Ethereum co-founder recorded explaining how to “disguise” ICO ETH purchases
twitter.comI like to hate on ETH as much as anyone else, but isn't it also normal for stock market "whales" to buy/sell in smaller chunks to not move the market by much with a giant order?
Since ETH is based on a completely transparent ledger and not a privacy focused coin like XMR, all wallet amounts are public so you can see if a giant wallet pops up or transfers out to known exchanges - meaning a sale is taking place. So, it's natural to break it up into multiple wallet addresses.
Am I missing some other context here? I don't see what's wrong with using multiple wallet addresses to not let the whole world know about your large orders.
Proof of stake.
PoS a flawed idea from the outset, but you can kind of try to fake it and make it work for a while if people believe that the coins are well distributed. Over the long term, the large whales will eventually consolidate more and more power, but hey, that's tomorrow's problem.
But if in reality there's just a handful of silicon valley tech bros and VCs who control the majority of the supply, and thus can collude to control the network state, then it destroys the idea that it is a decentralized, and trust minimized system.
This was a similar reasoning for justifying the DAO fork. The hacker who broke the code stole ~4% of all Ethereum at the time. Having a known, and impossible to deny, whale of that size would have severely hurt their ability to legitimize the planned migration to PoS.
Specifically from this source, "We may limit the size of a single purchase to make it easier to disguise. *So that no one is scared.*"
I know many ppl from ETH ICO.
Most of them sold it under 20 usd per eth
SO your probable worries are not valid. There were 2 bear markets since eth ico.
Solana has this exact issue though... since launch it goes only up (relatively) and money raised from VC were much bigger (eth ico was only circa 10mln usd)
FYI
This isn’t about moving the market or efficiency. This happened before ETH was available on any exchanges. Lubin was explaining how to disguise large whales buying a big proportion of ETH. This has major implications, especially after the supposed move to proof-of-stake as few whales would have undue influence over the consensus.
> if a giant wallet pops up or transfers out to known exchanges - meaning a sale is taking place
I’m rusty, but exchange deposits are probably to unique addresses and might not consolidate into known exchange addresses until after the sale.
Why do you say that you hate ETH and everyone else does? Any backround?
What does this mean for the non-crypto audience?
It looks like it means that even the founders of Ethereum intended to enable fraud, disguising large institutional investors as many individual investors so that the market would be mislead about the popularity of ethereum.
Or to be frank - the messsage to the non-crypto audience is this:"Yet again, the crypto guys seem to be scamming each other, stay the hell away".
Ether is in part premined. Before the token went public, a select few insiders were able to buy lots of it at practically no cost.
Here the co-founder explains how to buy more than the agreed maximum per holder, by simply creating multiple accounts to buy them. The founder actively encourages fraud and does it on record.
Everybody was able to pre-buy Ether at the time, not just "a select few insiders".
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/11/sale-of-the-cent...
Maybe, but it was under the pretense that the project was intending to be "decentralized", not controlled by whales who followed the founders' advise of disguising their purchases.
It’s decentralized and totally transparent. Do the research first.
The point is that the founders apparently intended for large whales to disguise their purchases. This means individuals bought into a system that was advertised as being decentralized, when it was apparently intended to merely /appear/ to be decentralized. Remember Ethereum is planning on moving to "proof of stake".
Yeah I intended sarcasm. The only amazing thing about crypto is that so many people fall for it.
It means that Ethereum is a super shady project and probably an illegal, unregistered security, not a commodity property like bitcoin.
It's a mystery why the SEC hasn't torn them apart.
The same way the RIAA has torn apart BitTorrent?
Honestly?, in three years?, probably dick.
even the founder sees the scam value in the scam crypto
Sometimes I think what's needed for people to accept this whole crypto bulls*it as a scam it is.
Wait… I put all of my retirement and kids’ college money into ETH. I told my friends and family to do that too so we can get rich. Was that a bad idea?
My brother said he didn’t trust his money to a 27-year-old Russian kid who looks like a tweaker. My brother doesn’t know how to write code, I told him to do the research.
Should I be nervous or start shopping for a Lambo?
>27-year-old Russian kid who looks like a tweaker
This increases my trust in the tech if anything. Shame about the rest though.
Yeah, programming is hard, reentrancy and timing issues are a thing. Every smart young coder has to learn about those the hard way — with other people’s money.
Good thing he doesn't even choose the codenames of the sub projects, let alone do all of the work or hold all of the keys to the kingdom.
Realistically, the validators do.
I saw The Validators open for Judas Priest at some casino in Palm Springs a couple of years ago.