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RE: Analysis of Voting "Spikes" on the Steem Blockchain

in #utopian-io7 years ago

Hi @calebjohn, interesting approach to look at the votes per second. However, I'm not sure you actually caught what you were looking for. The Steem block time is 3 seconds, which means all votes that happen within 3 seconds will have the same time stamp. ~60 votes per second actually mean 60 votes per 3 seconds, which is not so much and somehow possible also with organic votes on popular authors. You can get a high number of votes per block by combining several votes into the same transaction (like berniesanders does with his accounts), but that immediately exposes that those accounts are operated by the same entity. If you're after bot nets, maybe you want to search for accounts that always vote in a similar order.

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That's a very good point! I didn't realize that the timestamp was block time, not creation time. To confirm that, I checked against the posts I have saved and regenerated the graph I have shown above using 3 second bins. I would attach it here, but it is predictably identical to the one above! I still maintain that ~60 votes in three seconds (~20 votes in one) is moderately suspicious (although certainly less so).

That's a good suggestion! I think for my next post, I may look into clustering voters to see this kind of grouping. I'd also like to look into voters based on SBD value they've added to the post.

Thanks for reading!