Recently, I've been looking at a bunch of "address profiling/tag clustering," trying to tell which ones are smart money and which are pump-and-dump schemes... Honestly, I only trust half of it now. On-chain fund flows can indeed reveal the rhythm, but many tags are applied retroactively: you see it making money, then label it as a "whale/institution," and then use that as a confidence boost, which is easy to self-delude. Not to mention the same group of people splitting addresses, using intermediaries, or even deliberately feeding fake paths—clustering becomes so complex it’s like reading horoscopes.

And now, with privacy coins, coin mixers, and regulatory boundaries causing two camps to clash, the labels of "clean/unclean" are even more esoteric. They might just be tagged after passing by briefly; I definitely wouldn’t rely on them as the sole basis. My approach is still old-fashioned: look at behavioral consistency + holding cycle, don’t just focus on a large inflow. Last night, I was stuck refreshing and retrying in the browser, and only realized after a long time that I was just chasing the plot… For now, I’ll keep it simple—less hands-on, more review.