Thread by @cryptoshiro

1/ Just spent the last week going through the #BitClout Block Explorer and boy are there A LOT of interesting stuffs

Bit of a long thread but hope yall find it useful (before you blindly ape elon or chamath coin lol)

2/ First heard of BitClout last week when major CT accounts were collectively confused of how it works and how their profiles ended up there.

Then everyone started tweeting "Just setting up my bitclout 💎🙌"

3/ So I tried signing up (found a password somewhere here), sent a few sats, bought some BitClout and straight aped into some cobie and elon coin..

BitClout went down not long after that

We all thought that must have been the fastest rug pull but they were back online in 20 hrs

4/ Then I found the BitClout Block Explorer

explorer.bitclout.com

Since the whole thing is on a public blockchain, the explorer lets you see every transaction/event that happened on BitClout

Every coin purchase, every profile update, every follow/unfollow, everything

5/ What got me curious were things like how do they decide how much a "Creator" is worth? Who are these crazy ppl who has millions of $ in elon coin? Why can't ppl get their money out? How do I short $BitClout?

So I went down the rabbit hole...

(everything here is public info)

6/ First of all, the genesis block:

explorer.bitclout.com/?query-node=ht…

Mined on Jan 18 5:42 UTC, Block 0 contains 1 transaction: BLOCK_REWARD

That reward is a whopping 8 million $BitClout coin.

By their own valuation, 1 coin is currently $144, so that's $1.15 Billion worth of pre-mine.

7/ The genesis block reward was split into 482 Public Keys

A key is generated when you first signed up. If your profile is one of the ~15,000 they scraped from Twitter, it already has a key

To claim your profile, you need to swap them by tweeting your key thereby promoting them

8/ The reward was not split evenly. Some keys hold 100,000s of $BitClout while some only get 0.00001s

Approx. 349 keys containing ~5.7 million $BitClout have not been touched since the genesis block

The activities on the other 133 keys are where things get interesting...

9/ There are 11 types of actions that get recorded on the blockchain

Your average activity on the BitClout website mostly consists of these actions (listed as Transaction)

However there are only certain Public Keys that could perform the bottom 3 actions (more on these later)

10/ 42 days after the genesis block, on Mar 1 things finally got started: Block 1 to Block 2,389 were mined. In total there are 57,784 transactions recorded on these blocks

What are these early transactions and why are there so many of them?

11/ A closer look at these transactions show they mostly consist of: BASIC_TRANSFER, UPDATE_PROFILE and CREATOR_COIN

Apparently this was how they populated empty public keys with 'influencer' profiles scraped from Twitter and pumped their market cap

12/ Every time you perform an action such as updating your profile, posting comments or following people on BitClout, you are charged gas fees for the transactions to be recorded on the blockchain

Fees for the above are minuscule
BTC > $BitClout swap is 0.1% of the minted amount

13/ On this early stage, all those empty keys went through 4 transactions

- got sent a bit of $BitClout for gas
- spent it to update profile as scraped from Twitter
- got sent a larger amount
- spent it to buy their own coin

Check out Block 2 for example
explorer.bitclout.com/?query-node=ht…

14/ Repeat the above 15,000 times and now you've got 15,000 'reserved' influencer profiles on BitClout

The next step was to make the profiles look so valuable that the influencers would be enticed to claim theirs, thereby endorsing it

What to do? Artificially pamp it of course

15/ On Mar 11 starting from Block 5529, a similar process of sending $BitClout to each profile so they could buy their own coin began

This time the amount was larger but varied arbitrarily

This is why every profile comes holding their own coin and why their value is artificial

16/ We could see from the block explorer that all those $BitClout that were distributed for updating profiles and pumping purposes came from the genesis block reward

2 genesis public keys were responsible for distributing the funds:

Genesis Public Key #102 and #131

17/ Since genesis public keys are preloaded with pre-mined $BitClout from Block 0, I reckon it is safe to assume that whoever is in possession or has access to them (482 keys in total) is part of the BitClout team or an investor

18/ Out of the 133 genesis keys that have shown activities since Block 0, around half have updated their profiles and could now be browsed on the BitClout website - including Genesis #102 and #131

They are respectively called "master" and "merlin"

19/ Transactions show that master is mainly used to distribute $BitClout to influencer profiles, which were then all automatically used to buy their own coins

master performed this task on 2 separate days: Mar 1 and Mar 11, the day before first launch

explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC…

20/ On the other hand merlin's job is to give out 0.00002 starter $BitClout to every new user that signed up - to pay gas fees for simple actions like updating profile or posting

A quick Twitter search for 'merlin bitclout' brings up this tweet from the day of the second launch

21/ By checking the transactions of the genesis keys, we could find out how the remaining pre-mined $BitClout are utilised and the team behind it

Additionally the block explorer also lets us know who currently mine the blocks & how many BTC have been swapped for $BitClout so far

22/ As previously mentioned, there are transactions dating from Mar 1 recorded on the 133 genesis public keys that contained ~2.3 million of the Block 0 reward

By my last count, around 800k $BitClout have since been transferred out of the keys or spent on Creator coin

23/ Some genesis keys were emptied out - their $BitClout distributed to other keys

For example, all 41k $BitClout in Genesis key #105 were sent to public key BC1YLhhjMfZBCFw(...)

explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC…

24/ Other genesis keys used their pre-mined $BitClout to buy large amounts of Creator coin

Genesis key #347 spent around 24k $BitClout on elon & naval coin, pumping their market cap in the process and is now the top holder of both their coins

explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC…

25/ In fact, the top coin holders of the highest value Creators are mostly genesis public keys or accounts that have received pre-mined $BitClout from them

charitee, who is in the top 5 coin holders of these Creators, is genesis key #244 who has updated their profile

26/ These investors are all genesis public key owners with pre-mined $BitClout that have also updated their profiles

chamath, who holds genesis public key #9, has 87.5k $BitClout from the Block 0 reward in his key

explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC…

27/ From what I've seen so far, genesis public keys that have updated their profiles are mostly investors and team members (including miners)

Some use real profiles, others anon. There are even meme accounts

28/ Speaking of miners, 9,900 blocks have been mined so far

Since launch day, the average block time is ~5 minutes

Block reward is usually 1 $BitClout but can vary - the largest I've seen so far is 340 $BitClout for Block 3727

explorer.bitclout.com/?transaction-i…

29/ Not sure what the total block reward is so far but last I counted there were at least 11k $BitClout mined by Block 9000 (excluding the 8 million from Block 0)

I have found around 20 public keys that have BLOCK_REWARD on their transactions - gonna assume they are the miners

30/ Half of the miners are genesis public keys and some have updated their profiles

Some even have already used the block rewards to buy creator coins

31/ Will update this thread later with:

- how they process profile transfers (SWAP_IDENTITY)
- how BITCOIN_EXCHANGE works and how many Bitcoin have been converted to $BitClout
- how they price $BitClout
- and some other interesting stuffs

Gotta go for now

32/ S/o to @C0inAlchemist @loomdart @_prestwich for their insights on BitClout