Byteball

HakHow the Byteball airdrop is screwing over the Steem community and what can be done to stop it.

The more I see the aftermath of the Byteball airdrop, the more I reflect on the damage it has done to the Steem community. Sure we all made money, but do you understand the cost?

The cost of an easily exploitable airdrop
There are three negative side effects of the airdrop that will leave lasting effects on the Steem community.

Referral Sniping

The first is the epidemic of users sniping other users referral bonuses. This has become so bad that some users created bots to automatically scan the blockchain for new Byteball addresses posted and send the minimum amount to attest the account. This allowed them to receive a referral bonus equal to the new users sign up bonus 25% up front and 75% in one year. These referral bonuses ranged from $10 to $160, an amount that makes referral sniping irresistible.

Spam and Bot Abuse

Everyone knows the Steem rep system is easily gamed in both directions. Did you know a new account can get (30) rep with around 0.600 SBD and (40) with a little over 5 SBD?

The last few days we have seen a huge uptick in spam, plagiarism, and bot abuse creating new accounts to take advantage of the Byteball airdrop. A (40) account gets $20, $10 and $10 in a year, more than enough to cover the ~5 SBD to increase the rep on a fresh account to (40). Did you know they also get another $20 for referring themselves? A referral gives the same sign-up bonus as the user you sign up paid 25% up front and 75% in a year and you can easily get a referral bonus from your other accounts. This doubles the incentive to abuse the system (both Byteball and as a side effect Steem) to get a huge payday.

In fact one user, @dreamryder007 has done just that, creating hundreds of accounts using plagiarism masked with Google translate into Chinese to create a large pool of Byteball airdrop accounts and accompanying referral rewards for thousands of dollars.

The amount of plagiarism on the Steem blockchain dramatically rose to farm higher rep accounts.

Google Spreadsheet of accounts used to farm Byteball

The above spreadsheet is a li
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