care that they don't know, so they keep offering solutions that work at the edges but don't solve the core issues, it's very frustrating to me.

It's got to be magnitudes higher of frustration for you.

So, I guess I'm saying, keep on digging and scrawling for as long as you can maintain sanity, because it helps others like me who question what's going on realize that were actually the sane ones. :)

$0.09

1 vote

[-]

lextenebris (62) · 7 years ago

You know, the question of "intent" is really big and really important – and even after having read the white paper and the blue paper, a couple of years of random discussion from creators and those involved, and getting elbow deep in the ugly, messy, red and gooey guts of it all, I don't think I actually understand anymore than you do.

And if I am remembering the discussion you're referring to, a good chunk of my perplexity could be tracked back to the fact that it was obvious that the mechanisms in place would lead to exactly the kinds of behavior and activity that we are being told is undesirable. If you look at my comments on the proposed content of hardfork 20, you'll see exactly the same thing.

I am currently scrolling some very pretty pictures of the network of delegation transfers for the last week. If I can make this graph turn out to be tolerably readable, I will go the extra mile and see if I keep double the number of transfers that are being visualized.

In the process, I'm doing what I can to cut out the big, obvious bots and major services on the platform. That step alone is probably unnecessary, but it's interesting. Even looking at some of the preliminary, quite broken imagery I can see major islands of activity forming with very strong centroids. That's the sort of thing that you simultaneously really want and dread to see, because after the filtering, what you have left are supposedly non-bots.

Research continues.

$0.04

1 vote

[-]

aussieninja (62) · 7 years ago

I thought that was when someone canceled a delegation?
If I delegate to you 50SP... then I put in a transaction that delegates you that 50... but since it's on the blockchain, I can't ever cancel that delegation... all I can do is put in a new delegation of 0... and that's the cancel button.

$0.00

[-]

lextenebris (62) · 7 years ago

That's the assumption I'm going with, because it makes the most logical sense of my options.

However, given the ridiculous profusion of operations which are stored on the blockchain as different operation types, I really expected to find that there was a specific "stop delegating vests" operation to designate that.

Though it's probably surprising how few of the "stop delegating" operations there are on a regular basis. According to the numbers that I've been pulling today, of the 252,312 (as of this moment; I'm sure that number will change by publication time) delegation transactions in the last month, only 8388 were orders to stop delegating.

Though as I write this, I'm wondering if I'm not handling multiple delegations from one account to another in the right way. I've been adding them, but I suspect that I should simply take the last entered value instead.

I'll have to look at how do that algorithmically.

$0.07

1 vote

[-]

aussieninja (62) · 7 years ago

Ah... I see you've already got there in that other convo... sorry, whoops, etc.

$0.00