A certain Twitter fan appealed to fans, “Don’t buy my coins on BitClout, whoever buys is stupid.”
Written by: LeftOfCenter
On March 23, a social network platform called BitClout revealed the list of investors behind it. There are many famous celebrity crypto funds, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Arrington Capital, Polychain, Pantera, DCG (CoinDesk parent company), Huobi, Variant, etc.
BitClout is a project of an anonymous development team. It has received industry attention for a long time, but it has some negative comments. For example, Larry Cermak, the research director of The Block, a well-known poison tongue critic, bluntly called it “or a scam.” According to one of the anonymous founders of the team, the financing news released this time is just to smash “rumors.” With the endorsement of a large number of top investment institutions, the credibility of the project can be greatly improved.
However, the effect of the endorsement of the big-name institutions is not ideal. Instead, it has attracted more criticism and doubts, and has received more doubts. It is considered that “compared to BitClout, the notorious BSV looks more reliable.”; although I hope Relying on celebrity hype to gain aura, but the big V 0x_Infinitum publicly stated, “Don’t buy my BitClout tokens. It is useless. Whoever buys it is stupid.” In fact, BitClout privately tweeted Twitter users without permission. The publication of personal data on the platform has violated the law. Brandon Curtis, the product leader of the decentralized exchange Radar Relay, issued a legal warning to the social network BitClout founder Nadar Al-Naji through the law firm Anderson Kill, saying that the latter used it without consent Up his portrait.
So, what kind of platform is BitClout? What is its operating mechanism? Why did it trigger a group attack?
What exactly is BitClout?
According to the official white paper released by BitClout, BitClout is a new type of blockchain-based social media. Unlike ordinary social media, the accounts on it can issue their own community tokens (similar to Roll or Rally). Since the supply of tokens is controlled by automated market makers (such as Uniswap or Curve) and uses joint curve pricing, this means that these tokens are largely speculative.
This is exactly what the development team wants to achieve. The steep joint curve can maximize the price of community tokens and stimulate the mood of fomo to invest more funds to buy tokens on BitClout.
Members of the BitClout team, aliased as Diamondhands, frankly stated that BitClout’s innovation lies in speculating on creators as an asset class, rather than the content itself. This is the difference between BitClout and other encrypted social media. Diamondhands said, “If you have a creator who can speculate, then you can make a long-term investment. On the contrary, the content itself does not have such long-term value.”
In fact, BitClout hopes to attract attention through the celebrity effect and help it realize its cash. In order to quickly convert users, BitClout has adopted an extremely radical method, directly transplanting the Twitter accounts of some big V users and related content published to its own platform. on.
Specifically, BitClout will reserve accounts for some big V Twitter users, which means that accounts are automatically created for them, and users only need to activate them. What the user has to do is to post a BitClout tweet to complete the activation and claim the account. The account that has been activated is the verification account, and a blue check mark will be displayed next to the profile. In addition, BitClout also reserves a certain amount of tokens for these accounts, the value of which is proportional to the number of fans. Currently, BitClout has automatically generated approximately 15,000 Twitter accounts.
In other words, for those big fans with a large number of fans, even if they have not claimed the account, they will find that they already have a BitClout account. If there are a lot of fans, it will automatically issue a worthy community token for you. . Think about how many people can withstand the temptation not to claim an account. If users claim their accounts and start publishing content on these platforms, BitClout’s goal is achieved. In this way, a big V account is converted. At the same time, the celebrity effect of the big V will attract more fans to the platform.
On the other hand, even if these big V accounts are not stationed on the platform, traders can still trade these tokens. In this way, BitClout maximizes the celebrity effect and speculative attributes to increase user conversion.
BitClout’s “sao operation” was criticized
Although there are luxury investment institutions endorsed, and adopt such extreme celebrity effect and speculative attributes, then the big V did not buy it, and it was almost unanimously questioned and criticized.
James Prestwich said that he was shocked to see so many venture capital funds and big-name companies supporting such toxic and even illegal projects. The founder, nadertheory, refuses to admit that it was created by himself, and uses other people’s reputation and brand to promote his tokens. This is an unethical behavior of chicken thieves. In short, this is a scam, the essence of which is to allow investors who enter the market later to take over for early investors to make profits.
https://twitter.com/_prestwich/status/1374528577614479365
0x_Infinitum urges not to buy your own bitclout social tokens, which are useless at all. Whoever buys is a fool.
As a matter of fact, BitClout’s suspected operations include the following:
First, BitClout’s website is not publicly visible.
Open the website, and what you see is the following line of small print. To access the website, you must have a password. To translate the subtext, you need to buy coins to access. This will surprise the cryptopunks who advocate decentralization.
Secondly, the way to buy coins is also very strange.
Different from the current mainstream IDO and IBP crowdfunding models, BitClout adopts a very old-school fundraising model, by sending BTC to BitClout to exchange BTCLT, but when you buy BTCLT, you cannot exchange it back for BTC. As of March 18, nearly 2,705 BTC have been raised. This can’t help but remind people of the widespread scam of “sending money to an address and then receiving tokens” during the coin issuance boom in 2017.
According to Twitter user Hsaka, the notorious BSV seems to be more reliable than Bitclout.
https://twitter.com/HsakaTrades
However, its anonymous team members said that as long as BTCLT is listed on the exchange, it can be traded. There are mainstream exchanges among the investors built on BitClout, which means that the possibility of listing on the exchange is very high.
In addition, BitClout claims to adopt an anonymous model for decentralization. However, some people speculate that its founder is actually Nader Al-Naji. Nader Al-Naji is the founder and CEO of BASIS. He previously worked as a development engineer at Google and DE Shaw.
Lumi, a blockchain researcher, believes that BitClout’s radical economic incentive model may lead to defamation of someone’s reputation in order to obtain wealth. “In fact, you only need to open a short position first and then try to destroy someone’s reputation. Up.”
Twitter user Ma/ya Zehavi believes that Bitclout is a breeding ground for greed and opportunism using crypto projects. Wearing a decentralized mask is actually to conceal the essence of its dystopian social structure. Some ideas seem cool, but the more they think about it, the more they feel that they will develop into the dire consequences for real life as predicted in a certain episode of Black Mirror.
https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1373742991484018696
However, the most questioned Bitclout is directly embezzling users’ content to make money, which has caused infringement.
Stephen Palley posted a tweet condemning that Bitclout used his name, preferences and reputation to profit without permission. And hope to immediately remove his account.
https://twitter.com/stephendpalley/status/1373810813237137414
In addition, Brandon Curtis, head of the Radar Relay product of the decentralized exchange, issued a legal warning to Nadar Al-Naji, the founder of the social network BitClout, through the law firm Anderson Kill, stating that the latter used his portrait without consent. Anderson Kill claimed that Nadar Al-Naji violated California’s Civil Code Section 3344 (protecting the name, portrait, voice, and signature of natural persons, etc.) and Section 1798 (protecting personal privacy). According to documents issued by Anderson Kill, BitClout was created and controlled by Nadar Al-Naji, created and sold NFTs without authorization, using the names, reputations and portraits of approximately 15,000 Twitter KOLs and celebrities.
Ideamarket
The Bitclout model is reminiscent of another platform called Ideamarket.
Similar to Bitclout, Ideamarket is also an information market based on social accounts. Like the real stock market, users need to use real money to vote for each social account to establish an ideal market for information. This market does not need to trust centralized third-party media. , But voted by the market.
Mike Elias, the founder of Ideamarket, believes that the benefits of doing this are many:
First, the information market generated by the market can improve the accuracy of the information market without being completely controlled by the “narrative central bank” media company.
Secondly, users on Ideamarket need to use U.S. dollars to vote on various accounts, which means that the malicious market behavior of buying fans to gain trust is expensive. On Ideamarket, buying fans to increase credibility is open and transparent, which is conducive to market transparency.
Finally, Ideamarket hopes to bring benefits to investors with a keen sense of smell, that is, through identifying and preaching under-recognized ideas, Mike Elias believes that this will trigger an “intelligence gold rush.”
Compared with Bitclout’s aggressive cold start, Ideamarkt is a way to trot steadily. Ideamarket was first launched in 2019 and has now been released on the Ethereum mainnet. Like Bitclout, each account on Ideamarkt has its own personal token. As the number of tokens purchased increases, its value becomes higher.
Compared with big-name funds with luxury endorsements, Ideamarkt’s investment institutions are also much smaller. Investors include Mechanism Capital, Hartmann Capital managing partner Felix Hartmann, The LAO, Web3 Foundation technology educator Bruno Skvorc and DAO enthusiast Philip Silva .
The development of Ideamarkt is also a way of steadily trotting. From the initial support of Twitter to the integration of other platforms, including Substack, Ideamarkt released the task of integrating the Gitcoin Grants market in the 9th round of Gitcoin donation activity bounty program. . In addition, Ideamarkt has up to 10 bounty tasks in the 9th round of Gitcoin donation activity bounty program, with a total bonus of 24,000 US dollars.
Whether it is from the point of view, vision, transparency or Ethos, Ideamarkt and Bitclout are obviously different. The former originated from the grassroots, adhering to a more open and transparent idealistic vision (no derogation here), and more use of group collaboration in development integration. , Is a bottom-up model, the founding team is very Buddhist, and it has slowly begun to show some improvement in the past two years of silent cultivation. The menacing Bitclout has become more currency-oriented. The endorsement of big-name fund investors has adopted a more aggressive speculation mechanism to attract speculators’ participation, and a more old-school fund-raising model. However, ideals return to ideals. In essence, Ideamarkt is still It is impossible to get rid of the manipulation of speculators. At least for now, Ideamarkt is still far away from the goal of creating a credible, decentralized and rational market.
https://bitclout.com/one_pager.pdf
https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-bitclout-the-social-media-experiment-stoking-controversy-on-twitter
