It sounds almost identical to a platform which went bust in the UK recently, FootballIndex, which allowed you to buy ‘shares’ in soccer players, with the promise of a dividend paid out over a number of years. You could also in theory sell the share to other people.
What happened is that the platform became almost completely reliant on new customers joining to pay out the old. If you’re thinking, well that sounds a lot like a Ponzi scheme, you’d be right.
When COVID hit snd football games were cancelled, ‘investors’ withdrew their money to spend on other things and the stream of new customers died out completely. The platform collapsed snd nearly everyone lost their money.
Won’t be going near it, and the fact that Clubhouse has been so quickly completely overrun by MLM hucksters who use it to pump each other’s products is a big strike against that platform for me too.
> If there is a scammer like an inventor who is doing a scheme similar to Theranos. They will have influence, and the wealth to back a BitClout currency, and once the scheme is busted the values will become zero.
You'll need to argue that busting the scam actually reduces their influence. Anna Sorokin got a 300k deal with Netflix right after getting out of prison. If she writes a book I'm sure there are some people that would be willing to buy it. Has the scam really destroyed her influence?
The OP also does not go on to make a case for WHY they think this is a scam. A sales person not answering your question does not make the company scammy.
Isn’t creating profiles that are not real deceptive? Your details, pictures are used to create a profile. This is one aspect that comes to my mind being deceptive.
I just went on the site. The 'top' profiles include usernames like `elonmusk`, `loganpaul` and `arianagrande`, next to an icon saying they're "waiting to join". This sounds like a lie right? Unless there's such demand for this site that Elon Musk and Ariana Grande are waiting in a queue to get in on the BitClout action?
What a terribly written article. I know nothing of BitClout or Clubhouse.
Author claims “I don’t know how these things work.”
Then proceeds to deride them using a straw man “expert” who he paraphrases, can’t even be bothered to quote.
I’ve read more insightful commentary on truck stop bathroom walls.
Now, will somebody tell me what bitclout is, and can I have some?
Author seems to think creator coin price is tied to some magical measure of a person’s influence. It’s not. Price goes up when people buy the coin and price goes down when people sell it, that’s it.
>Creator coins are a new type of asset class that is tied to the reputation of an individual, rather than to a company or commodity. They are truly the first tool we have as a society to trade “social clout” as an asset. If people understand this, then the value of someone’s coin should be correlated to that person’s standing in society. For example, if Elon Musk succeeds in landing the first person on Mars, his coin price should theoretically go up. And if, in contrast, he makes a racial slur during a press conference, his coin price should theoretically go down.[0]
Author is kind of right if you go by what their site says.
To easier take “notes” ClubHouse you can record the screen on the iPhone, this will also capture the sound if you use the loudspeaker or AirPods. I EU you don’t have to inform that you are recording, as long as you don’t share the recording with anyone (only for you to listen to later)
First question is already not correct by the expert. Afaik the value of the USD depends on the GDP / economic output of the country. Money -exchange- can be tied to the other person accepting your value token or not.
Here are two facts about the dollar that a lot of people don't know:
1. The Federal Reserve holds assets (mainly stocks and bonds) whose value exceeds the value of all the dollars that have been issued.
2. If they anticipate that inflation will be greater than their 2% target then they sell these assets in order to push the value of the dollar back up.
So even though the dollar isn't backed 1-to-1, it's value also isn't an arbitrary social decision like some people seem to think. It's being supported by assets with real value.
Of course many of the bonds owned by the Fed are US government bonds, and so the dollars value is partially dependent on the ability of the US's government to tax wealth from its citizens.
> 1. The Federal Reserve holds assets (mainly stocks and bonds) whose value exceeds the value of all the dollars that have been issued.
This is not true at all. The Fed does not hold equity (stock) and the Fed is also not the only entity that can create money. Lots of money is created by regular banks lending out deposits. This is called fractional reserve banking and until recently was the primary mechanism for money creation.
> Lots of money is created by regular banks lending out deposits
I was only counting Federal Reserve accounts and printed money as dollars. Dollar-denominated accounts at regular banks have value because of the assets held by those banks.
Good question. Here I meant it in opposition to the 'fake' kind of value that gold and bitcoin have, where people value them purely because other people value them. Of course gold and bitcoin do have real value in the sense that the market is willing to buy them for a certain price, but the social network effects that give them value are different from how the dollar obtains its value.
Thanks for this comment, so you got money exchange (I accept your value token) , the token itself, and it has got be backed for it have to have worth. So I accept a dollar, but not a bottle cap. So the expert was wrong in that sense, that’s what I am trying to determine.
> And dollar denominated bonds as backing for the dollar are basically a short-circuit.
The difference between dollars and dollar-denominated bonds is the time delay. Suppose you issue 100 kineyCoins and give them to me, and we have a contract that I have to give them back to you in a year. Then those coins will have value to third parties, because they know that if they hold them then as the deadline approaches I will have to buy those kineyCoins back in exchange for whatever those third parties value.
> Afaik the value of the USD depends on the GDP / economic output of the country.
No. The GDP increases every time a USD transaction happens (e.g. you buy a cup of coffee with USD). And an American buying a cup of coffee definitely does not increase the value of the USD.
Ultimately, "value" is always a social construct. When currencies were backed by gold, you could say, well the currency value is its gold equivalent - but this only works because, apparently, gold has "value".
Otherwise, things have "value" because we can do things with them. Food and drink are probably the most immediate ones - we need them to survive.
Classic currencies have quite a lot of use too. They are universally-accepted, protected by governments (inflation concerns notwithstanding), tamper-protected, there are safe and easy ways to store and exchange it (bank accounts / transfers, cash, cheques), it is protected by the full might of the law against crime. In some countries more than in others of course. So it's a good universal medium of exchange, even if ultimately it is a social convention.
Crypto in general has some, but not all of the above properties. I now totally get that when you really can't trust your crony government to provide such a currency, they are a good alternative.
But ultimately all "value" is merely what someone will pay (exchange) for the thing.
Exactly why I mentioned monetary -exchange-, not backing. The value is backed by a countries GDP, which helps determine its value/worth. If I accept (exchange) a Dollar for a Euro, I know it is backed up by a certain economic output, status and its national banks. I think that’s a difference there?
It’s a bit different I think, you can’t explicitly exchange a dollar for a (tiny) fraction of US GDP. You can buy some product of it with it, but eg if US continues to grow at 2% per year, you can’t latch on to that.
By contrast, shares have this property, to some extent, because in the long run they either pay dividends, or are returned for capital. A share literally owns you a bit of the company’s economy. Give or take non voting shares, non dividend paying shares etc.
In a first approximation, what back the currency is that it's accepted to buy things that are denominated in Dollars.
But in a deeper sense, what back the currency is that it's the only currency accepted by the USA government to pay taxes and other liabilities (1).
If tomorrow, people decided they not want to use Dollars, they would still have to get Dollars in order to pay their taxes, that would grant demand for Dollars.
I kind of doubt it. Because China has the second largest GDP, and it is quite comparable to US. But Chinese Yuan is basically worthless outside of China. Almost all international trade, even when involving China, is done in USD.
So definitely there has to be some other factor apart from GDP which gives value to a currency.
But isn’t there a static exchange rate right between Yuan and USD according to economy inflation or GDP? Or proof of work for Bitcoin, so what backs bitclout?
What happened is that the platform became almost completely reliant on new customers joining to pay out the old. If you’re thinking, well that sounds a lot like a Ponzi scheme, you’d be right.
When COVID hit snd football games were cancelled, ‘investors’ withdrew their money to spend on other things and the stream of new customers died out completely. The platform collapsed snd nearly everyone lost their money.
Won’t be going near it, and the fact that Clubhouse has been so quickly completely overrun by MLM hucksters who use it to pump each other’s products is a big strike against that platform for me too.