It is with great confusion and mild excitement, that I can officially announce that the first ever cryptocurrency-based social media platform has been created!
It’s called BitClout and it’s pretty much Twitter, except instead of long sleepless nights of grinding for followers and fighting other users to the death for the sacred Blue-Tick; you are given your very own, entirely unique creator coin, that other users can choose to buy if they find your content valuable. You also generate your very own “market-cap”. If you buy lots of your own coin early on when it’s very cheap and people start funnelling money into your account, it makes sense that you could make a good deal of real cash dollars from this.
Like all new technological developments, there’s always room for massive potential “unicorn” upsides, but there’s also an equal and substantially greater potential for these sorts of things to descend into strange pit of the internet ruled by grifters and reddit users…
Let’s take a closer look at what BitClout really is and whether you should jump on board.
What is BitClout?
BitClout has dubbed itself ‘The Crypto Social Media Network’ and per its own publicly available explainer:
“BitClout is a new type of social network that lets you speculate on people and posts with real money, and it’s built from the ground up as its own custom blockchain. Its architecture is similar to Bitcoin, only it can support complex social network data like posts, profiles, follows, speculation features, and much more at significantly higher throughput and scale. Like Bitcoin, BitClout is a fully open-source project and there is no company behind it — it’s just coins and code.”
BitClout is wildly similar to Twitter: with 280-character limit on posts, and services to that allow users to send DMs, like each other’s content and re-share posts.
The site operates on users trading tokens based on the value of someone’s reputation. For example, Elon Musk’s coin is currently floating around the $55,000 mark despite the fact that he hasn’t even joined the platform yet… Like all marketplaces it operates on the fundamental principles of:
“Buy things that you believe will grow in value over time”
BitClout claims that its creator coins are “the first tool we have as a society to trade ‘social clout’ as an asset”, which means that they obviously haven’t been looking into the Social Credit System in China or are just hoping no one will notice that they’re definitely not the first the party on this one…
People have already created Creator Coins for celebrities to come and claim them, in the hope that this thing will take off. It’s not obvious that any of these celebrities have consented to their names being used on the platform, but we can make a pretty reasonable assumption and say: probably fucking not.
“The owner of a reserved profile can claim their profile by navigating to their
profile and hitting a button to Tweet their BitClout public key,” the public explanation states. “When they do this, they gain full access to the account, as well as a percentage of the creator coins associated with their profile (see Founder Rewards). Only the owner of the Twitter account associated with a reserved profile can claim it.”
BitClout is still very much in its infantile stages at the moment, being less than two months old, but this platform has the potential to alter the way we commodify work, art and so on.
With the rise of NFTs and the like, the world of crypto has become a landscape of wild experimentation and the undeniably strange rumblings of a new financial era…
How to Buy BitClout
The only way to purchase more BitClout is to exchange your pre-existing Bitcoin for BitClout, which you can use to buy the coins of a content creator(s) of your choice, or, you can purchase your own creator coins (if you think that your profile will rise in value over time).
Some have expressed concern that BitClout may be a nifty mechanism to steal Bitcoin, but BitClout’s lead creator, who goes by the pseudonym Diamondhands, told CoinDesk that several major investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital and CoinBase Ventures are now backing the project financially to the tune of $24 million.
This lends BitClout a reasonable amount of legitimacy, but it’s not even close to something that gives me resolute confidence in the project. In these early stages I’ll only be transferring about $50 worth Bitcoin into BitClout because the potential for this thing to disappear with your crypto is still pretty damn high.
So, Is BitClout a Good Idea?
Personally, I think that BitClout does have the potential to disrupt social media in a legitimate way. By giving content creators a visibly monetised platform, people are willing to invest directly in others and themselves. It also means that content creators have a direct line to credit and are able to “put their money where their mouth is”.
It also has enormous political potential, allowing grassroots fundraising for independent political campaigns like we’ve never seen before. Granting individual people the ability to directly invest in a politicians unique coin, may very well provide the first transparent access to financial donations in politics…
BUT it also has the potential to be majorly exploited. It could very likely just deteriorate into a place where people with large holdings of their own coins encourage others to invest large sums into their coin. Then if the original owner decides to tear out 100% of their holdings, the coin will become quickly untethered from legitimate value and become worthless. There are so many potential ways for grifters and hucksters to come along and exploit unknowing or naive crypto enthusiasts with this platform, so users beware!
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