Yeah, agreed. I just think it's ironic that Redditors (who are often obsessed about "sticking it to the MAN" and "fighting the SYSTEM" and "taking on the WALL STREET BANKSTERS!" (whatever that means) are probably just transferring money to the richest man on Earth. I mean, that would be hilarious. And I don't think it's far-fetched given the transactions I've identified.

True, but taxes need to be reported and paid only on realized gains - if you invest in crypto and it appreciates in value, you don't need to report it on your taxes until you sell it for fiat. And, there is no requirement that Musk (or anyone else) make their tax returns public - see the debate around Trump's tax returns. Even very prominent people aren't legally required to release their taxes to the public. Musk doesn't release his taxes, so there's nothing to report on. There's no law that says "your taxes are private except if you're rich". Everyone has the same legal right to tax privacy (even if we might believe in some moral or public-interest sense that the very-wealthy ought to be excluded from such protections).

Agreed, it's all "unrealized profit". And, in practice, it would be difficult to liquidate that much DogeCoin without influencing the price significantly (it would have to be liquidated gradually over time, and probably spreading the sales out among different exchanges would also be advisable). But, those things are impossible to calculate with certainty, so I just gave figures for unrealized profit, since that can be determined rigorously and explicitly.

Agreed. Lack of due diligence is the main culprit here, as it almost always is.

You hit the nail on the head.

DogeCoin is, in a deep sense, the Fyre Festival of investment opportunities, in that its value is driven almost entirely by celebrity promotions. The Elongated Muskrat may not intend to engage in price manipulation, but it is a predictable outcome of his behavior, and he is surely aware of it. In any case, no sane moral philosophy would accept this as an excuse: we are responsible for the predictable outcomes of our actions, even if those outcomes are not explicitly desired. Few of us would be sympathetic to a defendant who stands before a Court of Law and declares: “Your Honor, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury – please understand, that while I knew that running that red light would result in the deaths of those pedestrians, I didn’t desire to kill them – that was just a side-effect. What I desired was to shave 5 minutes off my morning commute.” An investment in DogeCoin is, for all intents and purposes, an investment in Elon Musk’s Twitter feed (or, think of it as a Twitter Feed ETF which primarily holds MUSK but also some SNOOP). The Elongated Muskrat and the D-O-Double-G may well be the “smart money”, but those following after them are certainly not.   

Load the DogeChain into a relational database with this schema:



Then run this query. It proves that DogeCoin flowed from the whale address to the charity address:



And, this transaction completed at the exact time Musk tweeted about donating:

Regarding disclosures, he's only required to disclose what Tesla owns, not what he himself owns privately. He is required to disclose private ownership in companies of which he is the CEO (ex. Tesla and SolarCity); you can do a Freedom of Information request for forms SEC-3 and SEC-4 from the Securities and Exchange Commission. But, he's not required to disclose DogeCoin ownership.

The Whale Address does not belong to any cryptocurrency exchange. First, it is far too large; even Binance, the highest-liquidity exchange for DogeCoin, controls about 20% of all Doge in existence (of which 13.8% is in Doge-Tether pairs, 3.4% is in Doge-BTC pairs, 0.6% is in Doge-USD pairs, 0.42% is in Doge-Euro pairs, and the remainder is in pairs with small cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies with no pair contributing more than 1%). In fact, even the top 100 exchanges combined do not have holdings anywhere near as large as the Whale Wallet. See CoinMarketCap’s study on DogeCoin exchange liquidity. Second, exchanges rarely put all their Doge (or anything else) in one basket (or address), for obvious reasons. Third, the Whale Address is relatively new; it was first funded on 2019-02-05, long after major exchanges added support for Doge. Fourth, the Address has relatively low activity levels, averaging about 215 transactions per year (incoming and outgoing combined); a typical exchange using a single hot wallet for all DogeCoin storage would process orders-of-magnitude more transactions in a similar period.

The Whale Address does not belong to any online wallet service. Storing DogeCoin (or any cryptocurrency) in an online wallet is the pinnacle of idiocy, but as you may have noticed, idiots do exist. That said, even the most popular online wallet (DogeChain.Info) has nowhere near as much DogeCoin in all of its users’ accounts combined as exists in the Whale Address. Further, online wallets use keys segregated by user for storage, rather than consolidating multiple customers’ coins in a single wallet (again, for obvious reasons). See DogeChain’s key-storage policies.

The Whale Address does not belong to an ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund), Mercantile Exchange, or similar financial entity. This is easy: there are no DogeCoin ETFs or similar. Good luck trying to convince the SEC to license your DogeCoin 401(k) retirement plan.

The Whale Address does not belong to an early miner and/or DogeCoin developer. The earliest of early-adopters will sometimes accumulate substantial amounts of cryptocurrency, typically through mining when difficulty is low, buying when prices are cheap, or a combination of the two. Indeed, most cryptocurrencies begin with low mining difficulty and low to negligible valuation; BitCoin itself did. However, the majority of DogeCoins in the address-of-interest were mined (relatively) recently. Following transactions back to their genesis blocks and studying mining rewards and historical difficulty levels shows that, even with extremely optimistic assumptions about mining rig efficiency and electricity cost, the DogeCoin in the Whale Wallet cost tens of millions of dollars of electricity to produce (in reality, the electrical cost was probably in the low-hundreds of millions of dollars). Like the Address itself, the Doge within are too new to be associated with early miners or developers.

The Whale Address does not belong to RobinHood. This stockbrokerage and options marketplace is closely associated with WallStreetBets (despite never being particularly popular with its own userbase). RobinHood offers DogeCoin for purchase, and likely holds some DogeCoin itself. However, it is absolutely neither the owner nor the controller of the Whale Wallet. First of all, RobinHood does not offer withdrawal of DogeCoin, nor does it make users’ private (or even public) keys available to them. This suggests that RobinHood is trading primarily or exclusively in “paper DogeCoin”, and that it owns little or none of the underlying asset; such practice is standard for brokerages, whether the asset is stocks or gold or cryptocurrency. It is precisely this lack of hard assets that motivated RobinHood to halt trading of GameStock ($GME) during a Reddit-induced short squeeze. Secondly, and more importantly, the value of the Whale Wallet is far too large to be owned by such a relatively-small company. RobinHood is an American LLC (Limited Liability Corporation), and as a result, its financial records are not available for public scrutiny to the degree that would be legally required if it was a public corporation. However, we do know that it has received a total of $953 million in capital funding ($110 million from Yuri Milner in April 2017; $363 million from DST Global in May 2018; $280 million in May 2020 from Sequoia Capital; $200 million from D1 Capital Partners in August 2020). Its total market valuation is approximately $8.3 billion. If RobinHood owned the Whale Wallet, it would own DogeCoin valued at approximately 2.7 times the entire amount invested into the company over the past 7 years. Further, this would imply that ~31% of the company’s entire market value is due to its DogeCoin holdings. While we can’t inspect RobinHood’s inner financial workings, its investors can (and do); anyone who has gone through the funding process knowns that prospective investors are exceedingly diligent regarding this. No major investor is going to pour money into a start-up so that it can buy $2.6 billion dollars in DogeCoin. The theory that RobinHood holds the Whale Wallet, while popular among Reddit’s DogeCoin enthusiasts, is exceedingly implausible; it reflects deep misunderstandings about the nature of brokerages, the size of RobinHood, and the relationships between pre-IPO investors and start-up companies.

This isn’t a defense of RobinHood. DogeCoiners are correct in urging RobinHood users to sell any DogeCoin they own on the platform and repurchase it on a real exchange such as Binance. DogeCoiners are correct in warning about the dangers of uncontrolled key custody. The heart of their argument (“RobinHood may not, and likely does not, have anywhere near enough DogeCoin to cover the purchases made on its platform”) is an excellent reason to avoid RobinHood, but it is also the reason why RobinHood cannot be the controller of the Whale Wallet.

DogeWhistle.com, I listed all the transaction IDs and even the SQL queries needed to find the transaction path. If you have access to Google BigQuery, you can load the DogeChain and run the queries yourself (use a Public Data Connector). I can't easily paste that all in here.

Here are the transaction IDs:

Step 1: 3cdf109ae7265608c2f91e833a682aac06601e6fe5a0155255ffc8a98a772a21
Step 2: e8fc9c76b678ac3cd50978fb4b14684c41e018f3dbdd23e3ed9e79e36ea17f98
Step 3: 800f13d8cf5e114f85b3891c48b91359b6951e737735a7393a7ab285dcfcba0c
Step 4: 928593f49999db4a4d73db7388de397a650d9e7692970802ec0c41c1c09a9c22

I made a chart showing the path of the DogeCoin: https://dogewhistle.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DogeFlow_ZoomOut_2021-02-16.png

I laid it out more on the site. The way he profited isn't that hard to understand: buy low and then pump.

Agreed that it's not solid proof (though there's no way to solidly prove that anyone controls any address really, unless they come out and say so. But the correlations between whale-wallet transactions and statements by Musk are just too strong. He tweeted about buying just as DogeCoin flowed into the wallet. He tweeted about selling just as funding flowed out. He tweeted about donating to a charity just as DogeCoin from the Whale Wallet flowed to that exact donation address. It's circumstantial evidence, but I think it's pretty strong. I laid it out on the site.

We all know that the Elongated Muskrat pumps DogeCoin on Twitter. That's not news. We know his tweets rock the market - that's not news, either. We also know that a single wallet holds ~28% of all DogeCoin (about $2.6 billion at current prices, though the coin is so volatile that you'll need to recalculate the account's value every five minutes). I loaded the entire DogeCoin blockchain into a SQL database and found that the Whale Wallet transferred money to an obscure charity just as Musk tweeted about donating to that charity.

You take the blue pill: The story ends, you wake up in your bed, and you can believe whatever you want to believe. You can choose to believe that the optimal financial strategy involves pouring your savings into a meme-based cryptocurrency hyped by an eccentric billionaire (who, incidentally, was fined $20 million by the SEC in 2018 for manipulating stock prices via Twitter). You can choose to believe that a man capable of controlling cryptocurrency prices and earning billions from price fluctuations has passed up this opportunity for profit out of the goodness of his heart. You can even choose to believe that reading stale memes constitutes “due diligence”, and that Snoop Dogg, Jake Paul, and assorted TikTok celebrities make for excellent financial advisors.

You take the DOGE pill: You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the muskrat-hole goes.

DogeWhistle.com

EDIT: You all don't like visiting external sites. That's fine - I'll add some content from my site here.

The transaction IDs linking the Whale Wallet to GiveDirectly, a small charity Musk contributed to:

Step 1: 3cdf109ae7265608c2f91e833a682aac06601e6fe5a0155255ffc8a98a772a21
Step 2: e8fc9c76b678ac3cd50978fb4b14684c41e018f3dbdd23e3ed9e79e36ea17f98
Step 3: 800f13d8cf5e114f85b3891c48b91359b6951e737735a7393a7ab285dcfcba0c
Step 4: 928593f49999db4a4d73db7388de397a650d9e7692970802ec0c41c1c09a9c22

Flow chart (follow the yellow Doge, Neo):

SQL query proving the link:

SQL query proving that a statistically-improbable number of transactions include "69" and "420":

Musk's fascination with "69" and "420":

Please do read the site before commenting "u hav no proofs...where r the proofs?". I agree this evidence isn't 100% rock-solid, but I think it's strong overall.