Service completely down?

And yet another Steem/ Whaleshares clone came to life.

Just one witness, again?

So far I have seen a bunch of Steem spin offs that I really think are truly unique. First of all there is Golos, that evolved into its own unique kind of platform. With Scorum covering sports and Smoke being cannabis themed, two more interesting forks were added. And with Whaleshares the Steem concept took a different turn. Aimed at Stake and growing slowly but steady.

But just like with other Cryptos and ICOs {Innitial Coin Offerings} there also are forking projects that can be considered highly questionable. Some could even turn out to be Scams. One of those highly questionable platforms seems to be WeKu. Shortly after, what this platform called, the presale ICO the website went offline. And no more Ethereum based ERC20 Tokens could be bought.

There already had been complaints about the price being set too high for WeKu members. Another thing that struck me as being a bit strange was an ICO afterwards. Just like there was only one witness, owned by the WeKu-Team. No internal market that worked. Frontpage presented Teammembers and advisors that were hard to get confirmed as really being part of this project. It all looked like a quickly done mash-up.

Hidden domain renter

The WeKu domain was apparantly hosted by an American company. And the domain had a hidden privacy setting. That is okay to use, except for most businesses this is considered not done. So, who is really behind the WeKu project? That is open for debate, but I'll leave that for what it is. As currently there is not much to be gained in speculating about it. WeKu could still turn back on. With witnesses being enabled.

The way it took off was by handing out free WeKu just for signing up and referring others. And this system of spreading out WeKu amongst the members got abused very badly. It created instant self enriching Whale accounts. Some of them also 'well known' here at Steem. It almost gave me the strong impression that some of them actually were involved more than the outside would have made us believe.

One after another?

Of course it is to expect that Open Source projects can also be forked off into a scam. That does not state anything about it being bad in itself. Although scammers do like to point the finger of guilt to their victims. As if it was their own fault for being ... Where you can fill in any kind of attack, theft or abuse on the dots. Wrongdoing as a way of living. And others should just protect themselves against them. As we live in the jungle, so are its laws, right?

Strangly enough some of those, who seem to belief that the only law being the one of the jungle, seem to have booted up yet another Steem clone. Looking more pro then WeKu, yet still seems to have been a search-and-replace forking Steem clone. Taking the Whaleshares name and adding another animal to it. One being apparantly connected to a spyware infested piece of p2p sharing software. Now all we have to wait for is a Bullwhales fork of Steem...

Be critical

Now I really have no clue what will happen with WeKu. It started off with 400 million WeKu issued up front and would try and sell another 400 million ERC20 tokens for Ethereum. That is 800 million within a year. And with inflation set at 10% recently that would create 80 million new WeKu every year? Somehow the math did not add up here. Was it done by some people who honestly did not know how this should have been done? Or was it done as a kind of hit and run scam?

Some facts that made WeKu at least questionable were the lack of transparancy, only one controlled witness, non working internal market, clearly badly performed search-n-replace fork, many defect links, bad economics, ICO afterwards, no blockchain explorer, unclear who is/was behind the project and looters being hailed as community savers and accepted as curators.

The opposite of Bullshares

Now, I'd have to admit that it does have a smelly stinch, to state the least. And if you might be temped, as a former WeKunian, to move over to the 'Shorters' version of Bullshares, then first look for some signs that might have you think twice. It also has only one witness, for instance and it uses the SteemIt copyrighted logo. Some trivial links do end up dead and it looks a lot like another search-n-replace forking Steem clone. (Be carefull buying an account, your money might be lost.)

There is no exchange on Blocktrades for it, nor on GDEX. Yep, it is a very bad executed, as if done in a hurry, search-n-replace forking Steem clone. Which lacks a lot of transparancy. And if you take the time to look at who is what at that platform you might have an 'Aha' moment. Yes, I left out their names here, just like I leave out the name of that questionable forking Steem clone. As there is no such thing as bad advertising.

DYOR

Do your own research {DYOR}, that is basicly what I would want to advise you. Maybe I am somehow biased against those questionable forking Steem clones. But as there are some clearly connected to a few well known scammers and system abusers I urge you to DYOR. Because some of them seemed to be stuck in their view of reality as being ruled by the law of the jungle. And I have learned from my lessons in life that those people cannot be trusted, ever.

Sometimes I wished I was totally wrong about these kind of things. But then reality bites and it hits me in the face. Luckily there also are a lot of fellow human beings that proof there is a lot to be thankfull for in this reality. Yet it seems like a healthy thing to do to be a bit critical now and then. And if something seems to be to good to be true, it often proves itself to be.

Have a great one!

If only scammers would look like this...

Image license CC0, source: Pixabay