BitClout: 12 Things to Know About This Creator Platform Before You Join
It’s a mixed bag. Proceed with utmost caution
I joined BitClout a few days ago. When I read that a writer on Medium is now trying her luck on BitClout as a content creator, I decided to take the plunge. So how do you get people to invest in you? Just like you would on any other social media platform. It’s a Twitter-like medium, but with ‘real’ money at play. People can ‘buy’ your creator coin, give you a cash incentive if they like your posts, comments, links, and images. The more active you are on the platform, the more diamonds and ‘buys’ (real currency, but minuscule) you gain. Similar to the stock market, the price of BitClout keeps fluctuating every day. It was at $69 when I signed up, and went down to $59 the next day, and is now up again at $64.
This is what I have learned so far, so you can cut your learning curve before you sign up:
1. You should be the first person to buy your own coin, so you buy it on the cheap. While it’s at 100 by default when you sign up, lower the ‘Founder Reward’ (FR) to 90% or even 99% and buy your own coin, because it would be the cheapest before you sell it to others. The moment others buy it, it goes up, like it happened with mine. My Creator Coin (CC) value was at $0. But the moment my friend bought them, it went up to $46. Now, even if I were to buy it, I would have to pay 46-times more money when I could have bought it for a dollar.
2. Never lower your FR to 10% before buying your own coin. There are people employing bots to invest in newcomers. Before you buy your coin, they would have bought your CC for $1. As a safeguard, the platform now defaults to 100% FR, so keep it that way.
3. Always read the ‘tutorial’ soon after you sign up on BitClout. It offers you easy tips on how you can buy your own coin even while keeping the FR at 100%. It also shows you how you can trade your CC by buying and selling other people’s coins as well.
4. Don’t start selling your CC until you reach 100 followers. Until then, keep the FR at 100%. The idea is that you want credible people to first follow you, so you have a certain reputation that they can trust.
5. There are many scammers out there with fake accounts, including those of celebrities. Rely on the blue tick mark to begin with. Beware of them. There are many videos that explain how you can use their Public Key and view their transactions on Bitclout explorer and Bitclout Pulse to verify if they were phone verified, or if they are just bots. Always transact with real people for added safety.
6. The more people buy your coin, the higher will be your price. The stalwarts in the game have their CC priced at upwards of $8000. However, if the bots or untrustworthy people buy your coin, they will adopt the ‘pump and dump’ method. Which means, they will buy your coin, which will increase your CC price, but also dump it soon after there is an increment in your CC value. They are a bit like daily traders on the stock market who are looking at daily gains, or punters who sell the moment they see some profit. The problem is that when they sell, your CC price will tumble. If the majority of your investors happen to be these, your stock could tumble even more. Therefore, buying your own coin will give you the financial stability you need to ensure that such scammers don’t lead to your fall. For example, if my friend is a scammer, all he has to do is sell off his stake (the moment he invested in me, his stock’s market value jumped 200%). Which business can offer such high returns in seconds? BitClout gives you that opportunity.
7. For those who don’t want to invest, there are creator funds for them. But they have to be convinced of the value you bring to the table. And they will also buy a majority stake in your coin, if you don’t want to take the risk. As the crypto platform is volatile, people who bought it when it was $150 have burned their hands as the price is now half of that. Therefore, they don’t want others to feel the pinch either. That’s why Creators Fund was set up, so you don’t have to make that initial investment, if you don’t know how to play, and you don’t want to risk it.
8. There are conspiracy theories galore about how BitClout is out to get you. That it’s not really decentralised. That the person behind it was had a failed venture some years ago. So on and so forth. It’s true that the platform is no way democratic. Some people still control the platform, and the real players are the developers who are coding at the back-end. Some allege that the platform promoters have access to the seed phrases, and can pull out all our monies whenever they feel like it. Being a non-technical person, I have no way of proving this. That’s the problem with anything that’s alien to you. Like fiat money. How many of us know how the currency notes get their exchange value? Who prints and how much, and when? The only surety we have is that the banks and the government promises to honour the currency, no matter what happens. With crypto, there is no such promise. If you transfer the money to the wrong account, the money is just gone, and you have no one to turn to. Similarly, if your crypto exchange is hacked, your money has just been burned for good, and you cannot have it back.
9. BitClout is a new platform with only thousands of people out there instead of millions. And these include bigwigs like Dharmesh of Hubspot and Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Therefore, it’s easier to be in the front and centre of them if you engage with their posts. I did, and earned diamonds from Dharmesh, the Krassenstein twins, and Mario Nawfal on my first outing.
10. Creator rewards: People are giving away different benefits to people who buy their creator coins. A person who buys 0.1 or 0.2 coin gets nothing. But if a person buys 1 or more coins, people are giving away DM access, one-on-ones, free tickets to events, exclusive badges, workshops, and so on. The idea is to keep the investors invested in you and prevent them from selling the coin. If the coin’s value grows, we all grow. That’s the mantra.
11. NFTs: Non-fungible Transfers unlike BitClout is a static asset. Those who have the NFT cannot give it to anybody else. Though it’s not a copyright, it’s a non-transferable asset for life. Once you buy it, nobody else can own it. It could be a photograph, article, video, song, lyrics… anything you own and can sell. It is the creator’s way of making the investors part of his inner circle.
12. The upshot? BitClout is a work in progress. It’s a blockchain experiment that’s evolving every day. Only invest, if you have money and time to burn.
P.S: This is my reading of the creator platform so far as I continue to explore. If there’s more you would like to add/amend, feel free to use the comments section below. If you are on BitClout, you can follow me here.
