Hi Ryan, this is the video I mentioned in the intro to this article. I wouldn’t call it outright misinformation, as the key points of concern raised in it were valid *at the time* it was made.

Namely:

1. The project is fully open-source, and hundreds of third-party devs are building an entire ecosystem of apps and projects on top of the platform. In fact, the founder announced yesterday that the success of BitClout will be when bitclout.com disappears as the front end will be handed over to devs in the community, whilst the core team who started the project will focus on the blockchain powering the $clout currency and the new, two-way creator-supporter dynamics it enables.
2. Liquidity is in place — and has been for over 3 weeks now. You can buy and sell $clout, not just via major exchange Blockchain.com (as announced by their CEO here) but right from the site. You can do so using any fiat currency you would like, so you don’t even need to have a crypto wallet or go through an external exchange to get your money in and out in, say, USD or GBP. Finally, the Coinbase CEO is very active on BitClout and Coinbase is rumored as being the next exchange that will take $clout “mainstream” within the crypto/ blockchain ecosystem.

I was also highly skeptical after watching Coffee’s video, so I threaded carefully.

What I found was different, beyond the above developments, and showed that he clearly did not spend even half an hour actually using the platform to try and understand it.

E.g.:

1. You get free $clout upon sign up, meaning you don’t need a spend a single penny of your own money to use the site.
2. “Paying to Tweet” — that one really put me off! — is taken completely out of proportion here. Yes, technically since every change is logged onto the native blockchain, there is a fractional, nominal cost to record every action on the public ledger (which again is open source, so anyone can go into the blockchain explorer and see exactly everything that ever took place on the platform since day 0). But this cost would be a fraction of 0.000000001 (not the actual number, but you get the idea) so that by using the free $clout you get upon sign up you could probably post all day for years on end without spending a penny…!

Morale of the story: do your own research.

I trust CoffeeZilla and consume a lot of his content, but this was a botched job that clearly showed he himself relied on external information and never logged on to see how the darn thing actually worked.

An update that takes into account the many developments over the past month would be useful.

The important distinction to make is this though:

While BitClout *itself*, as a platform/ site is not a scam; there are many scammers on the platform who use it maliciously — just like anywhere on the Internet. These are of course entirely different things, just like there are fake accounts and scammers right here on Medium and on every social media platform you can think of.

Lastly — some of the largest investors in the VC space are now very public on their investment. I’m sure you’ll have seen this announcement by Sequoia capital on CNBC, which touches upon some of the concerns (again, both the video and Twitter thread are outdated).

If these large VCs were backing and publicly promoting a “scam”, their own reputation would be destroyed.

Anyhow, I hope that helps!