Is ICONbet DApp on the ICON Blockchain a Scam?

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Is ICONbet DApp on the ICON blockchain a scam?

ICONbet has received a lot of support from the ICON Foundation and currently provides most of the daily transactions on the struggling ICON blockchain. Based on our previous dealings with ICON we were naturally suspicious of this DApp. The website for the DApp includes a link to a whitepaper that attempts to show that the game is fair by using a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA3-256) of the block timestamp.

The whitepaper ends with the following text “The ICONbet team is globally distributed. Given the ever-changing and uncertain regulatory environment for blockchain-based games, tokens, and DAOs, the team has decided to remain anonymous“. It’s safe to say that the team behind the DApp are part of the ICON team and have access to the centralised nodes used by the ICON blockchain.

The ICONbet DApp follows most of the rules of roulette and as it’s supposed to be operated by a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) the game is known as DAOlette. One major difference between DAOlette and real roulette is the restriction on placing bets on 0 (shown as a bomb on the wheel).

Many players have complained of the wheel coming up on a bomb more often than statistics would suggest and this manifests itself in one of two ways. Either 3 bombs in 3 spins of the wheel or 3 in quick succession of around 20 spins. Despite heavy promotion on Twitter and paid ads on DApp sites there are only a couple of dozen players.

ICONbet after heavy promotion only has a couple of dozen players

So is ICONbet a scam or not?

We started by using the website to place bets on the wheel spin and noticed the same alarming frequency of bombs reported by other players. Maybe the website was biased towards certain users or specific ICX addresses. As the DApp is simply a smart contract on the ICON blockchain we built our own bot to “spin the wheel”. The bot has several advantages over the website like avoidance of malware, much higher betting frequency and the ability to analyse the results.

The ICON blockchain uses 24 centralised nodes to create blocks and each node creates 10 blocks before the duty is passed to the next node. The time to produce a block increases slightly when the block producer changes so this is a good time for a node to drop an extra bomb on an unsuspecting player. Our bot was designed to skip the first block produced by each node to avoid these bombs.

With centralised nodes producing the blocks the assertion that the game must be fair as it’s based on SHA3-256 of the block time is simply wrong. Even our basic bot can demonstrate that taken over an average of 10,000 wheel spins it only takes around 400 microseconds to change any winning spin block time into a losing spin block time (or vice versa). The ICON blockchain has a block time of approximately 2 seconds or 2000000 microseconds. Therefore increasing or decreasing the block time by 400 microseconds is an adjustment of just 0.02%. Block times on the network vary much more than this so the node operators can easily adjust the times to suit the wheel spin outcome they desire.

BLOC8 team top 3 ICONbet wager war

As shown above we made it to 3rd place in the ICONbet wager war on the 21st September. This was basically achieved due to the high frequency wheel spins created by our bot compared with using the ICONbet’s clunky website. For most people, us included, a top 3 position comes at a cost. Based on the claimed house hedge of 1.5% you can expect to lose over 1,000 ICX during the day. This is compensated by 15 to 25% of the wager war fund but this is only 10% of the house excess and some days there is no excess, despite over 300,000 ICX being wagered. The top 3 position also earned us about 110,000 TAP tokens.

TAP tokens are the DAOs native token but it heavily favours the anonymous ICONbet development team so they don’t have much intrinsic value. Not surprisingly the ICON blockchain shows that ICONbet financiers also play DAOlette. LuckyWhale and Rok23 BXMT currently hold at least 6.5M and 4.9M TAP respectively across 3 known blockchain addresses. As LuckyWhale took top spot on the day we came third we checked their bets for the day and the following day. On the day they came first from 445 wheels spins they were hit with just 8 bombs compared with at least 21 that most players would receive. More remarkable was the betting pattern over the 2 days. LuckyWhale placed dozens of large bets (1000 to 4000 ICX per wheel spin) and they were almost all winners compared with bombs against 10 to 100 ICX bets.

Statistics show that to earn 6.5M TAP you need to lose a huge amount of ICX if the “wheel” is not biased. One of LuckyWhale’s wallets can be found here but the more important wallet is here. It shows the first wallet transferring 22,634 ICX over a 2 week period to the second wallet and then sent off to a cryptocurrency exchange. So during the time a lot of the 6.5M TAP was earned LuckyWhale was also regularly earning ICX by “beating” the house hedge.

So even if you have had a bad run with “nuclear” bombs compared with regular bombs you can console yourself in the knowledge that some punters are regularly beating the odds. Check out all the bets placed by Wager War winner for 9 October 2019, Mart0593. Does a strategy of placing apparently random large bets works as a strategy at DAOlette? Probably not as indicated by a punter which we have nicknamed ForeverLosing. The odds of a losing spin are exactly the same whatever amount of ICX you wager, 1 ICX, 10 ICX or 4000 ICX it’s all the same. After more than 300 wheel spins the punter was down about 4% compared with the claimed house hedge of just 1.5%. So ForeverLosing adopted the random big bet strategy and increased the regular bet size of 2 to 10 ICX to a whopping 1500 ICX. Big bet yes but with a claimed 81% chance of winning it should be fairly low risk. Boom, first spin at the new mega bet size and it’s a losing bet! That took the unlucky punter to cumulative losses of almost 21%.

ForeverLosing’s online dataset has over 1,100 wheel spins, cumulative loss of almost 14% and still about 4% excluding the single mega bet. That particular punter should have contacted us before placing his mega bet as it broke a few of the golden rules of ICONbet that you pick up after tens of thousands of wheels spins. Please contact us if you haven’t worked out the obvious pitfalls of this DApp. All the ICONbet gambling data that we analyse is available on ICON’s tracker but it’s not very user friendly so our bot does all the hard work for you. Use our contact page if you want a permanent record of your DAOlette wheel spins or you want a copy of the golden rules. We ask for a small donation for running our bot over your data but we even accept the ICONbet TAP token that you no longer want.

Summary

  • ICON Foundation supports ICONbet
  • All the ICONbet developers are anonymous
  • It takes under 400 microseconds for an ICON node to change a winning spin to a losing spin
  • Apparent wheel bias
  • Not allowed to bet on bombs which makes manipulation by nodes easier
  • Players not sticking around to use the ICONbet DAO

We will leave it to the reader to decide if they think ICONbet is a scam. We welcome comments from P-REP candidates, ICX holders and anyone interested in the ICONbet DApp. If you found this information, or any of our articles useful, please contribute to the BLOC8 blockchain evangelical cause of cleaning up crypto. If you would like copies of the data or further details please use our contact page.

ICON Project P-REPs and Censorship

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Can the ICX ICON Project be turned around?

ICON Project

Do we think a failing blockchain like the ICON project can be turned around?

Yes, it’s never too late to change course and steer away from the rocks.

Would we recommend software developers use the ICON blockchain?

No, at this present time we would advise them to use the Ethereum Classic (ETC) network.

How long have we been critical of the ICON Foundation?

Our supporters know that we raised issues more than 18 months ago but they were never addressed by the Foundation or Min Kim.

Why did we stand down from the P-REP testnet?

It became quite clear that the only way to make it into the top 22 was to hide the truth from the ICON community and we were not prepared to do this.

P-REP Candidates

Why do we support IConnect Global of Africa as a P-REP?

IConnect has been reluctant to join in the P-REP cartel practises (see censorship below) and this indicates they are a truly an independent team. It would be an injustice for an entire content to be excluded from the ICON network. Africa has a large proportion of the world’s un-banked and Satoshi’s vision for blockchain technology was for it to be available for all.

Do we think known rogue P-REP candidates are interested in the ICON community?

Candidates like ICX Australia and UBIK Capital thought it was appropriate to “buy votes” and their sudden change of heart doesn’t make them worthy of your ICX vote.

Why have we been so critical of Rhizome?

A leopard doesn’t changes it’s spots and in our opinion anyone that votes for this candidate is just hoping to offload their ICX to new investors that haven’t seen the uncensored data we hold. With ICON trying to arrange a listing for ICX on US cryptocurrency Exchanges it’s vital that shilling is stamped out.

Is this website or the BLOC8 team associated with IConnect?

Absolutely not and the IConnect team became a P-REP candidate in March 2019. Details of their team and proposal are available on the ICON website. Outside of Africa it’s quite easy for candidates that were involved in the ICO to buy a position in the top 22 i.e. less than $160,000 required when the ICO bonus is taken into account.

Censorship

Do we think P-REP candidates should also be social media moderators for the ICON network?

There is a clear conflict of interest and when a team becomes a P-REP candidate they should give up their right to moderate on social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Telegram.

How can the ICON community be better represented on social media platforms?

The ICON Project needs to prevent anonymous individuals from moderating social media posts. Technology exists to validate a moderators ID without exposing it to the wider internet community.

Why is censorship resistance important?

It ensures existing and potential investors of blockchain tokens are able to establish fact from fiction.

What are we doing to ensure data is not censored?

We use Steemit and ironically the ICON blockchain to ensure the data that we painstakingly collate is available for all to see. We also own several Unstoppable Domains like cryptonewsarticles (.zil and .crypto), ICONProject.zil and ICONProject.crypto. We will be publishing our data about the ICON Project via IPFS in due course like these .

12 Ways to spot a failing ico

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failing ICO projects identified by crypto news article writers

Those of you that follow us on Twitter or Telegram may already know how to spot a failing ICO but we were asked to add the details here and in the general Cryptocurrency sub Reddit. It’s widely accepted that most altcoins will ultimately fail. Some ICOs were outright scams, others were simply ill-conceived and others are years away from providing a return for their investors. Let’s get started with the 12 ways to spot a failing ICO:

  1. Lack of direct contact between Founders and community
  2. Reluctance to discuss the project in social media channels that they don’t have full control over i.e. constantly shot down in general Crypto sub-Reddit threads.
  3. Banning critical thinking from their social media channels i.e. removing posts and banning users if they are not 100% positive towards the project
  4. Arranging for individuals to be blocked from posting in ANY public Telegram groups
  5. Arranging for individuals to be shadow blocked on Twitter
  6. Supporting known bad actors in the ecosystem like Rhizome to promote the project
  7. Token moon boys and P-Rep stooges try to discredit articles and videos of known influencers
  8. Failure to build anything meaningful since ICO launch
  9. Producing fake news to promote the project
  10. Founders with a lack of integrity
  11. Making the mistake of thinking everyone is in crypto for the money
  12. Disrespecting the community that pays their salary every month

Have you spotted the ICO you invested in from the red flags above? Should you continue to hold altcoins like ICX, XRP and TRX? If 99% of altcoins are destined to fail then it’s unlikely you have picked a winner and it’s probably time to look at another blockchain project.

ICX whale Dr Ben Lee dreaming of 10,000 transactions per second on ICON blockchain
Dr Ben Lee Tweet 6 September 2019

A few weeks earlier ICX whale Dr Ben Lee was asked by Michael Gu of BoxMining what level of transactions he hoped to achieve in the next 5 years. His answer “we are aiming for something like 500 TPS but it’s really hard to get“.

ICON blockchain project struggling?

Please add your comments about the ICO you invested in or the altcoin you bought that you think might be failing. If the Founders of the associated tokens read your comments they will have the opportunity to prove without any doubt that they are not a failing ICO.

P-Rep candidates NOT TO STAKE YOUR ICX WITH

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Brian Li of Rhizome accused shiller of ICX and BitConnect

P-REP candidates have been canvassing ICONists to stake their ICX with effect from 26 August 2019. We have spent hundreds of hours over the last few months reviewing P-REP candidates. As per our earlier articles the blockchain ecosystem is riddled with bad actors and this article will highlight the P-REPs you need to avoid. As per the needlessly complex IISS 2.0 published by the ICON Foundation you risk losing 6% of your ICX if you stake with a rogue P-REP.

We have been pushing the ICON Foundation to produce documentation that the average ICONist can understand. We believe they are reluctant as it will highlight the inflationary effect of IISS 2.0 based on the current levels of transactions on their blockchain. Millions of transactions will be required everyday to counter the inflation caused by paying rewards to ICONists and P-REPs. At present the ICON blockchain shows just 7,000 to 39,000 transactions per day.

P-REPs have been accused of a whole host of unsavoury antics including:

  • Doxing (doxxing) innocent families – see victims Tweet
  • Shilling ICX to over $13 and promoting BitConnect (see Comments section)
  • Trying to bribe ICONists by handing over P-REP rewards
  • Producing fake or misleading articles about ICON
  • Publishing blockchain verified lies about an ICX TX Challenge contractor
  • Banning ICONists from social media groups without justification
  • Lacking integrity and showing no respect towards ICON community members
  • Creating cartels of P-REPs to control the network

Please note the accusations have come from various sources including fellow P-REPs and the ICON Foundation. Some P-REPs have made our list purely by demonstrating over and over again that they don’t have the required knowledge to take on the task as a block producer. Let’s look at a particular example of some of the data we hold. Telegram user Sigmoid Freud posted this fairly innocuous comment in the main ICON group a few days ago.

P-REP Brian Li of Rhizome accused of shilling ICX and BitConnect

Within minutes the post was removed by moderators standing as P-Rep candidates. Sigmoid was of course referring to a well known article on Steemit that was heavily edited when the community rumbled what Brian Li of RHIZOME was up to. This is an archived screenshot of the original article with a reference to an insider that Brian Li was working with to shill ICX. This helped pump ICX to over $13 and that is why there are so many disgruntled token holders today.

Brian Li buy ICX before January

Screenshot of article revised by Brian Li and as recorded on Steemit today. Significant differences and the unacceptable shilling has changed to marketing. Ask yourself are these really the kind of people we want controlling the ICON network? The before and after screenshots are recorded on the ICON blockchain as a permanent record of how some unfortunate investors were duped into buying ICX at grossly inflated prices.

Here is the list of P-REP candidates that do not deserve your vote based on our painstaking research. If you would like copies of the data that we hold or feel your team was unfairly included in this list please use our Contact form or add your comment below this post. Remember this is a dynamic list and P-REPs will be added and removed as they change their policies. In addition further disclosures are included in the comments section below this article. Readers should familiarise themselves with our earlier articles about ICON which we posted in the months prior to producing this list. Please be sure to review the list on a regular basis and stake you ICX accordingly. We recommend ICONists join Telegram groups that are not heavily moderated by P-Rep candidates such as this one. Also subscribe for updates to this article by clicking the bell “icon” that appears in most browsers as you read through the article.

  1. ICON Foundation
  2. RHIZOME (only Rhizome team should vote for this P-Rep)
  3. ICX Australia
  4. ICX_Station
  5. ICONation
  6. Ubik Capital
  7. Everstake
  8. DSNC
  9. Certus One (possibly stood down as a P-REP)
  10. Sharpn
  11. PICONbello
  12. VELIC
  13. Signal9

We do NOT invest in ICX and we have not received any payment for publishing this article. If you are looking for details of the BLOC8 DApp they can be found here. Unlike most of the DApps currently on the ICON blockchain BLOC8 can be used from smartphones and desktop PCs. Whichever teams you select for ICX staking we advise covering a large number as it keeps the teams on their toes and reduces your potential losses from token burn penalties. If rogue actors are selected as block producing P-REPs for the ICON blockchain it could have untold consequences for ICONists and the price of ICX. If you are reading this post via the homepage rather than the direct URL click Comments for feedback and latest updates.

We are now in a position to recommend IConnect Global (Twitter Telegram value for money team) as one of our preferred P-REPs for the ICON blockchain. As soon as you are able, cancel any votes you have placed with Rhizome and move them to IConnect but remember not to stake all your ICX with a single P-REP for fear of the 6% ICX burn penalty. Here are a few of our tweets about IConnect and recommend you FOLLOW BLOC8 on Twitter for independent news of the ICON blockchain. https://twitter.com/BLOC810/status/1166752403133292545 https://twitter.com/BLOC810/status/1166692630345986048

Email 1 MILLION ICX ICON TX Challenge

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ICX ICON TX Challenge email

Email sent by BLOC8 2 July 2019 regarding the 1 Million ICX ICON Tx Challenge

한국어:

편견이없는

6 월 24 일 월요일에 BLOC8에게 6 월 22 일 토요일에 보내 드린 이메일에 다음 답장을 이메일로 보냈습니다.

친애하는 Bloc8
중복 의심되는 서비스를 일시 중지했습니다.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nc5jUI5q1P-VX3W36TpyC4G2ZjF3aSqLGFZwd50fd7k/edit#gid=0
거의 의심되는 서비스를 확인한 후 확인 후 상태가 변경됩니다.

물론 확인 된 중복 레지스터는 더 이상 보상을받을 수 없습니다.
협조 해 주셔서 감사합니다.
ICON 팀.

블록 체인 서비스가 중복 되어도 더 이상 보상을받지 못한다는 확신을 갖고 있음에도 불구하고 6 월 25 일 화요일에 수만 회의 ICX를 지불했습니다. 이것은 hx976bdedbc5b7a5be2fcc59b5b6acbbc14bb5be60에 의해 작성된 SCORE cxef795d2e19cada777511640d591735e1cc47c471로 확인됩니다.

ICON 추적기 https://tracker.icon.foundation/addresstx/hx976bdedbc5b7a5be2fcc59b5b6acbbc14bb5be60 는 600 ICX (하루에 200 ICX에서 3 일간)를 지불했다고 표시합니다. 블록 체인을 확인하면 해당 주소에서 ICON을 ICON Challenge Wallet 주소에서 132,579 개의 ICX를받은 https://tracker.icon.foundation/addresstx/hx14f6654b25e044d5b39abc177138a644b926ab67 로 보냅니다. https://tracker.icon.foundation/address/hx210d9faa489d0d1b71d568349551273612a4619a 도 ICON에서 83,852 ICX를 받았습니다.

BLOC8 프로젝트는 ICON 재단과 계약을 맺어 하루 200 ICX의 대가로 하루에 2 만 건의 거래를 창출했습니다. 계약 조건에 따라 재단은 단일 단체가 한 번만 유사한 계약을 체결 할 수 있도록 허용했습니다. ICON TX Challenge 지갑에서 지불 한 금액은 귀하가 BLOC8과 합의한 조건을 위반 한 것으로 나타났습니다.

BLOC8은 한국 및 다른 국가에서 마케팅 목적으로 절실히 필요로하는 네트워크 스트레스 테스트를 수행하는 데있어 최고의 팀임을 분명히 보여주었습니다. 이것은 BLOC8이 246 개 프로젝트 중 하나 인 ICX보다 더 많은 돈을 지불 받았다는 점에서 입증되었습니다.

재단에 귀하가 https://buycryptonewsarticles.com/icon-tx-challenge/ 에 문서화 된대로 여러 차례 계약 조건을 위반했다는 증거가 주어졌습니다.


재단은 7 월 31 일까지 네트워크 스트레스 테스트를 위해 BLOC8 12,000 ICX를 지불하기로 동의했습니다. 우리가받은 ICX는 4,200 개 뿐이므로 여전히 ICX는 7,800 달러입니다. 다음 24 시간 이내에 7,800 개의 ICX가 BLOC8 프로젝트로 전송되도록 준비하십시오. ICX ICON TX Challenge는 한국 기업인 ICONLOOP에게 큰 수치를 불러 왔습니다.

English:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

On Monday 24th June you emailed BLOC8 with the following reply to an email we sent you on Saturday 22nd June.

Dear Bloc8
We suspended duplication suspected services. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nc5jUI5q1P-VX3W36TpyC4G2ZjF3aSqLGFZwd50fd7k/edit#gid=0
We checked almost duplication suspected services and will change status after check.

Of course, confirmed duplication registers cannot get rewards anymore.
Thank you for your support.
ICON Team.

Despite your reassurances that duplicated blockchain service would not receive anymore rewards you proceeded to pay them tens of thousands of ICX on Tuesday 25th June.  This is confirmed with SCORE cxef795d2e19cada777511640d591735e1cc47c471 which was created by hx976bdedbc5b7a5be2fcc59b5b6acbbc14bb5be60.

ICON Tracker https://tracker.icon.foundation/addresstx/hx976bdedbc5b7a5be2fcc59b5b6acbbc14bb5be60 shows you paid them 600 ICX (3 days at 200 ICX per day). If you check your blockchain you will see that address sent ICX to https://tracker.icon.foundation/addresstx/hx14f6654b25e044d5b39abc177138a644b926ab67 which received 132,579 ICX from the ICON Challenge wallet address. https://tracker.icon.foundation/address/hx210d9faa489d0d1b71d568349551273612a4619a also received 83,852 ICX from ICON.

The BLOC8 project entered into a contract with the ICON Foundation to generate 20,000 transactions per day in return for 200 ICX per day. The terms of the contract stated that the Foundation would only allow any single entity to enter into a similar contract once. The payments from the ICON TX Challenge wallet shows you are in breach of the terms agreed with BLOC8.

BLOC8 has clearly demonstrated they were the best team at carrying out the stress test of your network as you desperately required for marketing purposes in Korea and elsewhere. This is evidenced in that BLOC8 was paid more ICX than any of the 246 projects stress testing the network for the Foundation.

Evidence was given to the Foundation that you were in breach of the terms of the contract on numerous occasions as documented at https://buycryptonewsarticles.com/icon-tx-challenge/

The Foundation agreed to pay BLOC8 12,000 ICX for stress testing your network up to the 31st July. As we have only received 4,200 ICX you still owe us 7,800 ICX. Please arrange for the 7,800 ICX to be transferred to the BLOC8 project within the next 24 hours. The ICX ICON TX Challenge has brought great shame to South Korean business ICONLOOP.

Dev BLOC8

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

챌린지의 주요 부분 ( “ICON blockchain 테스트”)을 “승리”로 설정하면 BLOC8은 도전 과제의 최종 (사소한) 부분에서 선두 주자 중 하나 여야합니다. ICX ICON TX Challenge를 위해 Reddit 스레드를 upvoting하여 BLOC8 팀이 수행 한 우수한 업무에 대한 귀하의 지원을 보여주십시오.

Having “won” the main part of the challenge (stress testing ICON blockchain) BLOC8 must be one of the front runners in the final (minor) part of the challenge. Please show your support for the excellent work done by the BLOC8 team by upvoting their Reddit thread for the ICX ICON TX Challenge.

Tether and Bitfinex Response to NY Attorney General Claim of Fraud

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Tether and Bitfinex response to New York Attorney General claim of fraud

Tether and Bitfinex have submitted their defense against the claims of fraud made by NY Attorney General, Letitia James. Stuart Hoegner has submitted an affidavit and Zoe Phillips a Memorandum of Law. In this post we will review the assertions offered by the legal counsel for Tether and Bitfinex.

Fractional Reserve Banking

Hoegner and Phillips argue that as the Federal Reserve is only required to hold 10% of deposit funds in cash then the defendants shouldn’t need to hold 100% in cash. This is a very weak argument as the Federal Reserve holds fiat and Tether is a cryptocurrency which is expected to be traded 24 / 7. If banks have liquidity problems they can simply shut up shop for a few weeks, as they did in Cyprus in 2013 while they were waiting for an EU bailout. Legal counsel is wrongly trying to compare fiat and crypto. One reason people invest in cryptocurrencies is their distrust of fractional reserve banking so this argument hardly provides any comfort.

Website Disclosure

Legal counsel asserts that the website of Tether Ltd disclosed details of the $900 million loan facility prior to the filing by the NY Attorney General. On this basis, they argue that they didn’t try to mislead anybody regarding Tether funds. Again this is a weak argument as the Tether website, even today, states 100% backed and “from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties, which may include affiliated entities.” If the defendants were being open and above board they wouldn’t use the term “from time to time” and fail to disclose the size of the loan between the related parties. In the documents submitted by Hoegner and Phillips, they accept that USDT is currently only backed 74% in cash and if the full loan amount is drawn down this will fall to just 68%.

No Harm Done to Citizens of New York

The defense team argues that Tether has always been redeemable at par value and that citizens of New York have not lost any funds, to date. Effectively they are asking the Attorney General to withdraw the case until such time as Tether can’t be redeemed at par value. By that argument, if the Civil Aviation Authority knows that Boeing 737’s are not safe we should wait for a few planes to fall out of the sky before we ground them.

Summary

A lot of case law is cited, especially by Phillips, including the claim that Tether is neither a security nor a commodity and furthermore Tether is not an investment. Maybe not, when measured against traditional securities and commodities, but crypto traders use Tether as a hedge against the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies with the expectation that USDT can be redeemed on par with USD. Traders might want to consider an exchange like Coinbase until such time as the related party loan between Tether and Bitfinex is confirmed as lawful.

UPDATE 2 May 2019

The arrest of Reginald Fowler was announced Tuesday 30 April 2019 for alleged bank fraud. The indictment refers to various bank accounts held by Fowler and Global Trading Solutions LLC (GTS). For those that have still not figured this out, it is believed that GTS via Crypto Capital processed fiat transfers on behalf of Bitfinex.

ICON TX Challenge

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A guest post by a blockchain evangelist on the BLOC8 team about the ongoing ICON TX Challenge.

The blockchain ecosystem is awash with scams and bad actors. ICO exit scams, hackers, pump and dump schemes and shilling by heavy bag holders etc. If you are ever given advice about crypto ensure you know the context of the advice. Ask how many coins they hold and the evidence to back up their claims.

I’m British and the wrong side of 40 (not a 15 year old kid). I learnt much of the basics of blockchain from fellow, dual nationality British and Greek, blockchain evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos.

As a nation Brits have a very strong sense of fair play but that’s not to say we don’t have our fair share of scammers. It sickens me to be told by a P-Rep candidate that I should play the game and join the scammers. The same P-Rep candidate and Telegram group moderator also wrote to me to say I should rejoin their groups under an alias. Absolutely no way, if I’m not welcome as BLOC8 I’m not welcome at all.

Swiss registered blockchain project ICON announced on the 4th May, via their Medium blog, the ICON TX Challenge. ICON offered 1 million ICX tokens to developers using their blockchain. The date for the challenge was set to run from 3rd June to 31st July. The 1 million tokens were to be distributed as follows:

  • 100,000 for up to 250 teams following approval of a suitable SCORE (Smart contract on the ICON blockchain) including referral bonuses.
  • 600,000 tokens for 60 million transactions to be processed via their chain.
  • 300,000 tokens split equally between six teams based on the merit of their website / DApp.

With 60% of the tokens being made available for processing transactions it was obvious that ICON set the challenge primarily to stress test their network in a “real world” environment. They were also hoping to attract more developers as ICON is not known to have broad appeal to developers. Rules of the Challenge were quite clear that each team of developers could only apply once. This is to ensure tokens are allocated fairly amongst many developers rather than just a few. Each team would be allowed to process up to 20,000 transactions per day and receive 200 ICX tokens per day (reimbursed weekly) as a reward.

I expected developers from around the world to be racing to enter the challenge before the maximum of 250 entrants was reached. How wrong was I. A month after ICON’s announcement and as the challenge started just 12 teams had signed up. I tried to contact Ricky Dodds via Twitter and Reddit to ask why next to nobody was interested in the challenge. I drew a blank as he doesn’t accept contact from the crypto community so I asked ICON, via an email, to get Dodds to contact me. My email was sent to ICON 3rd June and on the 9th June Dodds (@doddric on Telegram) sent me an email with the subject “Reaching out”. My email reply to him is shown below.

ICON TX Challenge email to Ricky Dodds 9 June 2019

A perfectly civil and simple request for ICON to adhere to the rules of their challenge. ICON only respond to their known shillers, fanboys and heavy bag holders so I wasn’t too surprised that Dodds never replied to the email. I continued to watch as more and more fake teams were added to the challenge. Rewards for processing transactions are processed on a weekly basis with the first payment made to BLOC8 on the 11th June. As tokens are transferred via the blockchain I could see that all the fake teams had also received tokens. Probably 100,000 tokens in the first week to fake teams. I contacted ICON over and over again but little or no response.

As nothing was being done by ICON I reached out to well respected community member, and P-Rep candidate, Spl3en via Telegram on the 17th June. He had also noticed that fake teams were processing transactions as part of the ICON TX Challenge. Independently we had both worked out that more than half the teams in the challenge weren’t entitled to tokens. He was in contact with Daeki Lee of ICON and I also contacted him via Telegram. On the 18th June, the day the token rewards were due to be distributed for week 2 all teams received an email to say they would be paid a day late. Finally I thought ICON had seen sense and were removing the fake teams before they distributed tokens to the legitimate teams.

I was wrong again, on the 19th June ICON distributed around 150,000 tokens to the fake teams, so now about 250,000 tokens in all. Below is a tiny extract from my chat with Spl3en, which was published online without my permission.

Spl3en comments in a Telegram chat session.

After this image was published online Spl3en beat a hasty track over to the forum where it had been posted. No doubt shillers, fan boys and heavy bag holders sent him to the forum as he hadn’t posted anything for 10 months. He tries to argue his Telegram chat was taken out of context but he deleted the chat session in an attempt to remove the “context”. Fortunately I had already archived the full chat log and it’s available online here. It’s clear from the image what Spl3en thought but as a P-Rep candidate he made a vain attempt to backtrack. Meanwhile I am getting abuse from the shillers, fan boys and heavy bag holders that I’m calling out ICON because I didn’t win the competition or ICON didn’t approve our application. The challenge is still ongoing and BLOC8 has received the maximum available tokens to date from ICON as evidenced by the ICON TX Challenge dashboard.

Some members of the community thought ICON was going to run a DEX but ICON were actually just writing the software for a DEX. They were hoping that someone would pick up the code and run with it but so far nobody has shown an interest in it. Could the ICON project handle another embarrassment? It’s not really important who created the fake teams for the challenge but just be aware that some legitimate teams struggled to get approved whereas over 100 trash sites were approved by ICON. It’s the shoddy way it was handled by ICON that’s the issue. As a blockchain evangelist I am simply exposing ICON for disrespecting legitimate teams and the community as a whole. Legitimate teams were “robbed” of the 250,000 tokens that ICON gave to teams that were not eligible to be in the challenge as notified to them by Spl3en, myself and others.

It’s not important what you think about awarding developers rewards for merely stress testing the network. It’s not important if you think that the legitimate teams got well rewarded or not. The issue is ICON set a challenge for the crypto community and ICON messed up BIG TIME. @Alexyos88 on Twitter included a screenshot of another post in the forum and added:

“The Tx challenge has become a bad joke – thanks to the dilettante executives from ICON.”

The forum post was asking Daeki Lee who created the 100+ fake teams?

  1. ICON management as they were embarrassed as only 12 teams joined the challenge and they wouldn’t get the “real world” stress test that they were looking for.
  2. Members of the ICON team thought it would be good for ICON or they wished to make a significant personal gain from the challenge.
  3. External scammers that ICON should have known would try to game the system.

Any answer was very embarrassing for ICON. The full chat log of our discussions with Daeki Lee are available here as I also archived that before he deleted it. At this point I believe ICON went into overdrive and hastily arranged the Telegram AMA session. Having been called out Min was angry whereas he should have been apologetic. Min, Dodds and Lee were all part of the AMA.

On Monday 24th June ICON disqualified 93% of the teams that they had sent a warning to. This disqualified 81 teams but there were still several dozen more fake teams in the challenge. ICON maintains an online Google spreadsheet for teams to monitor approval, rejection or disqualification from the challenge. It is currently here and we have an offline archived copy in case it is taken down by ICON. The additional fake teams can be identified by following the blockchain transactions of this wallet.

On Tuesday 25th June I alerted Binance and the crypto community via Twitter and Telegram that the wallet needed to be locked down and I even went as far as asking for all ICX wallets to be locked down until the scammer(s) can be traced. I believe one or a few individuals now have over 300,000 ICX from the 600,000 TX part of the challenge. If you check that wallet you will see that ICON paid the fake teams associated with it 19,800 ICX on pay day 3 (25th June).

So even though ICON had disqualified them they still went ahead and handed over ICX for the previous weeks scam tx.

Remember this is pay day 3, more than three weeks into the challenge and ICON were notified by me 16 days earlier of the fake teams. Why on earth would ICON continue to pay fake teams after BLOC8 had already gone public with the issue? Look back at Spl3en’s chat comment “But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if most of the traffic is originated from them, directly or indirectly, and not from external developpers”. Note the word indirectly. To process 140,000 tx per week each team needs to spend around 224 ICX, and be reimbursed 1400 ICX. If you are running over 100 fake teams you need to spend over 22,400 ICX and receive at least 140,000 ICX “reward” from ICON.

If ICON agreed with an external individual / group to indirectly process tx for them during the challenge they would be “honour” bound to keep handing over the ICX “rewards”. Based on the analysis I have done I am calling for Daeki Lee to stand down with immediate affect and a full apology from ICON for the shambles of a challenge.

In conclusion, don’t simply believe anything you hear from ICON and their devoted team of shillers and P-Reps. Do your own research as they might not be working in your best interests. A few days after the AMA Min tweeted #ChangeIsComing and then immediately blocked well known community member, BittBurger. Please feel free to add your comments here but make them factual. I don’t eat babies for breakfast or have two heads despite what the ICON “team” will tell you. Comments confirm 216,000 went from ICON TX challenge wallet to 2 wallet holders and can be verified on the ICON blockchain. The ICON TX Challenge has proved very challenging so far for ICON.

Import Private Key from MEW or Saturn Into Trust Wallet

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Use your private key to import tokens into Trust wallet

Access to cryptocurrency tokens, like BitUnits, on the Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain, is made available with public and private key cryptography. As the name suggests the public key can be made available to anyone as it works as a pair with the private key to secure your assets.

If you are already familiar with MyEtherWallet (MEW) or the Saturn wallet you might want to “transfer” your crypto tokens into the user-friendly Trust wallet. Wallets don’t actually hold tokens but they provide a facility to control access to the tokens on the blockchain. So the transfer is passing authority from one wallet to another, rather than the actual tokens. You will need your private key from MEW or Saturn to give this authority to the Trust Wallet. Below are the steps you need to complete in the Trust Wallet.

Import Private Key from MyEtherWallet or Saturn Into Trust

We have provided links to the Trust Wallet website in a previous article and this, in turn, gives the links to install the app on your iPhone or Android phone. Once you have installed the app it will bring up the following screens. Select IMPORT WALLET and on the next screen select the Ethereum Classic network.

 Import Private Key from MEW or Saturn Into Trust WalletEthereum Classic network tokens

You will then be shown a screen containing four tabs marked as PHRASE, KEYSTORE JSON, PRIVATE KEY and ADDRESS. For security purposes the app prevents screenshots being taken at this stage so we can’t provide an image here. Click the PRIVATE KEY tab and you can paste in your private key or use the QR code scanner. Now click the IMPORT button and your phone will now have authority to transfer tokens via the blockchain.

Never ever make your private key available to third parties as this will give them access to your tokens and once they move the tokens to their address it will be impossible for you to recover them. If you have any technical questions you can contact the Trust wallet team in their Telegram group which currently has close to 10,000 members.

Transfer BitUnits from Binance Trust to Saturn Browser Wallet

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Transfer BitUnits from Binance Trust Wallet to Saturn Wallet

Before you set off to transfer BitUnits to a DEX to cash out understand that optimum returns for most investments require they are held over the longer term. HODL your crypto tokens and this applies to BitUnits. You should be looking at keeping hold of the tokens for upwards of five years. Just looks at how far bitcoin has come in ten years, and this is what BitUnits Club developer Issa Clunie, had to say about cashing out to fiat.

“Cashing out of crypto to go to the dying banking fiat currency is like taking a PS4 and trading it for a PS1.“

Inevitably there will be the weak hands that sell too early and live to regret it, and this guide is aimed at them. Most of the BitUnits were airdropped into Trust wallets, but a Saturn wallet is required to trade on their DEX. In the last article in the series, we covered the different types of trades available on Saturn, and this is a follow-up piece.

An article on cross-browser and mobile support was published in September 2018 by the Saturn team. We will concentrate on the Firefox browser as the Saturn wallet works on mobile as well as desktop with this browser. In Saturn’s article, they provide a link to the Firefox extension for the wallet, but it is also available here.

Setting up the Saturn Wallet  to Transfer BitUnits

If the Firefox extension doesn’t take you straight to the wallet set up screen look for a menu item in the browser settings marked as Saturn Wallet. It will generate a random 12-word seed, and you will also need to set a secure password. Be sure to keep the seed and password available in case you need to restore the wallet to a new phone etc.

BitUnits in Saturn Wallet

 

Ensure you have ETC network selected from the dropdown list at the top left of the web browser. We are now ready to add the UNITS token to the Saturn wallet. It will look like this screenshot to the left, but the ETC and Saturn tokens will be at zero unless you have imported an existing Saturn wallet with tokens. Click ADD TOKEN button and paste in the BitUnits smart contract address, as shown on their website.

The smart contracts address: 0xd1c10d433c888e6d1841ff924d0ce45157f0d5cd is the Token Contract Address and when you enter this address into the Saturn wallet it should populate Token Symbol with the word UNITS and set Decimals of Precision to 6.

Make a note of the address for the ETC and BitUnits (just one address) in the Saturn wallet and send the tokens you have in the Trust wallet. You will need less than 0.001 ETC to set the gas to transfer BitUnits from wallet to wallet. If you don’t have any ETC you will need to buy some or ask a crypto friend if they will send some to your Trust wallet.

You are now ready to trade on the Saturn network DEX. If you trade UNITS for ETC you can keep the ETC in your Saturn wallet or send them to your Trust wallet. As Saturn is providing a true decentralized exchange, where you are in control of your private key, it is safe to keep your digital assets in the Saturn wallet indefinitely. This is not the case for most of the exchanges operating today like Binance. If a regular exchange gets hacked, and they do with alarming regularity, you stand to lose all your tokens.

 

 

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