048. Game of rugs.
Hi there friends,
Welcome to another week in the clout-iverse. Crypto bags got you down? Turn that frown (and portfolio performance) upside down. @BitsTODAY is here to (ideally) position your perspective for the long-term. Plus, $clout continues to perform remarkably well considering the headwinds facing ETH, BTC, and other crypto assets. After briefly breaking the $200 barrier this weekend, $clout is holding strong around $175.
In other news, maybe it was $clout’s stability that convinced @dripcult to go full time on @BitsTODAY. Or maybe it was @nvo’s charm. Either way … LFG 🚀. Full squad on that real sh*t.
Bits on the menu tonight:
Ubiquitous UX Drops: No sleep ‘till NFTs 😴
Clout Controversy: The @rajpull … growth catalyst or dangerous distraction?
Clout Controversy x2: Grey whales get grey-listed 🌫️🐋❌
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 Ubiquitous UX Drops: No sleep ‘till NFTs 😴
It’s been pretty quiet on the core-clout team’s part of late. While we’ve come to expect big things from @diamondhands at the tail end of weekends, especially on Sunday nights and sometimes into Monday, we didn’t get much, save for a few hot takes in the past 24–48 hours. Hopefully our proverbial BitClout daddies were well taken care of by their respective families yesterday, enjoying well deserved naps (much like @ASG), cracking bad jokes, and drinking 7 light beers. They are the progenitors of all of our collective pride and joy, after all.
Yes, we did get soundcloud embeds in post today (+1 for all the musicians out there.)
Still, the most recent major updates that sleuths like @tijn uncovered for us regard the coming of NFTs to BitClout. We expect this to be pushed quite soon, and that the current calm on the dev front likely betrays a frenzied mad dash on the backend to get this live ASAP.
Here’s what the info about NFTs on BitClout that began trickling in over the weekend:
A lot of this is pretty table stakes stuff as far as NFTs are concerned, though the unlockable text is cool, especially for some of us who are literary minded ;).
Still, there’s a laundry-list of outstanding questions we have here. How will the front-end of the NFT marketplace look? What will it cost to mint NFTs? What happens with the $clout needed to do said minting? Where will the NFTs and their data be stored? On the blockchain?
As we all wait impatiently for this next massive drop, there’s been no shortage of opining on the community’s part. Which reminds us … still no CIP repo for community ideas, concerns, and submissions? ❓❗ (cc: @Maebeam)
#3 Clout Controversy: The @rajpull … growth catalyst or dangerous distraction?
We’re gonna be 100% honest here. We were going to try to stay away from this one. While the @rajpull has become an absolute mainstay of BitClout engagement and especially, trading activity, it’s also become quite controversial.
For those of you who are new around here and have no idea what a ‘raj-pull’ is, @RajLahoti pioneered an innovative use of his creator coin in which he purposely sells all his coins, allowing new investors to enter at lower prices, and then re-buys his own coin later. The founder reward he earns in the interim, especially when employing higher founder reward %s, can be lucrative.
@RajLahoti has managed to parlay his first mover status in this space to absolute domination of trading activity on BitClout. As investments across the platform as a whole have slowed (see below), trading in @RajLahoti coin, as well as derivative accounts like @rajpull, has skyrocketed.
In fact, as notes @scottco, rug-pulling games, led by @RajLahoti, can consume more than half of all volume on Bitclout on any given day.
And this transitions us into a question that’s posed about basically anything that happens on BitClout. Is it good?
Again, as with anything that happens on BitClout, there’s a wide range of opinion. Many celebrate Raj as a sterling community builder and catalyst; his games generate massive engagement and may well have brought many new users to BitClout. Then there are others who think these games monopolize attention and investment flows on BitClout.
Without getting into the specifics, over the weekend, these debates got heated and spilled off platform into Clubhouse rooms, Discord, and all the other places where people chat BitClout. As @diamondhands reminds us, it’s a) important to keep things civil and b) we’re all navigating the same waters in the same boat as early adopters:
As a place where folks gather for news and entertainment on BitClout, we at @BitsTODAY want to build a strong ship here. Help us and take up an oar → we’d love to hear your (respectful) takes, gather them in one place, and look for commonality in what we’re all after here (as we suspect there will be plenty of it).
Our main takeaway for now is that above all, BitClout is a place for ingenuity. No one knows exactly what to do with their creator coin yet. It’s okay to admit it … we’re all still figuring it out. We respect the hustle and respect those who take a more purist approach to their creator coin approach. Please get in touch with any of us (@ASG, @dripcult, @nvo) with ideas, thoughts, rants, maybe even fully-fleshed op-eds??? 👀
#4 Clout Controversy x2: Grey whales get grey-listed 🌫️🐋❌
With $clout hitting $200 over the weekend for the first time, sentiment on BitClout itself has been pretty rosy. Back in the old country however (aka Twitter), skepticism still abounds, coupled with no small amount of hate, even as some early challenges, such as the lack of an off-ramp, are solved.
In particular, the Bitcoin maximalist community (aka crypto natives who religiously deride any non-Bitcoin project) has chosen BitClout as one of its preferred punching bags. This trend took off when Robert Breedlove, a prominent Bitcoin thought leader, mentioned he was giving BitClout an honest look. Suffice to say, his followers excoriated him mercilessly.
Over the weekend, @breedlove22 ‘rugged’ the $clout in his wallet. Unlike much of the Bitcoin maxi community, we’re not here to throw stones. Perhaps he concluded BitClout isn’t his jam, and he took the assets in his wallet and bought more BTC. Or made a mortgage payment. Not what we would have done, but also not for us to judge.
Now, others in the Bitcoin maximalist community, e.g. Peter McCormack, have openly talked about rugging their coins to spite or in some of their words, “implode”, the BitClout project. In response, we’ve seen a proliferation of ‘grey-listing;’ if you search @petermccormack on Bitclout.com, the profile won’t show up. Same goes for @jack (thx for the tip, @shubhang 😘). It seems this is being done primarily to profiles that would potentially compete directly with BitClout or rug, though in earlier days, there were adult artists and entertainers who also claimed their profiles and posts had been grey-listed.
To be sure, this is all happening at the Bitclout.com level of things. These profiles are still visible and tradable on other nodes. In other words, nothing is happening here at the BitClout blockchain nor at the protocol level; the profiles aren’t gone.
Still, this has caused no small amount of community tumult. There are those who think the profiles should be blacklisted completely, the domains released, and the funds inside them airdropped to active users or burned. Then there are the pure-decentralists who posit that even grey-listing on BitClout.com is a step too far. Beyond the spectrum we just outlined, there’s loads of folks who think the entire scenario speaks of early mistakes made in BitClout’s inception.
Again, community, what say you all? We’re here for the spirited debate 🙇🏼♂️🙇🏼♂️🙇🏼♂️
Well, thar she blows 🐳. Another edish in the books for BitsTODAY. Before we say goodnight, did you get a chance to hear our interview with @fungibles on clubhouse? No? Well, no sweat my dude. we have you covered. you can listen to it on Spotify here. Enjoy.
Nighty night,
BitsTODAY