Anyone who has followed popular cryptocurrency discussions on Twitter has seen a celebrity impersonator announcing some unbelievable giveaway, usually in Ether. These tweets stoke up the sense of urgency by hinting to the audience that the supply is dwindling quickly.
It appears Elon Musk has noticed these bots and been rather impressed by them if his most recent tweets on the subject are any indication.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016032769082716161
It started with someone e-begging for Bitcoin on Musk’s profile, after which the SpaceX CEO lauded the ingenuity of Ethereum scam bots.
It was not long before this exchange caught the attention of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator. He was quite disappointed that Musk’s first-ever tweet involving the project had to do with scam bots rather than the technology behind it.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1016224550688878592
The statement was followed by an appeal to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for help in dealing with this matter. Interestingly enough, Buterin did not point out that Musk had misspelled “Ethereum,” typing it instead as “Etherium.”
These scams have become so rampant that many people, Buterin included, are stressing inside their usernames they are not giving away a particular cryptocurrency. In the case of Ethereum’s founder, he has “Not giving away ETH” as part of his username.
It is doubtful this little warning will help deter scammers and affect their success rate, especially when they post their “giveaways” in replies to other Twitter accounts. Even worse, some scammers go as far as to hack the accounts of prominent people in the cryptocurrency scene, as has happened to Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
By the looks of it, the number of these incidents has reached record levels.
A little math can keep us from getting fooled
We have seen an average of around 30 scammy tweets per day while browsing the platform. Considering that the vast majority are giving away 10,000 ETH, we can do some simple math.
There are currently 100,598,679 Ether circulating in the network. Divide that by the amount of ETH these giveaways claims to have, and we end up with the total number of giveaways needed to hand out the total supply of ETH (that is 10,059).
Now, divide that figure by the average daily number of “giveaways,” and you end up with the number of days that would be necessary to hand out the entire circulating supply of the Ethereum network. Answer: 335 days.
If all of these giveaways were real, the entire supply of Ether would have been gone in less than a year. Such a herculean feat could not be achieved even by the largest exchanges in the world.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
