BitClout Made Simple

I recently launched a profile for myself at BitClout — the first decentralized social network. I found it much easier to get into and use compared to all the other Web 3.0 or blockchain apps. In this article, I will explain what BitClout is in simple terms and how can you use it. Including its much-hyped money-making options. I’ll also explain the process of registering and using BitClout.

What Is Bitclout

In simple terms, BitClout is a decentralized social network. What this means is that the database that runs the network runs on many different computers rather than under the control of a single entity like Twitter. These computers are called nodes and they can be operated by anyone.

This has various advantages:

• You can’t be banned/censored/deplatformed: If you are banned, you can just use another BitClout node.
• There are no gatekeepers: A single entity like Twitter can’t unilaterally determine what you can see and what you can not see through its algorithm.
• You are not locked-in: If you don’t like how one node operates, you can just move to another node.

Basically, these traits make BitClout a distributed social network that is free of corporate control. Which is major.

But for a large majority of social network users who don’t risk bans or deplatforming, these may not be so important.

Then what does BitClout change about your everyday social network usage and why would you be willing to use it?

Because your social network activity is worth something with BitClout and it allows you to make money.

Instead of just making money over your activity — like most social networks — BitClout allows you to make money over your activity yourself.

How Can You Make Money On BitClout

There are 3 major ways in which you can make money on BitClout. Let’s start with the simplest of these, ‘the Diamonds’.

Diamonds

Instead of only likes, BitClout allows people to give each other’s tweets diamonds. At BitClout, tweets are called ‘clouts’, so we will be referring to ‘clouts’ instead of tweets from now on.

Here is an example of‘ clout’, along with the likes and diamonds interface:

As you can see, you can reply to, re-clout (retweet), like a clout or give a diamond to it. The only one that is different from the Twitter interface is the diamond.

When you give a diamond to a clout, you send the person who posted it money in between $0.01 to $500. The maximum amount varies, but the minimum amount is always $0.01. It starts from there and goes up to $0.05, $0.5 all the way up to the max. You can choose any amount of diamonds to give to a clout. The default is $0.01. So if you just click to give a diamond to a clout, it should send $0.01 to the person who posted it.

This is a way in which people incentivize the activity they like and show their appreciation to the person who posted something they like. Giving a like along with a diamond is generally customary too.

This is the simplest way which you can make money at BitClout or help fund a user/creator that you like.

However, the second way in which BitClout helps users make money is very interesting:

Now Your Account Has A Monetary Value

You may have noticed something interesting with the example clout I showed above:

There is a monetary number next to my nickname. Along with a ‘Buy’ button.

What the monetary number signifies is the price of my ‘coin’. And what the ‘Buy’ button does, is to allow someone to buy my ‘coins’.

Coins are like ‘shares’ in the stock market. When you buy a coin of a user, you own a portion of that user’s total shares. As the user is more active and more people buy the coins of that user, the price of the coin goes up. And similar to the stock market, every single person who bought the coin of that user also benefits from that rise in the coin price. As you — the account owner — should be owning more of your own coins than anyone else, you get a major benefit as a result of your activity.

Moreover, there is a feature called “Founder’s Reward” for each account. It makes a portion of every coin purchase go to the original account. For example, if your “Founders’ reward” is 10%, then 10% of every purchase that someone makes from your coin will go to you. This is a way to reward the original account from the coin activity on his account.

This results in an extremely interesting situation in which your account is like a ‘company’ in which people can invest in to back your activity and also make money over that investment:

Above, immediately under the bio and follower count of my profile, you can see a gray band in which the ‘stock value’ of my account is summarized. The important info can be seen in the green circles:

A — That is my current “Founder’s Reward”. This means 10% of every coin purchase anyone makes from my account will go to my account as coins.

B — That is the number of coins that were bought by everyone. Currently, there seem to be ~14.64 coins for my account in the hands of various people including me.

C — This is the actual dollar value that I have invested in my own coins (you can do that, and you should do that after you register).

D — This is the ‘total market cap’ of my coins, therefore my account. It signifies the total value of this account based on everything, especially the coins owned by all users. It's a pretty funny concept in that — you, as a person, having a ‘market cap’. But BitClout seems to have started out with financial terms, so financial terms are still being used on the social network as of now.

E — This one is an interesting list of top profiles with the highest coin price — the most ‘valuable’ accounts.

Under the “Holders of $Oz_Zeren coin” heading in the middle-bottom, you can see the list of people who have bought my coin to support my activities or invest in my profile.

Talking about investing…

You Can Invest In Other Users

Which is what many people do. Actually, there are profiles or ‘investment funds’ which exist solely for the purpose of investing in other people’s profiles.

This is the third way in which people make money at BitClout. By finding promising profiles or celebrity profiles and buying their coins. When that profile’s coin price goes up as a result of the profile owner’s activities, the people who bought that profile’s coin have the value of their coin increased automatically.

There seem to be people and specific investor profiles which do that exclusively, ie, acting as traders/investors and using the platform for investing in people’s profiles. But the majority of people seem to be mixing the two — using the platform normally and also at times buying someone else’s coin to support that person’s activities or do an investment.

What Does All Of This Mean

All of this, the fact that people can make money, but more importantly, get other people to invest in their profiles is positively game-changing in many ways. Let’s list them from the most obvious towards the most important and impactful:

You As The User And The Platform Is Now Free And Your Interests Are Aligned

Instead of platforms like Twitter making free money off of your activity without giving you any say in the process, the BitClout platform will make money together with you. If you aren’t active and if you don’t make money, the platform also will not make money. If you are active and you are making tons of money, the platform will also make money. This aligns the interests of the users and the platform.

Moreover, it makes the platform beholden to its users instead of detached, absentee shareholders. In the cases of Twitter, Facebook et al, absentee, uninvolved large investors own large amounts of shares of these organizations and they can put pressure on their decision making. Leading to many decisions that benefit the investors at the expense of the users.

Similarly, Major Creators And Influencers Are Also Set Free

In the same way, influencers are responsible towards only their fans and followers instead of being beholden to the whims of corporate sponsors.

This means that instead of shaping their narrative to appease their sponsors, the large creators and influencers can be their authentic selves and rely solely on the backing of their own followers.

As you can understand, this creates a major potential for independent, people-powered creative activity — from artists to journalists. Now independent artists can rely on their direct followers on distributed platforms like BitClout instead of relying on record labels. Journalists can rely on their audience instead of having to oblige with the opinion of the majority shareholders of mainstream media outlets.

The Creator Economy which allows creators to rely on their audience already exists, in the form of audience-backed funding platforms like Patreon, Substack, and so on. However, BitClout brings considerable ease to the process of backing someone and on top of that, makes the supporters a part of the creator’s business/activity. It’s interesting to imagine how the intersection of services like Patreon and BitClout could be.

Speaking of supporter-backed activities:

A People-Powered Economy

This format allows people to fund/back any project and get support for their projects in a very simple and understandable way. This is game-changing in that many projects, from software projects to social projects can get funding directly from people without relying on any intermediary or convoluted bureaucratic process.

There already seem to be plenty of projects and communities using BitClout to fund their activities in a transparent way. An added bonus of BitClout is the ease of communication between backers or community members and the projects. Projects can just clout their updates, whereas the backers can easily provide feedback to the projects under the same clout.

This is of course not as fleshed out a community-powered governance mechanism like DAOs, but DAOs are still rather too technical to be easily used by a majority of people. So until DAOs are well fleshed out so that anyone can easily launch or join a DAO as easily as launching a BitClout profile, BitClout provides an alternative way for communities and projects to implement governance by mimicking DAO behavior.

An additional benefit is that you can mimic corporate structures too — so, join BitClout with a few of your colleagues, create an additional profile for your ‘company’, put some funding into the company to create its tokens and then distribute its tokens to the main participants and there you have a basic company structure. Moreover, other people can easily buy additional coins to put investment in your company, which increases the value of the coins which the company partners have received — win-win.

How To Join BitClout

You don’t need any money to join BitClout. You just visit their home page, and click sign up. BitClout will give you $0.01 for verifying your phone no and $4 for verifying your address/identity later.

When you click sign-up, you will be greeted by the signup service that is provided by DeSo, the platform that powers BitClout. Click or tap anywhere in the window to continue.

This will bring you to the signup choices list above. You have the option of signing up / logging in with Google, or manually with what is called ‘Sign up with seed’. If you sign up with seed, you may be asked to verify your account via Twitter so using the Google option may be easier.

Whichever option you choose, you will see this below screen:

Save these words somewhere — a password manager, or better, a written piece of paper. Never lose these, because if you lose them, you will also lose your account.

When you click next, you will be registered and logged in. And BitClout will ask you to verify your phone number. Verify your phone number to get the money that BitClout will send to your account to create your profile.

If you can’t use or don’t want to use your phone number, then you will need to buy DESO, the native token of the platform in order to be able to create your profile. This is an anti-spam measure. You only need 0.01 DESO, which at the time of writing this article, costs $1.

If that is the case, click on the ‘Buy DESO’ link in the left menu bar.

This will present you with a page where you can buy DESO with cash, Bitcoin, or Ethereum. Use any option to buy the amount of DESO that you need. (at least 0.01).

When you complete buying the DESO, then click on the ‘Update profile’ button in the left-hand menu. You should automatically end up at the ‘Update profile’ screen if you verified your phone number instead. If in any case, you aren’t in the update profile screen, click the menu link to get there.

Now, here you will enter a username. This will also be used as your coin name. Enter a short bio for the profile, simply describing you or your community or project. You should also upload a standard avatar — just like what you would use for Twitter.

Click save without changing the Founder’s Reward. This will save your profile.

Next, click the ‘Profile’ link (not ‘Edit’) in the left-hand menu bar, or visit your newly saved profile in any way. Then click ‘Creator Coins’ tab down below in the middle.

At the bottom, it says nobody owns your coin yet. Click on ‘Be the first’ link to buy your own coin. It doesn’t matter if you buy 0.01 of your coins for cents or as much as you can — you must buy some of your coins in order to be able to change your founder’s reward. Now I explain Founder Reward percentage and what it does. While you are at the screen to buy your own creator coins, read the below part to decide how much and how to buy them:

The Founder Reward Percentage — this one is important

When the Founder Reward is 100%, if anyone (including you) buys your coin, all of it will go to your account. It is set to 100% to protect your account from people who might have wanted to buy a lot of your coin before you could have a chance to buy your own coin first. So it's at 100%. To be able to change it, you must buy your own coin first. The system will not let you change that value until you buy some of your coins.

Even if buying 0.01 of your coin (which would cost a few cents), is enough.

But…

If you can invest money in your profile, it's much better to buy as much of your coin as possible when starting. This would give you control of your own coins as well as have you benefit from the increase in its price to the maximum extent.

And you don’t even need to buy much — just buying 14–15 of your coins is enough. At the time of this writing, this would cost you $200. Which would give you over 90% control of your own coin supply.

If you can’t buy your own coins, or you don’t want to invest any money, you don’t have to.

You can keep your founder’s reward at 100%, so if anybody buys your coin, all of it will go to your account. So even in that case, anyone who wants to back you without expecting any return on their investment will be able to. And you can use BitClout like Twitter without the ‘profile stock’ feature.

However, it is better to give people a way to buy your coin. And if you can’t or don’t want to invest any money into your profile you can do that by reducing your founder’s reward. But don’t reduce it to 10%–20% or even worse, 0% in one go. You must reduce it slowly based on the below scale — even if you directly buy your coin as much as you can by investing money, or you don’t want to invest any money:

The above scale is an easy way for new users to reduce their founder’s reward. This is applicable whether you buy your own coin or you get coins by reducing your founder’s reward. Because if you buy your own coin, your coin price will increase just as if someone else bought your coin. So it's applicable in either case.

Again, it is recommended to buy 13–15 of your coins before you reduce the founder’s reward. If you already did that, or you don’t want to do that, just apply the below procedure:

Check your ‘coin price’ — that was mentioned earlier and what can be seen in your profile and in the right-hand menu. And then adjust your FR based on that percentage:

So if you are newly registered and you don’t want to invest any money in your profile, your coin price is yet $0. Then set the FR to 99%.

This will allow other people to invest in your coin. As other people buy your coin, you will get 99% of the purchase, so you will also start getting coins automatically.

Note that if you, yourself bought any of your coins already, the price will be already higher to start with. In that case, adjust the price according to wherever in the scale your coin price coincides.

When your coin price reaches $0.5, reduce your FR to 80%. This will allow people to keep buying your coin even as it gets more expensive.

When your coin price gets to $5, move to $5–15 scale and reduce your FR to 60%. This will allow people to keep buying your coin by making it less expensive.

You will notice that as people keep buying your coin, you accumulate coins as well. While at the same time your coin price will be increasing. If you buy your coin later yourself, this will still give you coins and increase your coin price at the same time.

If you bought 13–15 of your coins, this will already push the price high up enough to allow you to reduce your FR to 10%–20% range. At the time of writing this article, this would push your coin price to higher than $60. At that point, you could reduce your FR to 10% to incentivize other people to invest in your coin.

Buying your own coin has diminishing returns, by the way. If you buy ~15 of your coins, with the same money that you bought 15 of your coins, you will be able to buy only 3 coins more. (~30% ish). So, decide whether you want to invest in your profile more than that. The investment to coin price seems to follow the below scale:

So it seems like a good idea to buy 10–15 of your coins and then reduce your FR to allow other people to invest in your profile.

Now that you have bought your coins and set your founder’s reward, we can move on to other features of BitClout.

It’s Pretty Much Twitter

That more or less sums it up. It's pretty easy to use and you won’t feel out of your depth if you used Twitter or any other social network.

Nothing out of ordinary here. You can click inside the text box in the middle to compose any clout (tweet/post). You can add any video or link. Or image.

You can see the clouts from the accounts you follow down below. If you click ‘Global’ tab in the middle, you see what BitClout at large is talking about. You have a message inbox at the bottom of the left-hand menu.

Above is an example clout from another user. As you can see, you can reply, reclout (retweet), like, and give a diamond. Giving diamonds sends the user a tiny amount of money $0.01. Or alternatively, you can also send a larger amount of money — just hover on the diamond icon and it will give you options.

You can notice the coin price of the user next to the user’s nickname. You also have the option of investing in / backing that user by buying that user’s coin. Buying another user’s coin happens in the same way you bought your own coin. There are diminishing returns, and their coin price may be higher. So you may be able to buy only a small amount of coins.

From this point on, basically, you use BitClout like how you would use Twitter — post clouts, reply to other people’s clouts, like and reclout their clouts, give diamonds. Basically, interact with other people. Remember to give a shout-out to whoever buys your coin and backs you.

Possibilities Are Endless

From making some small money for your everyday social network usage to becoming a full-fledged influencer or creator who can fund himself or herself without relying on corporations or sponsors to launching a project or easily mimicking a small company, what you could do at BitClout is left to your imagination.

The major allure of BitClout in addition to its anti-censorship properties is that it makes crypto easy for the people. On top of that, it provides a way for creators to liberate themselves and serve only their own audience.

But in my eyes, the biggest breakthrough that BitClout has is making it easy for people to fund each other, communities, and projects.

Compared to the highly-gated, difficult-to-enter, difficult-to-navigate environment of traditional finance and the still-too-technical, complicated environment of ordinary decentralized crypto finance (DeFi), BitClout may provide a much easier to understand and use way for people and communities to bring together capital and fund projects and organizations. And even fund individuals.

Even further, BitClout is built on the DeSo (Decentralised Social) protocol. This makes it easier for developers to extend its features. There are already more than 100~ apps/services that have been launched on DeSo platform even despite only 3 months have passed since BitClout was launched.

This brings us to the end of my BitClout How-To. If you are on BitClout, or if you decide to give it a try, make sure to exchange follows: here is my profile.

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