Thanks - if the ETH blockchain decides to process my transaction to KuCoin I'll buy some.
ETH transactions are currently taking a looooong time costing muchooo gas.
Summary
ETH being cobbled by Chinese FCoin exchange 'wash trading'* shenanigans and crowdfunded EOS, some believe as a deliberate attack by EOS to cripple competitor ETH.
*A wash trade is a form of market manipulation in which an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same financial instruments to create misleading, artificial activity in the marketplace.
Technical Detail From 'Somewhere'
Today, 40% of the ethereum's network is being used by this contract
https://etherscan.io/address/0x98b4ca8bd52e4ed1f28d3f30d9f567d1166c9483
A beautiful and innovative copy-paste of a default ERC20 standard token called "IFishYunYu" with no features. (So it does nothing.)
Yet miraculously, it seems tons of "unique" accounts are transferring massive volumes of this token constantly, almost 50 ETH of gas an hour have been steadily used for nearly 24 hours now. Just to transfer individual tokens to the Fcoin exchange. But of course. The exchange is just a red herring to distract you from what's really happening.
Let's see what the creator of this contract has been up to recently.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd0e334dca734071f395cad64df90269113ead321232e5603f66fc6fb2885c654
Looks like he minted nearly 5 Billion Ifish tokens about 12 days ago...
to this account
0x45f64a7148d1cfeded427dd4380b458877e7ce56
which split it up across
10 or so accounts, that each do this
https://etherscan.io/token/0x98b4ca...?a=0xcd4777b5f4d8779e99ea996bb32988daf0bbbf3b
splitting it up across 500-600 accounts each.
Which are, the mystery "unique" accounts that are spamming the eth network. So yeah, it's one guy, it's the creator of the token. He was doing it during the previous Fcoin exchange competition too. He's running a multi-sided scheme, he even has bots running "wash" accounts. Like
https://etherscan.io/address/0xa67ef2aca4c6459e60821c1b1afe45812c4c1bcd#tokentxns
which is pretty cool, it just shoves the token into other accounts, and then those accounts shove it into other accounts, and then back to the big main account to simulate volume on the token itself. Try following a transaction, you'll come right back to the big-daddy account.
most importantly on why is this being done?
Let's see what one of the accounts funding all this eth might be doing
https://etherscan.io/token/0x86fa04...?a=0x7a717e226a8b37b912d0effbb0aab24ab690dbdb
gee, that sure is a lot of crowdfunded EOS, hundreds of thousands to be exact. From an account that seems to receive large sums of eos and immediately market sell them for thousands of ETH, which is then distributed out to contracts like this.
