Since ETH is based on a completely transparent ledger and not a privacy focused coin like XMR, all wallet amounts are public so you can see if a giant wallet pops up or transfers out to known exchanges - meaning a sale is taking place. So, it's natural to break it up into multiple wallet addresses.
Am I missing some other context here? I don't see what's wrong with using multiple wallet addresses to not let the whole world know about your large orders.
PoS a flawed idea from the outset, but you can kind of try to fake it and make it work for a while if people believe that the coins are well distributed. Over the long term, the large whales will eventually consolidate more and more power, but hey, that's tomorrow's problem.
But if in reality there's just a handful of silicon valley tech bros and VCs who control the majority of the supply, and thus can collude to control the network state, then it destroys the idea that it is a decentralized, and trust minimized system.
This was a similar reasoning for justifying the DAO fork. The hacker who broke the code stole ~4% of all Ethereum at the time. Having a known, and impossible to deny, whale of that size would have severely hurt their ability to legitimize the planned migration to PoS.
Specifically from this source, "We may limit the size of a single purchase to make it easier to disguise. *So that no one is scared.*"
Most of them sold it under 20 usd per eth
SO your probable worries are not valid. There were 2 bear markets since eth ico.
Solana has this exact issue though... since launch it goes only up (relatively) and money raised from VC were much bigger (eth ico was only circa 10mln usd)
FYI
I’m rusty, but exchange deposits are probably to unique addresses and might not consolidate into known exchange addresses until after the sale.
Or to be frank - the messsage to the non-crypto audience is this:"Yet again, the crypto guys seem to be scamming each other, stay the hell away".
Here the co-founder explains how to buy more than the agreed maximum per holder, by simply creating multiple accounts to buy them. The founder actively encourages fraud and does it on record.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/11/sale-of-the-cent...
It's a mystery why the SEC hasn't torn them apart.
My brother said he didn’t trust his money to a 27-year-old Russian kid who looks like a tweaker. My brother doesn’t know how to write code, I told him to do the research.
Should I be nervous or start shopping for a Lambo?
This increases my trust in the tech if anything. Shame about the rest though.
Realistically, the validators do.