Social currency isn’t without its controversies and the latest one is coming from a social media experiment on blockchain called BitClout.
The core insight behind BitClout is an amalgamation of speculation and content, which is fine for creators to monetize their social media activity. However, consent to have a social media account on another network is important as well. And in this case, there’s no mention about the latter as such and a lot of users of the “crypto world” on Twitter recently discovered about their profile on this particular social media network.
It is unpersuasive to many members, prominent members of the industry seemingly objecting to their images and Twitter profiles being copied onto a different website.
BitClout is a proof-of-work blockchain designed for running social media. It was created by an anonymous group of developers and its backers only hold its token, BTCLT. It is social media on a blockchain having a similar resemblance to Hive and Steem. It generates social tokens representing actual people. Those social tokens’ supplies are managed by automated market makers (like Uniswap or Curve). The difference is that one is governed by a bonding curve that explicitly ratchets up the value as more tokens get minted.
In order to interact on the website, users need their specific BTCLT token. This can be gathered through trading with BTC but there’s a caveat. You can trade BTC for BTCLT but you can’t do it the other way around.
BitClout runs on a proof-of-work blockchain specifically designed to hold social media posts. The source code will be open-sourced on their website and others will be able to join as nodes or as miners without any explicit permission according to an interaction between pseudonyms group Diamondhands and Coindesk.
Their token BTCLT is used as gas that’ll be used in a governance process managing the project’s BTC treasury. According to Diamondhands, a pre-mine of 2 million BTCLT tokens was undertaken for founders and investors. He further explained that there’s no supply cap technically but the cost of new emissions will skyrocket at some point from where there’s no expectation of any purchase. This will be seen when supply hits around 19 million.
Securing the network will let Miners earn BTCLT, but the limit for it is only 500,000 over the next few years.
An interesting fact is that this “social currency” scheme is seemingly getting a lot of monetary support from a lot of investors. A number of companies are looking up to partner with this blockchain experiment.
As per an email between Diamondhands and Coindesk, the companies are Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Arrington Capital, Polychain, Pantera, Huobi, Variant and others.
Diamondhands collectively believe that through this platform, the creator monetizing on the platform is what will drive its value.
The users and their posts on the network can be accessed by any authorized web application due to their underlying data structure. Websites that publish BitClout content and allow people to interact are known as their nodes. Through this open data structure, sites can create new ways for creators to monetize people incentives to hold their tokens.