Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en all right what’s up everybody i’m here with ethan and we want to talk about bitcloud everyone’s talking about it already we don’t talk about it because you know we don’t really care if it’s a scam we don’t care you can put your money where you want it’s a speculative bet everyone knows that um but as something that relates to money it also relates to reputation right people are putting their reputations on the line if they’re on this platform in some way uh how we’re thinking about it right as we read through the one pager as we do some of our own research what kind of what ways are we thinking about this what incentives are there long term um and we’re just here to chat about it because it’s such a such an interesting kind of viral topic and platform right now so um i guess we have the one pager up you guys can’t see it but we’re gonna walk through and comment on it so uh ethan you wanna give us a start yeah sure so i’ll say one other thing too which is that uh the reason this call came about is because steph and i seem to have uh sort of a contrarian opinion on this thing right now and i we we don’t know why like it’s kind of funny we’ve been laughing about it back and forth we’re like what are we missing here because everybody seems to be super bullish on this but i keep reading through like like steph mentioned the one pager or just looking at the numbers as well and i don’t get it so uh quick caveat like neither one of us are blockchain experts but um our full-time job is to kind of like understand businesses and markets and people and stuff like that so we’re going to talk about this from that perspective open to feedback i want people to kind of come in and explain to me what i’m not getting about this because so far this terrifies me like it’s like this is like a let me off the rocket ship kind of thing um and we’ll get into why but uh that’s a quick caveat i i don’t agree more i i have like alarms going off in my head when i and the more i read into this but i also feel like maybe we’re missing something so let us know if we are but yeah let’s jump in all right so uh the first thing for anybody who hasn’t heard of it like what is bitcloud i’m going to read the i’m going to read a sentence or two out of the very beginning of the white paper that kind of explains it but then i want to go a little bit deeper and sort of pull back the curtain on why their explanation of what the platform is might be different from what the actual sort of eventual outcome of the platform is so there’s a difference between what it’s being marketed as and like what it really is so uh from the white paper what is bitcoin bitcloud is a new type of social network that lets you speculate on people and posts with real money and it’s built from the ground up on its own custom blockchain uh so what does this basically mean what it means is that bitcloud’s created a platform where people are almost like stocks so somebody like steph or me or tim ferriss or chamath or anybody else you can think of can set up an account they can basically make that thing public and allow people to buy and sell this digital coin that’s based on their reputation and um steph i’m going to pause here for a second to see if there’s anything else that you want to add to this but there’s a couple reasons why i’m like this is there’s more to this than beats the eye to me and i i’m i’m curious i don’t think it’s quite tell us the whole story so is there anything you said something important which is it’s kind of like a stock so some people i don’t even think big clout is necessarily you know in their white paper i don’t see anything that says we are the stock market for people i think they were very clear about that but then the natural association that people have is to be like this is the stock market for people and one thing that’s really important there is it’s not right so normally when you have a stock you have actual ownership over something and that ownership is very clear about what you get right so you get x type of voting rights or you get dividends or you also get the right to know what’s happening within that company right through like public reports um and that’s not true with this so even though there are certain mechanisms where it’s like yes people have an asset that’s based on a person so it’s kind of like a stock it’s not similar in that way that it functions so that’s really important uh to call out for sure yeah that’s a great point and there’s there’s something else that like grabbed my attention when i first read this there’s three things in this first paragraph so i’m going to read the first paragraph uh from top to bottom so i think it’s two or three sentences and then i’m just going to call out a couple of things so it says bit clout is a new type of social network that lets you speculate on people and posts with real money it’s built from the ground up as its own custom blockchain its architecture is similar to bitcoin only it can support complex social network data like posts profiles follows speculation features and much more at a significantly higher throughput and scale last sentence like bitcoin bitclout is a fully open source project there’s no company behind it it’s just coins and code okay so three things that jump out at me from this which make me a little bit uh like less enthusiastic or i just i find myself questioning so first of all it says you can speculate on people and posts and that’s really interesting i don’t the speculating on people think makes sense to me because uh you know people can issue their coin and you can basically bet on whether or not you think the value of that coin is going to go up what’s unclear is what do they mean by speculating on posts i don’t know and i’m curious to learn more about that if anybody has any insight there but what’s more important to me is this thing about the speculation features in general uh right now i think a lot of the um a lot of the excitement around bitco or bitclout is related to the values of all these creators going up so people um well for anybody who doesn’t know the company basically scraped the top 15 000 twitter accounts and automatically created profiles for them um so they basically automatically issued coins for the top 15 000 creators in the world out of the gate the value of all those coins is going up right now all right and that’s exciting and i think it’s drawing a lot of attention and a lot of people who are kind of earlier making money what i think is a little bit unclear at this point is what they mean by these speculation features because uh the platform is unfinished so one thing that steph mentioned early on anybody who puts money in right now there’s no clear path to take money out that’s a feature that’s probably going to come what i find myself wondering is what other features are they going to build into speculation will it be possible to short people’s coins that’s kind of the biggest concern that i have because if it is that opens up a series of incentive problems related to uh you’re basically giving people an incentive to trash somebody else’s reputation and i think to me stephanie curious to hear your take on this but that’s like for me that’s the biggest uh drawback related to this right now is that if those speculation features include some kind of shorting functionality then there’s not just an incentive for somebody’s reputation to go up there’s also incentive for the reputation to go down yeah i think so there are issues with the platform as it exists today you mentioned one there’s no way to take your money out currently there’s also issues with you know how the platform was seated and all that was a super smart growth hack but you know parts of that were actually illegal right you like monetizing someone else’s identity without their permission but let’s just ignore those for the time being and say you know there’s problems with the platform every platform starts half-baked it may evolve but to your point what i think people haven’t really like thought far enough along with is like what what does this turn into right and of course right now it’s small it’s invite only to some extent um but as it evolves into something perhaps meaningful right in size in volume etc you’re gonna have different kind of financial instruments created and there are all these financial instruments as it relates to companies you know most people are familiar with them with public companies but what does it mean when that turns into someone’s reputation right and of course any at least in theory people uh would be opting into this as they joined the platform but i don’t think people really thought about what it means to have people betting on your reputation right to your point like someone shorting your reputation someone actually creating things to manipulate the world such that you look good or bad of course some of those incentives exist today but not with the same um force i guess or the same kind of perverse incentive where there’s money behind it and then you start to get into questions like okay so if i created a bitcloud coin right and i and i opted into the platform and eventually i realized well you know this isn’t working for me people are shorting my coin they’re talking they’re making up stories about me that aren’t true my own following is upset because they bought into this and my coin is going down and they no longer trust me how do i opt out that’s another thing that i you know maybe they will find a mechanism where this works but i don’t think people have thought into those aspects of the platform right when when you join twitter or when you join patreon or sub stack you have an agreement that’s very clear as to what someone’s getting and what they’re not getting and you can end that contract right when once you’ve created a coin a big clout coin a crater coin and it’s out there it’s unclear how that relationship can ever end right and if it does end if there is a hard stop at some point you know someone’s gonna be holding the bag right because all of a sudden that coin doesn’t exist and it’s just gonna be a race to trade out of it as soon as people possibly can so to your point i just don’t think um i don’t know if creators joining the platform have thought through what they’re really opting into right we had talked about this before ethan but you made a great point which is basically like someone opting into this is putting their reputation at risk in some way and the actual big clout platform has no um they’re not really putting up any risk right it’s they’re basically offloading the risk onto a creator that’s opting into sharing this with their audiences even past that if we just talk about like what someone gets if they buy into a crater coin um again some people i think a lot of people understand what it is today but it is not an isa it’s not a stock right so you’re not actually buying into um the future income or creations of that creator you are buying into their reputation which is a vague kind of amorphous thing um but that’s fine there’s a lot of amorphous things that people buy into and it doesn’t need to be necessarily like a physical good but as you’re buying into this one of the things that you mentioned before ethan is this idea that um you know you may also be able to buy or buy and sell trade uh posts and things like that i actually think that what they’re getting at there is for example if someone owns a chemoth coin maybe chamoth opens up the door for anyone who owns this coin to be able to dm him or to access his his special newsletter or something like that i think there’s merit to that but what doesn’t bake out for me there is as soon as you start to incorporate those things i think it actually undermines this very amorphous thing that is reputation because we can all kind of vaguely say we think chamas you know his market cap at least on big club today is let’s see i think it’s like 40 something million dollars and you know you can be like okay that sounds right like he’s he’s important he he’s well known um oh sorry it’s 14 million dollars currently um but that’s fine and you can buy into that but as soon as you start to be like hmm um he’s offering dms for example as as kind of something that rewards his his coin owners the math doesn’t bake out right and i think it actually again undermines the concept where all of a sudden you’re like okay she wants a busy guy maybe he can he can kind of be willing to dm five people a day at the current market cap you’re looking at like a single dm being worth like ten thousand dollars right and then all of a sudden i think people owning it are like okay like this is not worth the money right so i think you either have to keep it as this amorphous thing that is reputation or it basically becomes like a patreon or a sub stack where it’s very clear like value for value and as soon as you start blending the two i think you actually just confuse people and undermine the original concept for sure this is one of the things that i am also a little bit confused on and so look we could talk about it through the perspective of of an example so sean curry who’s am i saying his last name right is it pure i think it’s curry i’m not sure john the co-host of the my first million podcast really successful guy he’s put a lot of effort into building his reputation and you two were having an exchange on twitter yesterday which is really interesting so far sean’s pretty bullish on this thing and um i think i understand his his take he has a couple of uh points that he made and he says something along the lines of like okay well here’s why this is cool it’s because as a creator i get to monetize my reputation building so it’s not just it’s i’m not just monetizing at the end it’s like if i’m becoming more and more popular my personal value is growing along the way and i i think if i had to guess why people are bullish on this now i think a lot of them are kind of thinking the same thing it’s this appears to be a win for creators because you’re no longer building your reputation for free somehow monetizing that what confuses me though or or what i would push back on is is the idea that um there’s two things to your point a lot of the features that are mentioned in this white paper are things that actually already exist and point number two is in my opinion this platform increases your risk and exposure as a creator so i think it actually like i don’t think the value it creates is worth the risk to your reputation especially given that there are other ways to capture this this value elsewhere so i’ll give you a quick example i’m just going to run through it um continuing through the white paper what the authors have said is like okay what are creator coins useful for there’s a few things one they say the stakeholder meeting so you could like you said uh you could basically meet directly with people who hold your coin okay that’s a cool idea uh a new way to prioritize messages so you could rather than having like this huge inbox that’s just overflowing with people you could say just show me the messages from people who like own 10 or more of my coins or something like that you can prioritize based on ownership that’s interesting sponsored posts premium content paid likes okay i get it these are all legitimate ideas but here’s the thing you can already do all this on other platforms right like i already have a way to do a stakeholder meeting through something like patreon to your point or sponsored posts so it says right here creators have an inbox where anyone can bid to have them repost a particular post so if you want kim kardashian to retweet your fashion brand you submit an entry to her inbox and if she retweets it she keeps your money great but that’s already happening like that already happens they’ve streamlined it a little bit here but here’s the big question they’ve at what cost have they streamlined it the cost is the whole world can now gamble on your reputation and i don’t know that long-term creators are going to see the extra value in that when they could just be doing this you know through other avenues last thing i’ll say about this too the last thing they say one of the features is money likes so likes can be reimagined as purchases of the creator’s coin so it costs money to like something i get that like technically speaking that’s a feature that could be implemented but i i think my personal opinion that i think people are overestimating followers willingness to pay to like content like there’s a reason facebook and twitter are free it’s not that they haven’t thought of monetizing those like buttons it’s that i i just sincerely don’t think most followers would do that so legitimate uses for this and i can see why people are excited about it but i have to question long term whether or not the audience engagement is there and and whether creators will really find value in this given the trade-offs uh and the risk that you face just to comment on that so there to your point a lot of these features exist in other places and people could argue oh well as you kind of aggregate them into one platform that’s really interesting but i actually to what i was saying earlier i think that actually undermines aspects of it right so if you’re just trading on reputation and you don’t have any sort direct relationship of like i give you x and you pay y then again this amorphous thing i don’t i don’t personally want to participate because we’ve talked about some of the like negative long-term consequences of people actually betting on your reputation but as soon as you start to introduce stuff that’s more like something like sub stack or patreon where people again it’s like a trade of a very clear value um the economics no longer makes sense because of the bonding curve that exists within bitcloud right so there’s only going to be a certain number of people if people aren’t familiar within bitcloud every time additional bitcloud is purchased it’s done at an at a higher price right and there’s going to be uh just a limit to which people are going to be willing to spend on your newsletter right or like to get a dm from you right and so it just like that actual relationship may sound interesting at first because you’re like it you incorporate scarcity and you actually reward early early people who buy into you but it starts to degrade really really quickly um for something like this right so i don’t think people have thought about that and then the other part is again i think big cloud has some really interesting ideas and if you were to take it and adjust it in certain ways and they’ll talk about this it may make sense but the part that i think people are missing is like you have marketplaces for certain things like companies because of course companies die but companies tend to last for quite some time and even within like as a creator myself i can create something like a book that will outlast me and can actually have a shelf life for a very long time if you look at history in you know any sort of sense people’s reputations are fragile and um short-lived quite frankly and and that’s without these kind of extended incentives to actually manipulate that right and so it’s very rare even top celebrities you know maybe their shelf life is is a couple decades but most of them it’s you know a couple years max and then creators themselves again like you think about who your favorite creator is today it’s probably not the same creator as a year ago or three years ago and so betting on people people’s reputations is a little maybe silly is not the right word but i think of it as like betting on a stock that you know will almost certainly go to zero within the next couple years right yeah totally i think this is a really important point that isn’t for whatever reason isn’t being discussed widely enough like let’s let’s assume for a second that eventually there’s a there’s the ability to short these coins right now i don’t think it’s possible uh and it may be that the platform doesn’t intend to build that ability at all but even if the platform doesn’t people like if if there is incentive to create a monetary instrument like that someone will create it right yeah i agree with you there so if we assume for a second that that is the case then let’s look at like statistically what’s the smartest play for an investor what’s more likely that somebody’s reputation is going to continue to go up forever or that they will eventually be canceled especially in today’s yeah i mean it’s it’s i feel like it’s in inevitable for large people with large followings to eventually be cancelled exactly and which means that under you know if we assume that uh some sort of shorting instrument becomes possible then the smart money in my opinion is to bet against everybody like the smart money is on is actually against most reputations these days so uh it’s kind of like when you think about it so the stock market over time is is expected to continuously go up right if you’re talking about like an index like the s p um and that’s why in general you you want to bet on stocks and not against them but to your point this is almost like the alternative right like the opposite where the the trend line of what most people not all people will tend to go to zero right um in terms of their reputation so to your point it’s like actually betting on this maybe the same way that getting or shorting a stock can provide you some short-term return um and you can be speculative and when in the long term if you’re betting on these things you’re probably gonna lose right and if you look at like just the way that options work the the potential upside on shorting could be significantly higher than even owning your stock in the first place and i just think this becomes much more complicated when you introduce large financial incentives for tanking somebody’s reputation so that aside i want to dig into something that you also mentioned uh which is the like the actual math on how these coins values change over time because here’s so i mentioned before one thing that i understand is the the enthusiasm that this could somehow fund a creator’s career right because you’re being in this space i know how hard it is to make money from an audience and uh also just like really care about creators want to see them succeed so i get i get the enthusiasm for sure um for anybody creating like i’m sorry continuing through the white paper one of the things that they talk about is the creator coin supply curve so the value of these coins doesn’t actually change based on perceived value of the creator it’s not a direct correlation right the value of the coins goes up and down based on the supply alone when somebody buys your coin new coins are minted and the price of the coins goes up and when they sell your coins those coins are destroyed the price of the coins goes down uh what that means is that there’s a very predictable price for uh the coin depending on how much has been minted you can literally tell me what somebody’s market cap is today and i can tell you exactly how many coins are in circulation for them it has it has which means two things one this isn’t really based on reputation it’s based on i guess supply um and two it means that you can actually do some math related to how many of these coins you have to sell in order to make a certain amount of money so i want to talk about two situations in particular one is uh what it takes to make about a hundred grand on this as a creator now there are different ways to do this uh there are some things that are interesting about this platform so one is that as a creator you have the ability to set a percentage of the supply that you automatically get and what happens then is like you can set it i think it’s you can set it at anything but they suggest 10 what means what that means is of all the coins that are purchased 10 percent go straight to you so if somebody comes and buys 100 coins you automatically get 10 of them and uh that’s one way to do this the other way is to set it to zero zero percent and then buy a bunch of your own coin yourself uh so that just that your own value in your holdings goes up as other people buy two important things or one important thing to know about this is that and for whatever reason this isn’t widely discussed creators they they only get uh paid on net coin sales what that means is that if i come and buy a hundred coins and then sell 100 coins you actually don’t get any if you have your even you know if you have your creator percentage set to anything right uh there has to be a net purchase of your coins in order for you to be paid what’s unclear inside the white paper is whether or not that changes or well two things it’s unclear what time frame they’re calculating that net purchase based on right so this is maybe it’s hourly maybe it’s daily maybe it’s monthly maybe it’s yearly i don’t know it’s it’s not stated but what that means is like you know let’s say it’s let’s say it’s daily there could be tons of trade volume on you across the course of a day and you don’t benefit at all if it’s if it’s net zero if it’s monthly or longer then again you’re not really benefiting from this as a creator if if it ends up being net zero so there needs to be some clarity around how quickly that percentage is actually calculated for the creator in order for me to believe that this is a benefit to creators themselves rather than just the people behind the platform here’s the thing that’s uh i think is interesting so if you let’s say you set your percentage to ten percent all right based on the economics of the coin if you want to make a hundred thousand dollars then that means you have to have 132 coins sold uh at that point your coin would be worth about seven thousand six hundred dollars and uh people would have pumped about 000 into your stock as a as a creator so here are a couple of things that i think are interesting i agree that that is exciting on the surface right that you could make a hundred grand from people speculating on that but i think there’s a question here which is if you can get people to spend 339 000 on you do are you capitalizing at the highest possible rate and is there a better way for you to capture more of that directly from your supporters than to allow them without risking your reputation yeah then to allow them to bet on you exactly that’s what i’m thinking of right now yeah i think a couple thoughts there is just you’re right that right now in in being able to reap the rewards of being a creator on the platform you need to basically you need to push someone to buy your coin which is what their incredible growth hack right you’ve got to give them kudos such a great growth hack of preceding the platform although partially illegal what they did we should say um partially legal but incredible growth hack but that is basically what’s happening right that’s what’s pushing people to the platform but just remember there’s these incentive structures where as a creator think about like as a creator today ask yourself the question like would i shall would i sell my uh supporters a shitty product right and some creators are cool with that and there’s mlm schemes and all that stuff but most creators would be like no i care about how my audience views me because i have a long-term relationship with them that i hope to keep right and as soon as you start pumping them into this reputation scheme and you no longer have control right because i have control when i say hey steph smith audience i want to sell a book and i and i’ve created it and i understand what’s in it and i think it’s valuable right as soon as you start trading on this reputation mechanism and especially if you’re the one pushing people to actually buy into this then if it crashes which again we talked about reputation life cycles are short so it’s not guaranteed but it’s i would say likely then you have in some way probably sold your audience to this what i would call potentially a shitty product right people may view this differently but that’s kind of how i’m thinking about it as a creator where i want to only push my audience to buy things or to monetize them in some way but i’m proud of what they’re getting from it right and of course people can say speculators can speculate whatever right but there is there is something really important here that um it’s different if big clout is pushing people to buy crater coins versus if they’re now kind of offloading that task which is again their genius growth hack onto other people to do this for them right um and i don’t think or maybe they are and they’re okay with it but i what i would just encourage if you’re a creator listening to this is like if if you’re creating coin and pumping it to your audience that is what you are doing um you may think it’s actually a good investment and if they’re early they can make money off okay cool but just know that you are selling something to your audience right and that’s why where i think this does differentiate between something like a twitter right and something where there’s actual financial incentives for sure and and the interesting to me like the interesting thing about what you’re saying is that this isn’t just your audience these are your biggest fans these are the people who are literally willing to put their money on your reputation the ones you you have to take care of the most right so it’s it’s this very complicated scenario where the people who you’re supposed to protect the most are the ones who stand to lose the most if an outside force takes an interest in your stock price and this is not there’s not just not a lot you can do to control it so it’s a very complicated situation now let’s talk about this super quickly can you give the analogy of the icos because that’s basically what it is because just when it’s positioned this thing has been positioned so many different ways that’s partially because it’s still kind of half baked and things are being worked out and and it may evolve into other things but at least as to like what it is today i thought what you said about it was so spot-on in terms of what this really is at least so far yeah sure so on paper and again i i think one of the reasons that bitclout has been so successful is because they are master marketers like i don’t approve of it but it’s kind of like when your kid gets in trouble and you’re like i don’t have a kid but like you gotta know when kids get involved without them right yeah yeah you’re like oh you’re in so much trouble but i get it as well like nice job buddy you know yeah i don’t so i don’t i don’t approve of what they did but they but it’s a smart growth hack the other thing is that they’re positioning this product in a very smart way where the reality of what it is has been abstracted away so what this what this is on paper is they’ve basically done 15 000 icos without the permission of the people who are backing those coins right by scraping twitter and creating an account for the top 15 000 people they’ve created they’ve done 15 000 icos and now they’re basically just trying to get people to buy into those icos and i think anybody who’s thinking of getting into this either as a creator or an investor which should ask themselves you know one as a creator would i create an ico for myself if the answer is no you know think twice about just because someone did it for you doesn’t mean you know all of a sudden it’s a good idea yeah and then similarly like as a as a backer would i buy so-and-so’s ico it starts to kind of break down because like when you think about this is betting on somebody’s reputation that’s one thing you’re like oh okay well you know somebody like kim kardashian or tim ferriss or steph smith these are all people that i think are doing interesting work and are probably going to become more popular on this platform so if i’m early i should buy in but you have to ask yourself the real question which is like if you know if i issued an ico tomorrow would you buy it probably not but what the platform’s done is aggregate thousands of icos and make it extremely easy to issue a new one which could be useful like there’s there’s potential there but let’s not let’s not mince words about what it is these are just icos that’s literally all they are so um i think that’s an interesting way of looking at it one other thing that’s really important related to what i was talking about earlier is like how you actually capture value from this as a creator so in the example that i gave um you know if you wanted to say build a hundred thousand dollars in value you’d have to have roughly 132 of your coins sold at that rate again the the the value of each coin would be about 7 600 bucks now what happens when you want to take your money out so he and again this is an example that sean gave and i think it’s a good one this is like he said um and i’m paraphrasing let’s say i want to take a year off and just work on you know creating or take some time off something like that i can cash out of my ico or my coin and uh go do that right okay so if you’ve gotten yourself to the point we have a hundred thousand dollars in this in value in order to get any money from that you now have to sell you just sell your coins if your coin is trading at seven seven thousand six hundred bucks which it will be that’s a concrete number you can’t change it um oh actually no i’m sorry i’m wrong these figures are based on the current cost of bit clout so if bitcloud goes up your coin could be trading it considerably more but current cost um you would have to sell a hundred thousand dollars worth of your coin at seven thousand bucks a pop you’re talking about selling around 10 or 12 coins which would be most of your holdings as a creator what the curious thing about this is is that with only 130 coins issued if you then sell 10 or 12 of them you’re destroying roughly 10 of the uh stock and the value of your ice of your coin will go down by 10 so here’s where this becomes a dangerous thing i think is if this actually takes off it’s like a legitimate way to gauge somebody’s reputation what happens when you want to pull your value out and all of a sudden the market sees your reputation go down by 10 percent maybe nothing happens maybe people buy in maybe people start looking more trying to figure out why your reputation is tanking and they start finding reasons i don’t know but it just doesn’t seem like uh it seems like something that creators should at least be thinking about right because there are better ways to make a hundred thousand dollars at least there’s other ways to make a hundred thousand dollars yeah there was a tweet in response to some of the conversation that was happening and um this guy john basically said the bonding curve encourages creators to pump and dump their own reputation i know creators who have bought up their own big clout cheap and then dumped it on later investors horrific incentive structure right so again it’s this idea we’re like sure you you can make money off of this right there there’s endless ways especially if you’re early to make money off of this but just remember that even though this seems like an easy way to make money anything where you make money there there is a cost right and in this case part of that cost is your reputation if it’s your own coin right and i’m not just talking about the like philosophical reputation but people if you pumped to buy your coin who did it and put their real money into this and you end up selling because you want to net that profit they lose money one quick question though i had is in the same way that there’s and this is like a genuine question i don’t know the answer in the same way there’s a bonding curve where the more um the more demand there is and people buying the coin the price of the coin goes up as you sell the price of the coin goes down right um yep okay and is it also that same exponential relationship where well the reason i’m asking because you said if you sell 10 of the coins wouldn’t it actually go down more than 10 in value it would go down exponentially the same way that it went up exponentially yeah so this is this is something that’s a little bit unclear i can tell you what they say in the white paper so give me one second to find this okay so it says uh buying creates coins well and while buying creates coins while pushing the price up and locking money into the profile while selling destroys coins while pushing the price down and unlocking money from the profile okay this means this means a couple of things first of all and again this is something that’s kind of unclear based on the way this is written how much value do you get to hold on to as a creator if let’s say you have your your your percentage set to 10 if people sell your coin does that money disappear from your account i think it yes no it does so that’s what i’m saying you own a certain number of coins and what i’m trying to get at is this just as quickly as a coin goes up in value from what i understand about the way this bonding curve works it goes down in value right so if you sell a coin at seven thousand the next coin you’re selling isn’t at seven thousand and if you said sell ten percent of the coins that ten percent is actually going to reduce the price of coins by more than ten percent i don’t i can’t do the math on that in my head but it’s going to be a lot more than ten percent you’re yeah you’re absolutely right so i’ve got i’ve got the chart here and the uh just to give you the idea so if you’re at 132 coins which is about like based on today’s prices where you need to be to make 100 grand as a creator your coin would be selling for 7 600 if you then sell 13 of those in order to capture your money right that would bring you down to 119 coins and it would be going for 6 hundred so that’s a difference of fourteen hundred bucks which is about twenty percent right exactly yeah so i mean one of the things that this kind of makes me think of is just sure it’s great to be early to a platform this is not investment advice obviously if people want to speculate go speculate i don’t have a problem with that it’s more so just be aware of i guess the difference between is this platform providing value to people and therefore they’re engaging or is it set up in a way that where they’ve just done some excellent growth hacks they have excellent kind of incentive structures to get people to want to participate um like which one of those is happening and really i mean it may be some combination of the two but just remember like right now the the door is closed you can’t exit so the price is only going to go up right now right people know this but that’s something really important to keep in mind in addition you have all these people who they’ve incentivized by preceding their accounts who are now sharing it with the platform but it’s early days right so you don’t have the the kind of negative stories that i think will come right everyone right now is making money everyone right now um has people who are excited and they’re cr their their audience is excited because they’ve told them about this thing and more people are rushing in and you know at least for now they’re making money and again i think there’s totally an argument to the fact that you can make money off of this platform today and there’s there’s a reason to speculate on it potentially but just keep in mind that the structure that it is today is is just it’s only going to go up today so that’s why people are excited that’s why people are telling other people about it of course these short the short term is very clear to me in terms of what will happen but really what we’ve been talking about is like you know what happens when those stories start coming coming out and some creator you know just told their their audience to buy this thing and they’re left holding the bag how does that creator look right how does it look once a creator decides to exit the platform we finally see what that looks like as an example we were talking about this earlier but i was actually one of the people that was not part of the original 15k but someone decided so outside of the 15k you can just create an account and someone i guess impersonated me right they took my stepsmith io handle they put my picture in the same bio for my twitter um and i was like how can this be and it’s because anyone can just create an account today so that’s something that they’ll probably fix but i emailed them and you know to their credit big clout actually took it down i will say they took it down without verifying who the hell i was right so so someone could have just done that to another person’s account as well but there was not much but thousands of dollars worth of big cloud at least in theory within this this coin what happened to it right we haven’t even seen what happens to um these systems because we were only in this like exciting growth stage of like because it’s literally geared where it can only grow right there’s no backdoor there’s there’s nothing that can happen today that would be negative but as soon as those things start to happen i just i i guess we’re just encouraging people to think past this early growth stage and think about where does this platform actually extend to because it’s not as simple as as like what it seems to be today for sure yeah i think there’s a very um lopsided view of what this actually is in in large part because of what you’re talking the gearing and also in in small part because of the the network effects of the way it was launched like a lot of the people who are on this platform know each other they’re all friends and the only people who have access right now are like friends and super fans right so it’s all just kind of a party everyone’s having a lot of fun with it what happens everyone’s happy when they’re making money until they aren’t right yeah exactly and the other interesting thing is that this is okay it’s worth it’s worth discussing this by the way we don’t want to turn this into like a hate fest so after totally we want to get into some of the the legitimate uses and like where we what we would need to see in order to be more bullish on this um but it’s worth pointing out too to anybody who’s a creator this is not this is not geared towards your happiness like we there’s a so there’s already an example of um of this playing out once once you open yourself up to be better on by the world the only incentive is for people to make money they they they may like some may buy your coin in order to support you to show support uh but major players and i guess i’ll say that’s certainly not the incentive for everyone the major incentive is to make money regardless of whether or not you are happy and so we saw kind of a funny version of this play out recently where ryan beagleman was on the um the my first million podcast ryan’s a friend of the show he’s a really interesting guy he’s built some successful media companies and he was early to bit clout and so he was the one who was kind of brought on as like one of the one of the experts on this to talk about it and while he was on there like so ryan and sean are bullish sam was a little late to the party and he was kind he was asking questions and he wasn’t really sold on it um and ryan was kind of trying to stir the pot a little bit like he was he was trying to get sam to uh take on austin from the uh morning brew and see who could get their value to be higher again just friendly competition ryan’s friends with both sam and austin and he’s invested in both those guys so not a big deal but the question is like first of all sam said something which was small but i think important which is like he just said i don’t want to do that he’s like i’ve made my money man like i don’t want to take on this competition now and like like you know he’s got no reason to compete with austin over reputation but everybody who invests in those stocks has incentive for them to do that right so in this case it was a it was like an example of friends just kind of bantering but what happens all of a sudden when larger money moves in and and has the exact same incentives they they don’t they are not set up to care about your happiness the same way that your friends are and right now the whole platform is mostly friends uh and fans so i think that’s extremely lopsided and is creating a different image of this thing than will ultimately play out to be um just gonna quickly add on this idea that like right now the platform is benefiting from people with large audiences and to your point these people have money right if anything the thing that they um want to retain is their reputation and how they’re viewed in the world right because they already have enough to last them their lifetime um and i think what we’re going to see quite frankly is that as some of the negative aspects of this platform potentially emerge these people are going to be like i don’t i don’t need this right like i’ve got what i need and why am i putting my reputation on the line where people can or have these incentives to um or additional incentives i should say because there are incentives already on certain other platforms but additional more concrete incentives to take someone down i just or manipulate their reputation both positively or negatively they’re just like i don’t i don’t need this right and these people already pay tons of money to be seen positively in in different ways whether it’s like buying art or wearing certain things or being on certain shows or hanging around with peop certain people i think they’re just gonna be like this doesn’t make sense for me and that is big cloud’s ability to um at least today grow and i think that’s actually going to reverse at some point when people start to say i don’t want this anymore for sure it’s like their their genius is also their downfall in that they they they conscripted 15 000 of the most influential people in the world in the beginning it’s like you you could not have a better marketing team out there right but you also couldn’t have a worse enemy and as soon as as if like you said if hypothetically people find that this just isn’t worth the upside then i think they’re going to start encouraging their audiences to take to get off the platform and that could spell at the end for this it’s possible that that’s all it needs like like you and i mentioned there are some legitimate use cases for this and maybe all it needs is a little bit of time to develop the more legitimate sides and you know in five years from now like we won’t be talking about big clout as a betting platform but the underlying infrastructure which is more important we’ll still be around if that’s the case great but i think it’s a different conversation than whether or not this really is the future of reputation management and by the way i mean to your point managing your reputation is hard enough without like incentives for other people to manipulate it so i don’t i don’t i just don’t see why people who can make you know significantly more money on their own will continue to do this but i could be wrong i mean here’s the other thing we’re ready to be wrong here um and and this is certainly not like a black or white this is absolutely gonna happen it’s more so us being like have people thought of this right and maybe they have and maybe they’re just like we’re cool with this or or i actually think that’s probably unlikely to happen or whatever but i do think there’s a portion of people who haven’t thought through like what incentives exist or will exist given this structure and how will that evolve over time i just really think to your point like their excellent marketing is also just not going to work over time right and it’s actually going to reverse in some way where the people who grew the platform are just going to be they’re so important or i shouldn’t say important so wealthy and and have reputations already they’re gonna say i don’t want this i don’t i don’t want to risk this or add these additional incentives when i don’t need so let me ask you a question then because uh i think it’s important to be or we both think it’s important to be balanced here we we’ve talked about this a lot we’re like how are we going to make this not just like a hate fest on bitcloud because we have some legitimate ideas here okay so i have a question which is what would you need to see in order to believe the opposite like what would you need to see in order to reverse your current opinion on the platform and think that it’s actually a benefit long term yeah it’s a great question and totally agree with you if people are listening i i think in most cases you want excuse me a platform to succeed right any sort of innovation tends to be good i just think if you think about it like a spectrum where anything that you create is gonna at least at first be half baked but on one side of the spectrum you’re talking about like putting up like a gif online which is just for fun who cares if it’s half big it’s not hurting anyone and then maybe on the other end you’ve got like a vaccine or something like that we’re just like this cannot be half baked right if you’re injecting this into someone this matters do not mess it up and then this isn’t somewhere in between right and the reason that i think it skews more towards um getting this right is because people’s reputations are all they have right i mean of course you have assets and stuff but um this is the only thing that will carry with me from the day i’m born until the day i die is my reputation everything else comes and goes relationships people assets um and that matters my reputation matters in terms of my ability to build an audience to be wealthy to be happy right all of us you know whether you want to deny it or not like the way that people perceive us matters to some extent and then on top of that you’re laying on not just reputation but money right so anything that relates to people’s finances and investing also needs to be a little less half-faked right a little more baked so to your i think there are ways that if bitcloud could evolve and be less half-baked in certain areas there’s something here although i don’t think it looks quite like bitcoin does today so some of the things are that i think this idea of trading on people’s reputations if you’re gonna do it it needs to be um well it needs to be regulated in some way and i’m not talking about like the sec or something like that but it needs to be opt-in right fully opt-in right now they’re they’re seating of 15 000 people incredible growth hack borderline or maybe fully illegal right um so that needs to be it can only be opt-in and you should need to be able to verify that this person is the person that they are and then on top of that there needs to be very clear outlines of what happens if this person no longer wants to participate right because i do think that’s a very very likely scenario for some people at least the second is if you you could keep it as this vague amorphous thing like reputation but i think that starts to falter because again it i think it it’s hard to understand what that is and maybe that’s okay but what i do think makes sense is right now they have this kind of amorphous like is it reputation is it your betting on posts can you can you know creators can make like pick and choose what they get well if that’s the case and the marketplace itself should be very clear about what people are getting with a certain coin right today it’s nothing but if you’re gonna create it then maybe certain creators have more of an isa maybe certain creators do have the ability to like you know have one-to-one conversations with their audience but then you start to get more into like again things that exist like a patreon or a sub stack just that happen to be built on the blockchain um so that’s important just clear terms that doesn’t exist today and i think it should and then the third is just transparent marketing right and so i think most people have caught on to this idea at this point bitcloud is not or i should say crater coins are not really equivalent to a stock but that is important because if people are buying in and thinking that they’re getting anything in return for buying into this creator other than just speculating on their reputation then i don’t think that’s right and again in certain circumstances you saw um certain things like this happen at the beginning of twitter right um where they appreciated platforms or people were pretending to be other people but again when you’re talking about people’s reputations and then on top of that people’s finances i just think it it’s got to be more clear right you can’t have people saying this is a stock market for creators when it’s when that’s confusing right and misleading for people in understanding what they’re actually buying for sure i totally agree if you were if you were to ask me like what would it take for me to be pro bitcloud fully agree it’s gotta be opt-in absolutely has to be opt-in if you want to participate in this by all means i would never stop somebody it seems crazy but like hey you do you you know if this if this seems like a fun way or exactly that’s fine but it’s got to be opt-in and it’s got to be controlled like right everybody has like everybody if you are making your money online or if you have an online presence at all which is you know most of the world at this point you now have to protect against this because it’s not opt-in it is opt-out can we just talk about that real quick before you go on with my case in that scenario when i tweeted about you know someone impersonating me or whatever you want to call it um certain people were saying you know steph like you should just create your own big clout so that you just let your audience know hey this is me not this one i don’t want to do that like i shouldn’t have to and again if people want to participate go participate like this is not a conversation about like what people should or shouldn’t do but if i personally as a creator don’t want to participate my course of action shouldn’t just be okay go you have to participate to block other people from impersonating you right for sure i i was thinking about this yesterday i actually think there’s a big opportunity here for some crypto law firm to get involved because at this point and again i’m i’m nobody i like i’m just i have a tiny tiny audience just kind of starting down this trail but i wouldn’t want to have to think about this and i think there’s an opportunity where law firms or talent agencies could basically i don’t know if it would be an issue a token or what but charge to to do reputation management on this and basically police these platforms to make sure that your your identity is not being used on them i think there’s a huge opportunity there even if uh you know big clout eventually pivots unfortunately i think this is the kind of genie that can’t just be put back into the bottle there are whole blockchain is open source meaning even if they change it it wouldn’t take much for somebody else to spin up something similar so we now live in a world where it’s possible to spin up a betting platform based on people’s appear like appearance and reputation you can’t just undo that so there is some kind of opportunity here for law firms to get involved uh which i thought i’d call out and then to your point like this shouldn’t be something that people have to opt into in order to protect themselves from so that would be one major thing opt-in i like your idea of transparency and then related to this i think this rolls up into transparency but the founders have got to have some skin in the game so like this here’s the thing that’s one of the things that’s crazy to me this platform was built by a pseudonymous founder so you know people say that they know the person behind it maybe they do maybe they don’t but at the end of the day the person who built this has no potential downside for their own on this platform and like one of the things that’s kind of funny i told you about this yesterday stuff but i’ll just tell everybody listening like people are already tweeting there’s this tweet from um uh michael arrington who is the founder techcrunch he basically said you know psa bitcloud is not there’s a there’s a twitter account that’s now trolling bitcloud so there’s a twitter account that’s not associated with the company that’s insinuating that they’re associated with the company and is about to make money off of like issuing coins and stuff and early users of big cloud are trying to kind of protect against this and getting a dose of you know their own medicine i don’t know if arlington arrington is is involved as an investor in bitcloud but it was just funny to me to hear like bitclout is now facing a situation where a pseudonymous user is insinuating that they are like involved in their company and they’re making money off of it it’s like yeah it sucks it’s a terrible way launch a business so yeah i totally agree i mean here’s the thing i feel like people listening and even i created a document where i walked through some some of these concepts and some people you know or at least one person commented something along the lines of like the fact that i don’t understand crypto or the blockchain or whatever one i think you know we may not be experts but we’ve done a little bit of diligence to understand it at least at a base level but separate from that this isn’t even just a conversation about crypto right like crypto obviously or the blockchain rather underlies this platform and of course there are elements that are very similar to other financial assets but like i can say candidly like i’m invested in in cryptocurrency and i i actually buy into aspects of that being the future but not all crypto just like not all parts of any innovation are not good and in this case when you actually are when crypto is decentralized right um and that makes sense when you’re talking about some some entity just like money right but when you are talking about people’s reputations that should not be decentralized because i am centralized i am a person that that is impacted by this platform and therefore as a person if i want to take myself off the platform or to take legal action or to do there are reasons that certain things should be decentralized and certain things should be centralized to some extent right and in this case when you are actually dealing with people’s when you may even be breaking some laws by preceding a platform um you have to be responsible right there this is always this fine line between centralization decentralization or something being um you know anonymous or not is that anonymity has a lot of uh good behind it in certain cases but the kind of counter to that is always like okay well there where does the accountability lie if something is anonymous and as soon as you go into this again this realm where you’re dealing with other people’s lives that are not anonymous there’s got to be an entity that is responsible for that and so i agree that again like i just i something that maybe bothers me is just people look at crypto or anything on a blockchain as very similar and that the mechanisms should always apply and that’s where i disagree um and and i think that in this case that there should be like you said something that people can look to to be responsible the same way that twitter is responsible for fake accounts the same way that all these other platforms are responsible for the things happening on their platform this should also be true totally agree so tell me this long term what do what do you think the outcome is here i have no idea i think we should quickly comment on the fact that if people don’t know already there is a lot of money going into big cloud and not just from the from the like uh retail investor perspective but from um specific large vc funds so sequoia um i should actually look this up but i know sequoyah and dreesen i think chamoth has publicly said that he has invested and i think several other investment firms but something to keep in mind here before we get into like what we think is the future is that just because you see someone betting on this especially a venture capital firm if you understand the way venture capital works is they make tons of bets in the hopes that something becomes huge right and most people already know this but just because venture capital is investing in this that just means that they think that there is a a chance that this thing can become big and they’re okay if this thing falters and they actually just like every other bet they make not specific to bit clout they expect it to fail actually right um they just expect that one of the many investments that they make the long shot happens um so that’s something important to keep in mind in times of how i view this is i think you know they’re gonna they’re gonna add certain features that people are talking about a lot right now they’re gonna add a backdoor probably especially if they’re backed by these these funds um they’re going to probably improve on some of their verification processes and stuff like that in terms of where i see it long term though i’m not sure because i personally do think that people are going to realize that betting on people’s reputations doesn’t make sense so i think what you’re ultimately going to see i think is the evolution of this into very similar to one of the platforms that exists today if they really focus on the social aspect it’ll end up being a twitter clone if they really focus on this like transfer of value between creators and in their their audience it’s gonna be more like a sub stack or patreon if they focus more on this what i actually think is a more interesting concept is this idea of being able to um to sell part of your future earnings and really like incentivize your audience behind you that’s more like an isa right and you see like if you’ve heard of like what’s it called i think it’s called big league advance i think they talked about in my first million that’s where you know this is already happening in other industries this is for for athletes where they basically give away part of their future earnings to a company that that’s on them early on so this stuff already exists but really what i think is that you’re going to see bitcloud pivot in some way after they make their initial feature adjustments and it’s going to look like something that already exists today and it may succeed and and in that case like you mentioned earlier that’s a different discussion right so we’re not necessarily saying big clout forever will be terrible um or even that it’s terrible today but the long-term view of its current trajectory has some very serious questions that’s a great way of putting it yeah and to piggyback on something you mentioned with the investment i think there’s um two things worth calling out for anybody who hasn’t looked closely at this yet and again i i’ll fully admit i may be misinterpreting things here so if i’m doing the math wrong or something like shout us out and like we’re i would i would also give one more disclaimer which is like we’re both in media i am more than willing to bring on the founder of this and let them speak their full uh piece if they want right somebody’s willing to come forward and discuss some of these potential questions by all means i’m not this is not meant to be a takedown this is just some of the things that are like occurring to me and if there’s legitimate plans in place to curb them then we want to hear about it so that’s the case in in terms of the initial investment there are some things that are worth calling out so as you mentioned vcs are getting into this like one question that steph and i both asked many times is what are we missing right there’s so many smart people who are investing in there’s no way they haven’t thought of these potential downsides there’s just no way okay so one thing to know obviously what you said there a lot of these people are just taking a lot of bets also financially speaking if you look at the way the value of bitcloud scales you’d kind of have to be insane as a vc not to get involved in this so here’s the deal if you read the the one pager the the value of the bitcloud currency the the base currency on which this entire model is built it doubles with every million coins that are sold um if you do the math again i might be doing this wrong but according to this tracker that like tracks the size of the website right now there’s about 172 million dollars worth of uh money that’s tied up in creator accounts okay so that means it’s 172 million us dollars that people have so far actually used to buy creator coins if you divide that the current cost of bitcoin is 149 bucks so if that 172 represents all of the money that’s currently on the platform that means there’s about a million of these big coins that has been created 1.1 million um so long story short there’s a million coins i couldn’t even be wrong maybe maybe that’s only 50 of the value let’s say i’m 50 wrong and there’s two million coins the value of this coin goes up it doubles every time another million coins is sold and the company says in their white paper that they’re expecting about 10 to 19 million coins to be created first of all it’s a pretty big gap but let’s say it just goes to 10 right if you do if you run the math out on this i feel like i’m talking about a lot of numbers here but if if it goes up to 10 million coins and there’s currently say 2 million in existence that means there’s going to be seven more doublings of the value of a bit clout coin which could be huge potential upside for anybody who invested early money your money will literally double seven times i hate to say that because it sounds like it’s not investment advice all right okay now let’s look at why the vc firms may have gotten involved right maybe they really believe in this but if you do the math out there were two million coins that were set aside uh pre-pre-launched for the founders and the investors which uh is a potential value of 534 billion dollars by the time 10 million of these coins have been issued you know what stuff maybe i should just share my screen real fast talk do you think i should share my screen talk through this real quick or no is this making no i think it made sense i think the main takeaway is the idea that so typically when you get into something early especially as an investor you see the upside of that platform in terms of like how many people like the revenue that it’s doing and in here just in the way that the the bitcoin is structured it’s like you because of the scarcity getting in early matters even more right and that’s why you see people rushing to it not just investors but this idea of if i get an early not only is this like i’m not calling it a ponzi scheme but you know in a typical ponzi scheme you benefit from someone else under you doing what you’re doing and then selling it to more people this is like that or has similar mechanisms where not only do you benefit from other people you know who come after you but because of this the way that the coin is structured and how it doubles um and and similar with crater coins your upside is even more lucrative right and that’s what i think you’re getting at is this idea where it’s not even judging anyone for doing this but just as you get into anything ask the question why is someone else sharing this right is it because like if i share a link to an article it’s probably because i read the article and was like this is so great i think i want you to share in the value and maybe there’s an element of that where someone is saying this is so great i invested early i also want you to invest early to share in this upside but there’s an element to this where if i share an article with you there’s no upside for me other than maybe like feeling good about myself right and this there’s very clear upside of someone who got in early whether it’s an investor or someone who just happened to create their own coin or someone who happened to invest in another coin like we talked about ryan beagleman investing in sam in in austin so that’s really important just always ask yourself what are what are the incentives of someone sharing this and here i think you know we talked about the growth hack and these incentives and this platform in the way that they like they set this up to grow they literally they designed it for growth so it was so intelligent but then it does make me question you know typically when you see a platform grow it’s because people are getting value from the platform and what it provides and in this case in the way that the incentives are structured it really does make me question um you know is it is it really just because people have been incentivized in this way it’s just something to be aware of right sure yeah yeah so these these you know two million coins were set aside in the beginning for these investors at this point right now today if they can pull that money back out based on the price of bitcoin right now that’s worth 300 million bucks if it continues to grow up to the 10 million coins that they expect to issue the uh you know the value of 2 million coins will be somewhere in the nature of 534 billion so that’s tremendous potential upside uh the other thing that comes to mind too when i think about early investors getting into this i don’t know if this is the case but it strikes me that the way they launch this is extremely dubious right so it’s possible that the investors bought in in order to protect themselves because like this is another thing that can happen right because the value of the coin scales in a certain way if you understand how the value of the coin scales you can set up a blockade against character assassination by just buying enough of your own coin to drive the prices up so that most people can’t buy it you could buy like a pretty significant chunk of your own coin if you have the resources and uh would it would just drive the price up so high that you would own the vast majority of the coins that will ever be issued for you these mega firms maybe that’s what they did who knows i don’t know if if they really believe in the idea or if they did it as like a potential protection against you know future downside that just happens to come with enormous potential upset that i i don’t judge it like when you look at the potential cash out of this i don’t judge anybody that did it because it makes perfect sense turning a few million bucks into billions and billions of dollars is literally why they exist so that makes a lot of sense but it’s worth remembering that you know saying that every major investment firm is involved in this is kind of like saying that every major influencer is involved in this the company didn’t give anybody a chance to opt out so it’s worth questioning that initial assessment as well um long term in terms of what i think is going to happen here’s what i think is going to happen uh similar to what you’re saying i i i actually don’t think this platform will disappear forever i think the people behind it and the like the incentives are too strong this is a genie that got out uh i do that we’re overvaluing uh people’s willingness to interact with creators and so i don’t i i don’t necessarily think that’s gonna be a long-term feature i think we’re also overestimating the willingness of creators to stay on the platform so here’s what i think is going to happen i think all the prices are going to continue to run up for the next couple of months while people get involved then at some point they’re going to stabilize and at the same time ostensibly the company is creating a way for people to get their money out right once two things happen i think you’re gonna start to see people migrate back off this and it’s the platform’s gonna have to pivot in order to continue to survive if people can get their money out i think it’s gonna be a mass migration off as like you said um creators are just forced to deal with the downside of this right but also once that upshot stabilizes and like this becomes more like a typical stock ticker where you’re not really increasing your holdings on a regular basis oh and you’re potentially even decreasing them i think the upside is small enough and the downside is big enough that you’re going to see people migrate back off the platform and bitcloud’s got some time to pivot between now and then they’re going to have to in order to survive but five years from now i don’t think we’re gonna be talking about a stock market for people um i i think there’s something else related to that the last thing i’ll say and this is the last sentence or the second to last sentence in the white paper is um let’s see what does it say here in the same way that you can move bitcoin from one wallet to another bitcloud makes it so that you can move your clout in the form of your followers posts creator coin balances etc anywhere as well um thus in some sense bitcloud is decentralizing social media much the same way bitcoin decentralized the financial system if anybody is involved from these major vc’s that genuinely believes in this idea i think this is probably why they did it i don’t i don’t think most rigorous thinkers look at the idea of trading on people’s reputations as like a good concept but this idea of being able to move your clout from place to place may not be great but it’s better than what we’ve got in terms of social media today character assassination all that kind of stuff this is an important feature it’s something that needs to be developed and it’s possible that this whole bit clout betting scheme is just what was needed in order to kind of get the more important thing into the world so in five years if it still exists i think that will be the form that it takes decentralized social media will be much more popular but the idea of betting on reputation like a lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime i think in terms of the financial incentives here yeah i would just i think i totally agree with that i think this idea of decentralized social media has merit i think the problem today is again there are some great ideas here and if implemented uh clearly i would say is is the important part right transparently where people know what they’re getting there’s some real merit here that just doesn’t exist today and the problem again when you’re when you’re dealing with people’s money is that today big clout has a little trouble iterating in the way that something like twitter would because twitter can just you know there’s no if they launch a feature and it doesn’t work they launch another one but there’s so much baked in money already baked into this the way that big clout runs today and it’s gonna be hard to pivot it as i was saying i do actually think there’s there’s merit to this idea where you can have your own coin and there’s benefits that people have but again it’s very similar to something like a patreon or a sub stack and the market caps for these people or i would should say that the largest ones just don’t make sense right relative to if you were actually to pivot to something more like a sub stack or a patreon so i just think it’s interesting to see how big cloud has launched and it’s gonna be interesting to see how they maybe pivot or maybe don’t pivot but if they need to pivot what happens to the existing coins and what are they worth and you know i just think that is gonna be interesting to watch for sure but i guess the the thesis there’s a train um the thesis i think that we were trying to get at in this conversation which hopefully came across is not that like big cloud is is binary bad or good or anything like but if you’re going to participate whether you’re a creator yourself and you want to you know create your own coin or you want to speculate do what you want to do right obviously this is not financial advice there’s no judgment here but think through past today and what what it exists as and what this may look like and if you really want to participate in that or not even from an ethical perspective but like where where do you see this going as an investment because it’s not so clear-cut as it is today when the system is literally structured so that things can only go up absolutely all right enjoy uh i guess we’ll leave you with one piece of advice that i always say is just never invest in something you don’t fully understand so do your diligence even if this sounds like something similar like a stock market for people do your diligence to understand what it is and where you think it’s going to go i like that a lot and then the the last thing that comes to mind for me with is uh i think it’s charlie munger and warren buffett are both big on this concept of how trust is your really only long-term asset and if people think more about they’ll they will make different decisions i think than if you only focus on the financial upside so get out there good luck i don’t know let us know where we’re wrong we’ll hear from you you know where to find us all right see ya