Hello, I had a successful project, a crypto trading bot, that generated substantial commission for Upwork, and out of the blue it got disabled.
A support person replied that the project violates the terms of service of "**Edited for community guidelines**" (without citing a specific TOS URL because there is no such URL, more on that later), and simply said, by its nature my project violates their TOS.
**Edited for community guidelines** and there is simply no TOS I could find.
Now, I would never offer any kind of "rouge" software that's designed to bypass other sites' terms of service. If I did that, Upwork would have every right to disable such a project. I would 100% understand that Upwork couldn't stand for such a thing.
There are a zillion sneaker bots, ticket sniper bots, spam bots, autoposting bots, and similar ilk that indeed can only work by violating terms of service of websites. Good net citizens don't hammer websites, they use the proper API.
But a crypto trading bot is not a "website hammerer", in fact it would be way too slow to "snipe" crypto tokens through a website when there is a free and open-source API for that.
**Edited for community guidelines**isn't even a company with an address and a phone number, much less with any published Terms of Service. It's a DAO, an anonymous loose collaboration of people who provide liquidity via anonymous crypto addresses into what is called "decentralized exchange liquidity pools".
**Edited for community guidelines**is not governed by any known business entity, has no seat in any particular country, no form of incorporation. It's simply open-source code that someone uploaded to the Binance blockchain, and now "they" get a small commission for every trade made through it.
So it's no different from millions of other smart contracts on the blockchains, that shuffle cryptocurrencies back and forth, as they are designed to do. Smart contracts do not have "terms of service". And you cannot interact with them in any other way than their API (ABI to be exact).
So I find myself in an Orwellian scenario here where Big Uwork, with one keystroke, destroyed my income source, and its own considerable commission source, based on simply a technical misunderstanding.
They speak of alleged TOS violations performed by my software, without even knowing my software, nor citing the alleged TOS URL. In short, it all appears like a terrible miscarriage of justice by well-meaning people who do not understand enough about blockchain and decentrazlied finance to even judge this.
What upsets me is that Upwork so far has not even cited the exact URL and page where the supposed TOS are published that my project supposedly violates. It truly feels a bit like 1984. Accused and found guilty first, but where is the evidence?
Perhaps an internal person could review this with a cool head and help me get to the bottom of what I feel is a gigantic misunderstanding of the nature of crypto trading bots?
Again, my software only interacts with well-published open source APIs, not with any company's website. Crypto bots trade through the open APIs, which is exactly what blockchain APIs are created for. No other mode of trading even makes any sense, and there is absolutely nothing nefarious about it.
Thanks for listening, Jorg
