My initial investigation how I am doing it... (and a public apology)

I am sharing this information as others have expressed an interest in helping. My initial investigations are in looking at currency transactions and the relationship between accounts. The first two reports I will be doing will NOT point out anything that some people might consider negative behaviors. They will simply seek to define relationships between various accounts going back to when each of the accounts began on steem/it.

I plan to make some visual charts that will show these representations in an easy to look at format.

I also plan to make my final data available. I am doing it by hand currently, but I am also checking out some ways that may speed this up a great deal for me.

Right now my first post will likely be around @berniesanders, @nextgencrypto, @engagement, @thecyclist, and @randowhale as the big accounts as well as many smaller accounts. They all seem to be either the same person, or a group of people operating those accounts. I am leaning towards an individual, but I will not state this with certainty as I will share my plans here.

I will say now to CLEAR what I implied in my previous post. @berniesanders and his collection of accounts do not appear to have been involved in my recent bot 100+ account down vote of a post a couple of days ago. @berniesanders you have my apology for that implication.

I will provide data in an unbiased form with the hope that in the future this data is quickly available and we need not repeat this process except with data that has been produced after my report.

The second large group of accounts I will focus on after I am done with this batch will focus on the group that actually down voted me of which the largest member was @steemed. I do not know the relationship of the other accounts yet as I have only given a brief look the day it happened and @complexring, and a large network of @badger# related bots were involved. I won't go into detail on that until later when I can present it just as facts without bias and guessing. I will say that currently I have not seen a direct link between that network and @berniesanders other than perhaps as being mutual acquaintances. I will not push for guilt by association as I do not agree with that.

In this case it still seems that though @berniesanders and I have disagreed a number of times over the year he has still not flagged me. Thank you for this bernie.

After that I will likely look into the @noganoo network for comparison purposes. There is a lot of information to collect, collate, and consider. I cannot state with certainty where it will take me.

This data is worth collecting and I've been doing it primarily through steemdb. I am going to look at steemdata and see if that can speed up some of the process.

Planned Report

I am tracking where steem and steem backed dollars (SBD) have been sent, and I've been mostly ignoring the small transactions. I am not keeping a count of these transactions in my current research just a running total. This also includes transfers too and from exchanges. Where memos are available I am keeping a list of those.
I believe if we see frequent transfers to/from accounts and particularly if they are large they increase the obvious relationship as either being the same person, or at the very least show signs of a group of people that work together for mutual gain/power.

In the cases of the memos. If we have transfers being sent to the same memo at an exchange from different accounts then that is an even stronger relationship.

With this data I should be able to plot a chart that shows these relations. It would be similar to a scatter graph, but I want to make some that are easy to look at and I'll prune some of the lesser accounts off of some of those charts.

That is my plan. For those of you that talk about Preminers. This process also points out such activities and lends some insight into that. The term preminers for those that don't think it exists refers to people who mined steem before the steemit website went live, and before there really was a way for anyone other than miners to participate.

People could have participated in that IF they knew about it, and had the wherewithal to mine. Apparently according to @berniesanders he first heard about it on Bitcoin Talk.

He has moved millions of steem around and out to exchanges and likely a lot of it back into other accounts since he has been here. Steem for him has been a lot like winning the lottery, though it does require more WORK than simply getting a lottery ticket.

@berniesanders also contributed quite a bit to @curie, @steemcleaners, and @steemservices and I will have that information in my data as well. That is supporting projects with the aim of strengthening and protecting our community.

As stated I will present my initial reports with as little bias as I can and try to provide just the data and the facts. That will be the foundational information upon which further investigations and more speculative discussions can be had.

For those of you that wanted to help. You now know my plan. If you want to do something in parallel I would greatly welcome it. Let us shine some light into the cobweb infested corners of the steem past.