(I'm not an alt of Quickseller)
Can you prove this?
This is actually a point that I would like to delve into: the fact that one cannot prove that they are
not and alt of another. I have started noticing a lot of instances where one user sends tokens (or some other "cryptocurrency") to another user's address and it becomes solidified as grounds for a link.
I don't doubt that a lot of these cases
are cases of alts sending one another coin/tokens and I don't accept the "we had a trade and we lost the logs" argument for obvious reasons. However, I am absolutely sure that there is a significant portion of these cases which are false positives.
Is there any way to deal with that, other than giving up searches and allowing these bounty farmers to continue spewing trash all over the forum?
You need to use good judgment when reviewing blockchain links.
I assume you are referring to people sending ERC20 tokens to a central address. When you have one account sending tokens to an address associated with another account in a single instance, this is very clearly insufficient evidence to support they two accounts are alts of eachother. If one account sends every ERC20 token they ever receive to another account, this is probably still insufficient evidence alone to support the two are alts, although when used in conjunction with other evidence, a connection may be made; however this will show the two accounts likely live in the same time zone, and may know eachother IRL. I would speculate that when you have a very small number of accounts consistently making A --> B transactions, most of the time they probably are friends IRL, and one of them is simply cashing out their earnings. Even if there is one person with two or three accounts "abusing" bounty campaigns, in the grand scheme of things, they probably are not doing very much damage, and are probably not
really hurting anyone.
However when you have many accounts, perhaps more than 15 or so, and they are all sending tokens to a single address that does not clearly belong to one of them, this is decent evidence they are part of a single farm. Again, you need to use good judgment when reviewing this, and should try to rule things out such as that the coins are being sent to an exchange, and that the accounts are not receiving any kind of coin shortly after sending their tokens to the central ETH address. I think there are a lot of instances in which there are many more than 15 accounts involved, some people have posted about there being hundreds of accounts, and I would speculate in many cases they are being run by bots of some sort.
I don't think trying to hunt for the above farms is a good use of resources though. I speculate there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of these mass farmed accounts. I also speculate they are often "hired" by those ultimately behind ICOs as a way to increase social media chatter regarding their ICO, and that in many cases, calling these accounts out (including tagging them) will have little/no impact on their ability to continue doing what they have been doing. There was a
NY times article a few months ago that talked about how some people were buying up twitter followers in order to improve their twitter presence, and one company they bought from would often buy up twitter accounts from other "suppliers"; the article talked about how it would be possible to spot someone who had purchased many twitter followers by looking at registration data of a person's followers. I would not be surprised if similar shady business is going on around here in regards to ICOs. I think the solution is both remove incentives to farm accounts via shit posts, and to create incentives to not farm accounts via shit posts -- a big part of this would be for theymos to monetize the forum much more than he is currently.
