What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. My buddy Julian was telling me the other week that
I need to join this thing called Bitcloud. And I've been super busy. I had no idea what
it was. And he was just like, Yeah, just join now. You can figure it out later. Like it
doesn't matter. Just like get on the platform. And he kind of walked me through the process.
And Julian's a smart guy. So I'm like, Yeah, whatever. I don't know anything about cryptocurrencies.
I don't know anything about the blockchain. But whatever, let me just join this. And the
thing is that the way Bitcloud works is I think they just went through Twitter. And
they took like the top 15,000 Twitter accounts ranked by followers. And they pre made profiles
on the on their site. So I was already on the site. And I couldn't just like, make my
profile because it was taken side to like basically prove that I am the owner of at
CS Allen on Twitter and on Bitcloud. So I had to like tweet their thing, which is basically
an ad for Bitcloud. So what did I tweet? It's like my last tweet. That's up right now. Basically
said, Hey, setting up my Bitcloud. And then I linked on Bitcloud profile. And I immediately
got a flood of responses of people who are like, that's cool or welcome. Or yeah, I knew
you'd finally be on board. And other people who are like, Courtland, I am so disappointed
that you are supporting this obvious scam and Ponzi scheme. And then I got a message
from you. And you're like, Hey, let's talk about Bitcloud and do an episode on the podcast.
So everybody's all over the map. What are your thoughts? You know, what is Bitcloud?
Maybe explain it to me, explain it to listeners.
Bitcloud is kind of three things in one, which is I think part of the appeal to it, right?
So the first thing is that it's essentially just a social media platform, but rather than
being controlled by one particular company, it will eventually be a fully decentralized
social media platform that runs on blockchain. And so all the content that that gets submitted
to the social media platform is will be on the blockchain. So there's no one company,
there's no one person, there's no Mark Zuckerberg, there's no Jack Tulsi in charge that that
says whether you can have that content on there or not. And it will be spread out all
of the world kind of eventually is not right now, because it's still, it's still early.
And it's still controlled by the developers can kind of at this point. And then so that's
the first bit. And that in and of itself is really interesting, right? The fact that you
do now have this kind of decentralized platform that people can kind of interact with. What
they also did on top of that was they added this idea of a creator coin. So anybody who
signs up for big cloud, and in some cases, like you mentioned, about 15,000 or so high
profile Twitter accounts, they preceded those accounts on there as well. But anybody who
signs up essentially gets assigned what what they're calling a creator coin. And the idea
is is that creator coins value is based on your reputation. And part of the reputation
is you know, what what you're following is like on other sort of other social media platforms
where there's Instagram or Twitter and all those kind of things as well. But also eventually
it will be how you interact with people on the platform itself as well. So there's this
idea that your reputation is now something that can people can now invest into as well.
And so they've kind of essentially built a stock market of the reputation of people.
So I can buy your coin, you can buy my coin, you can sell it if you think I'm gonna do
something stupid. And make sure you don't lose any money.
That's the fun part of it for me, I think is the sort of speculating on people like
all right, mobs, this coin is worth like, what is your coin worth right now? I think
like $1,100. Their coin is expensive, but I can buy like a fractional part of it, I
could buy like point 01 of a mubbish arekbal coin. And I can bet like this coins gonna
go up in value, you know, this time next year, it's going to be worth, you know, 10 times
more than it is today. And so like, yeah, you're right, it's a stock market for people.
And there really isn't any other place to do that right now. Like, there's no way I
can like trade based on who I think is going to be more popular or more valuable or more
useful in the future. Like, big cloud seems to be it.
I mean, obviously, people have tried stuff like this in the past, people like stolen
and so those kind of things where you could you could buy people's accounts and things
like that, which was kind of a first attempt at that. But obviously, it was like one person
can own one account, which was really weird here. Now, like you said, everybody in the
world could buy any anybody else's coin, you can buy small tiny amounts of it to you don't
have to spend a lot of money on this. So the third thing I think that's kind of interesting
as well is that they've introduced this concept of a founder reward as well. So as
part of me being on the site, I can control what my founder reward is, and it can be anywhere
from zero to 100%. But not that it makes sense for it to be 100%. But essentially, what that
means is every time your coin is at an all time high, if somebody purchases the coin,
some percentage of that purchase will actually go to the person whose account it is.
So it defaults to 10%. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so every time my coins at an all time
high, if somebody spends 100 bucks to purchase my coin, they only actually getting $90 of
that coin and I get the $10 instead. And so that's a way to kind of incentivize people
to be active on the platform and so that they can make a little bit of money just by using
the platform itself without actually having to do anything. So I think that's kind of
an interesting aspect as well. One of the reasons that I'm not super into blockchain
crypto stuff is because it has essentially felt like a solution in search of a problem
to me. There aren't that many uses. Everyone's so excited about the technology and everyone's
dreaming up all these use cases. But the vast majority of use cases that I've seen for crypto
are things you could probably just do with a database. And it turns out no one really
cares that things are centralized in a database. And sometimes it's actually a feature, not
a bug. And it helps you understand that there's somebody behind the application you're using
and just making sure that everything is safe and decisions are being made in a good way
and they're kind of a steward.
And so a lot of the use cases for the blockchain just haven't really materialized into applications
that have been as killer as people have been predicting for the last 10 years. And the
main use case has been speculation. People just want to buy stuff and guess that the
price is going to go up. And so the big winners have been all these websites like Coinbase
that allow you, or maybe Robinhood, that allow you to trade cryptocurrency to this so-called
greater fool who's going to buy it at an even higher price than you bought it for. And this
is by and large worked very well because so many crypto enthusiasts are waiting for the
day that it is going to take over, that it is going to be super useful, that they're
just not selling no matter what.
And if nobody ever sells, the price really just does go up. Yeah. And so like Bitcoin
is over like $60,000. And so it's kind of like, all right, well, the speculation aspect
is fine. But what about the actual utility? And so since that hasn't really been there
very often, I haven't cared. But this actually is a really good case for the utility of the
blockchain. A decentralized social network, a social network that's not owned by anybody,
is actually a really cool idea that people have been talking about for 10 years.
The hard thing is building a social network is hard. Whether it's decentralized or not,
getting people to adopt a social network and getting the network effects to work, there's
a reason there's only a few big social networking companies because it's extremely hard to do.
Millions of people have tried to do this and most have failed. And even the ones that got
a lot of attention like Daspora, Macedon. Macedon is doing okay, but it's not taking
over. They just don't have it. They haven't figured out the growth part of things really.
They figured out the technological, decentralized part of things.
And maybe because BitCloud doesn't care that much, we'll get into this. There's a lot of
issues about how they've implemented it. It's pretty shoddily built. But what they really
do really well is they index on this fun speculation thing. Everybody wants to make money. Whenever
anyone hears about a new crypto thing where you could probably get in early and make a
ton of money, people are super excited. And everything about how it works is super smart
to allow and influence and encourage this adoption.
For me to even claim my profile, I literally have to tweet about BitCloud. And then they've
structured it so it's only the top 15,000 Twitter profiles you have to do that, which
means they're guaranteed to get all of the most influential people. The day Elon Musk
claims his BitCloud profile is the day that millions of people are going to learn about
BitCloud because he's going to have to tweet about it. And so the whole thing is structured
from the ground up to be a self-promotional thing and to generate a lot of press and to
get the users to advertise it. And that's something that I think no one else has really
done.
And honestly it cost them a lot of money though. Because obviously how many coins they've allocated
to you. So when they reserved your account and everybody else's account based on how
many followers you had and all that kind of stuff, they pre-allocated you a certain number
of BitCloud. So in theory, obviously it depends on the price of BitCloud, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, Elon Musk account is worth millions already and he hasn't even used it yet. So
the minute he claims it, and not that he cares because he's got more money than anybody in
the world does at this point probably. But you know, there's a lot of stored value in
his account already. And for the top 15,000, there's a big amount of stored value. Now,
obviously it didn't cost them the amount that we're seeing now because the speculation has
increased the sort of value of that exponentially already. But they did do the, let's spend
some money to make some money kind of approach to here. And yes, there was a lot of pushback
from a lot of people in terms of why are they reserving my accounts and why are they, you
know, why is my face on their, you know, on the set of on their site already and stuff
like that. But I think at the end of the day, it's not going to cost them anything. Like
I don't think they're going to, I don't think there's going to be any legal recourse out
of that and it's going to have generated them a huge amount of interest. So I think it worked
really well.
Yeah. There's a lot of controversy on this because they pre-created profiles for people.
They didn't ask anybody's permission to create these profiles. What are your thoughts on
like, is that an ethical thing to do? Is it unethical?
I'm not sure. Right. Cause our whole point of this is, is that these are public profiles
on your public images that they've posted and we can access them already, right? Like
it's not like they scraped somebody's private information and they just used it everywhere.
This is like public information, public pictures that are out there already. So can you scrape
it? Why the heck not? It's public already, right? Like it's not, it's not like I don't
think they did anything wrong there now. And, and in many ways, like I said, they're compensating
you for that, right? Like, I mean, they've taken your profile, but they've also given
you 40, 50, a hundred thousand dollars. That's just sat there. If you want to take it great,
if you want to, if you want to reach them and say, shut down my account, they probably
will and they'll just keep the money. I'm assuming that's associated with it as well.
So, so yeah, I mean, that's where I was like, at first I was like, well, that's not really
a good thing in terms of like, you know, without asking people's permission, taking their info
and stuff. Then I was like, yeah, you know what? These people either have more money than
they need, then they know what to do it and they're more concerned about just making noise
because ultimately if they didn't want their information, I'm sure if they reach out, you
know, even though it's not public who who's in charge, people know who's in charge of
this thing. Um, if they wanted to reach out and have their profile taken down, I bet you
they can make that happen.
Yeah, I feel the exact same way. I don't, I'm not a big fan of the argument that like
someone needs to ask your permission to make a page about you on the internet. I mean,
there are definitely lines that should not be crossed, right? There's a whole thing about
revenge porn that's horrible. A lot of lines that shouldn't be crossed like impersonating
somebody like they were to create a profile for you and then have that profile start saying
things and pretending that you're saying it like that would be a terrible line to cross.
But all they have is like your Twitter handle and your Twitter photo on there and they say
this profile has not yet been claimed. And that doesn't seem to me to be a thing. That's
like in any way bad that they did that.
What would it mean for things like Wikipedia and stuff like now? Well, I need your permission
to put your profile on Wikipedia. It doesn't make any sense at all, right?
More than news, right? I can't, I need your permission to write an article about you or
Twitter, right? If I want to tweet about Maboshar Iqbal, do I need your permission to tweet
about you? Like not really. The way the world works is anybody can say whatever the hell
they want about whoever they want, generally speaking with a few bounds and they don't
really need to ask your permission and that's how things should be. And so a little confusing
to me why people are so up in arms about the fact that they made these profiles. And I've
thought about this with indie hackers too. Like we have a giant directory of products
and it's like right now the only way to get your product in there is like you have to
add it. But the thought has crossed my mind. Like, hey, there are certain products in here
that I want people to add. Like what if I pre-add their products? And like we've got
pretty good SEO. I bet you their products are ranking pretty high and then they would
probably want to come claim it, etc. And then you get into like this whole Yelp territory
where Yelp is doing exactly that. And it turns out that a lot of restaurants don't want to
be on Yelp and they don't want to be reviewed. And I think that in that situation you should
be pretty gracious about taking it down. But the idea that they would need permission initially
I think is kind of silly.
I mean, I think Yelp kind of crossed the line a little bit in terms of like, you know, like
numbers of things like that. It's like I said, it's not like the big cloud was actually posting
on their behalf or anything like that. I think where some people have more of a stronger
argument in terms of what people are speculating on me and I'm not participating on it. But
the reality of that is that's happening now, right? Like, I mean, you could go to Las Vegas
and speculate on anything that you want to kind of right now. So it's happening already.
It's just happening on a public internet site at this point. And maybe, you know, you might
have issues with that. But I think that's not their fault. And I think that's not something
that you can really stop at this point because it's happening already.
The whole privacy debate sort of blurs a line with this other conversation, which is like
having control over what other people say and think and do about you. And I think having
privacy is completely different than controlling like you don't necessarily have a right to
control what other people think and say and do. If people want to speculate on some imaginary
coin that is attached to your name, that's their right to do that. And that's just been
the way the world has worked since time immemorial. If you're a caveman and you walked out to
hang out with your tribe, you can't stop them from gossiping about whatever sort of loin
cloth you're wearing. They're just going to do whatever they're going to do. And if you
don't want that, you can basically stay inside your cave.
And I think there's, you know, besides Yelp, there have been other websites that have this
issue too. Did you ever hear of a... Were you familiar with Get Satisfaction back when
that was big? People hated that website because they would put up a profile for your company
and they're like, hey, do you need customer support for this company? Post your complaints
here. And so every company had a Get Satisfaction profile of like a thousand customers, like
I hate this thing, blah, blah, blah. And then you had to like pay them to like get access
to your profile and then respond to customer complaints. That I think is a little bit borderline.
You know, like they knew what they were doing. They were sort of extorting you by publicizing
like bad reviews, but Bitcloud's not doing that.
Literally their main complaint is, is that they use the avatar, right? Like they're using
my image without my permission. A public image that they posted on the internet, that they
posted on social media platform. It's on every social media platform that they probably use
as well. So I'm just like, you know what? That just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.
If you post something publicly, you got to be willing and accepting for anyone to use
it however they want. That's just how it is.
Exactly.
Let's talk about this other point that you're making, which is a really good one, which
is that not only is Bitcloud like, you know, creating these profiles for you, but they're
actually investing money into your profile. Like I go to my Bitcloud profile. I've used
this not at all. I haven't posted a single tweet on Bitcloud. I haven't done anything.
I haven't paid for anything. And it's like, there's already $28,000 in market cap for
my coin. And there's $10,000 locked into my Bitcloud profile. And like I apparently
own $24,000 of the CS Allen coin that I could sell and cash out at some point. You can't
do it yet. We'll talk about that. But how did they get this money into people's profiles?
Because this is presumably like very expensive for them to do.
Well, yeah, like I said, I mean, it's appreciated over time because the price of Bitcloud itself
has increased. So right now, I think there's $160 per pet cloud. And that's based on there's
a whole kind of white paper. It's not really, yeah, it's not a real white paper that they
put out. It's kind of a white paper. It explains how it all works and stuff.
It's a blog, a glorified blog post, basically. But yeah, so basically the more Bitcloud they
mint because people move Bitcoin in will increase the price of Bitcloud itself. And then you
can use that to purchase all of the coins and stuff like that. So now that again, they
haven't officially announced this yet, because the company that doesn't really exist, not
really been publicly announced, but there's some big names that are behind it in terms
of have supported the platform, Gemini Capital, I think, a 16Z, Sequoia and all the big names
that you would expect.
Yeah, Alexa Sohanian, the Winklevoss twins invested, Coinbase Ventures invested as they've
given the crew behind Bitcloud a ton of money immediately spent buying coins for all these
influencers. And they have 212, 942,895 million dollars worth of Bitcoin and their wallet.
So apparently, according to the founder, most of that came from these investors. We're like,
oh yeah, this is a good idea. Here's some money. But a lot of it's coming from people
who are now signing on to Bitcloud and buying Bitcloud so they can buy these different creator
coins.
So maybe the first thing to talk about are all the implications of this thing existing.
Because in their white paper, they kind of go through some really broad, cool ideas that
actually are pretty cool, I thought, when I was reading them. So the first of them is
this idea of what they call a stakeholder meeting. So you could theoretically make it
so that people who own your coin, people who've invested in you, or the only people who are
allowed to, I don't know, respond to a particular tweet that you make. Or you could say you
have to own at least $1,000 of the MUB's coin or the CS Allen coin in order to even talk
to me on Bitcloud.
And what's kind of cool is like, all right, what are the implications of this? It essentially
means you're probably going to get a lot of feedback that's positive and constructive
because these are people who are literally invested in your future. You're not going
to get a lot of trolls spending a bunch of money on you because they hate you. Because
you're only going to buy your coin if you think that you're going to basically succeed.
And so on Twitter, you have a lot of, quite frankly, angry mobs of people who will do
nothing but troll people or harass people, et cetera. And Twitter does allow you some
moderation controls. You can make a tweet and say only the people that you mentioned
can respond to it. But this is kind of a more organic way to kind of make sure that almost
like a company would do.
We have our shareholders meeting. You have to hold this many shares to even come and
have a say. You could theoretically now do that on your Bitcloud.
Yeah. Some people are already doing this, not quite as formalized. But there's been
a few people, I think there's a user on Bitcloud called at Craig and he's been doing a weekly,
I think, Zoom call where the top 10 holders are allowed to join. So he looks at the people
that are following him. He sends them a message with, here's a link to the Zoom. And if you're
in the top 10, you can attend. You can talk with each other and kind of have interactions
in, but it's only the top 10 who are allowed in as well. So some people already started
to use the platform like that as these are the people who want me to succeed. I want
them to succeed as well. And then they can all kind of figure out how it all works out
as well. So it's starting already. I mean, I started a project called Bitcloud Follow,
which is kind of like the We Follow, but for pick out specifically. So We Follow was something
that Kevin Rose started at the beginning of Twitter, which is kind of like this organized
directory based on categories of people who are active on Twitter. So if you're looking
for somebody to follow about indie hacking or whatever, you can go find a list of people
who want to talk about indie hacking. So I kind of built the same thing, but for Pick
Cloud and I've now got like 300 people who've submitted their accounts. So what I've told
people is if you own some of my coin, I'm going to, I'm going to prioritize reviewing
your submission first, just kind of as a way to incentivize people to purchase the coin.
It kind of really helps in terms of your bank. Cause I think, I think the Bitcloud Follow
coin is worth more than my personal coin at this point. So it's got to be interesting
to see how all that stuff works out as well. But yeah, so I think, I think, I think there's
a really interesting possibility that mixing of the social media aspects of it, but also
like the financial aspects of, yeah, these people actually have a financial stake in
your success. And so the way that you can reward them and the way that you can interact
with them is kind of built into the platform as well.
I love this idea of mixing money and social media. And this has already been like a trend
that's been happening over the last six to 12 months. Like Twitter, for example, is introducing
something called Super Follows, where you're basically going to be able to pay for exclusive
content from people that tweet, which is kind of cool. I could say, oh, this tweet is only
for my super followers and that costs $10 a month to subscribe to me.
And I think the coolest thing about it is for the longest time, people have been clamoring.
We've all wanted to pay for social media because the alternative is everything is financed
through advertising. And that creates some pretty terrible incentives. And Facebook and
Twitter, whoever is going to show you the content is probably going to make them the
most money. But whether or not that's the healthiest content for you to see or the thing
that you actually want to be reading.
But if money is actually baked into these platforms, if I could pay Facebook a fee to
use Facebook and not see any ads, I might actually start using Facebook again. Or if
I could pay Twitter or different followers or people that I influence on Twitter to get
certain content, I might use that.
And with Bitcloud, all the money is basically... The entire platform just runs on money. You
can do literally any conceivable thing. Gate your inbox so only people who invest in you
can message you or people have to pay a certain number of your coins back to you to be able
to like your tweets. Just a bunch of different stuff here. So I'm a fan of the fact that
the internet has finally evolved to the point where we're more comfortable with money being
baked into things and it's not like we have to find all these weird advertising models
to support every platform.
Yeah. And I think the thing that makes Palatable to me is that there's not a company behind
it standing behind saying what you can and can't do in it, right? Because that's the
problem with me. Just like any platform that is going to be centrally closed, they're going
to have a big say about what you can and can't do. The things that you can talk about, the
things that you can and can't say. Well, I'm not going to get into the whole politics of
it right now, but in terms of that, the fact that it's decentralized, I think is the thing
that really enables that other thing because otherwise you're always going to be in the
back of your mind. Like, am I really going to invest all this time to build up this thing
on Twitter just to have Twitter say next week, sorry, we're going to have you, we can't have
you on the platform anymore. And so yeah, I still think there's some, you know, we still
have to figure out what's the legal implications of it, of a social media platform being completely
decentralized and nobody being in control anymore. But that to me is less scary than having one
company in charge. There's one company in charge, right? It's not like the government's
in charge and the laws of the land set, what's allowed and whatnot. We're literally putting
all of our hands into Mark Zuckerberg and sort of people like that and it's up to them
to kind of impose whatever they think is right. And I think that's scary.
It's scary for anyone building a business on the internet. Like if you're huge on YouTube
and YouTube decides they don't want you, like, well, what's it kiss all of your subscribers
goodbye like you're screwed. You know, if Google wants to close your Gmail account,
like what, who are you going to complain to? You know, only Google and they probably don't
have enough customers for people to even listen. And I think like one of the big shifts the
last year is some people moving increasingly towards newsletters. They're like, you know
what? I don't want to build up my following on social media. I can be shut down anytime.
But if I own my email list, nobody can shut me down. But even that's not really true because
the vast majority of the people on your email list are probably all Gmail users. And if
like your sender address basically gets a bad reputation in Gmail's eyes, like they
could basically just like black dot you and like you're screwed. You know, you got like
build up your sender reputation all over again. And so you can have to maybe walk me through
some of the technical details for how this works. But what I understand for reading the
so called bit cloud white paper, the underlying technology itself is decentralized, which
means that all of the accounts, all of the tweets that they're making, all of the value
of their coins who holds what coins that's all public information that anybody can build
on top of and nobody controls that. And like bit cloud.com proper is just a client that
these people built on top of it, but you could theoretically build your own competitor to
it and have access to all the same accounts and data and information and people could
log into your competitor, instead of logging into bit cloud.com. And there's nothing they
could do about it, which means that theoretically, if like somebody if bit cloud.com was shut
down your account, and they said, we hate you, you're not allowed to log in here, you
could just go to like, muds, mudshars, bit cloud competitor, log in there, and everybody
can see all your stuff. And like, you just it's impossible to really be de platformed,
I guess.
Yeah. And I think I think that that is exactly the idea, right? Like, so the blockchain and
the content is now basically a matter of public record. And it's just a matter of somebody
still needs to be the arbiter of what you can and can't see. But you have the freedom
to choose who you want that arbiter be, right? Like you can go to Facebook, and they could
build a client to interface into the blockchain as well. So you have the freedom to choose
who you want to control what you can and can't see. And ultimately, if you want to build
your own platform, and or if you want to build your own software, and then you can see everything
is up to you to kind of control what you can and can't see as well. So that's all the big
plan. You know, it's not quite there yet, because they haven't they haven't open sourced
the code that manages all of the blockchain stuff and that yet. But as soon as that's
out there, anybody will be able to run their own code on the blockchain. And then we have
to build whatever services they want on top of that as well.
Super fascinating. And like, this is also like not a new idea. The Have you heard of
blue sky? It's like Jack Dorsey's Twitter's attempt to do the same thing. So he announced
in December via tweet that he's funding a team of people. What did he say? Let me pull
up his tweet. He said, Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open
source architects, engineers and designers up to five, that's an interesting number,
to develop an open and centralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter
to ultimately be a client of the standard. So it's like almost exactly what the cloud
is doing. You know, twitter.com is just like one interface through which you could access
all these tweets, but then other people could build on top of it. And he gave a bunch of
reasons why they didn't start this way earlier, but they want to do it now. So he said centralized
control, the way things are now makes it too hard to enforce policies, there's too much
burden. So like when he tweeted this, it was like the middle of the US election, Trump
hadn't conceded yet. Everyone was saying Twitter should block this block that and like I'm
sure he's like, Oh, this sucks, like having have this responsibility. Number two, he said,
the value of social media is in the recommendation algorithms, but they're all proprietary. So
you can't choose alternatives, and it would be nice if you could. So like right now, Twitter
like by default ranks all your tweets by their own proprietary algorithm. They don't just
show you like the firehose of every single tweet in chronological order. Potentially
somebody could use blue sky to make a different client and organize tweets however you want.
Just like on Bitcloud, like they have this idea like what if you organize your tweets
based on people who own your coin versus people who don't. So that's kind of cool. And then
the last thing was that basically the incentives right now are aligned for these networks to
always promote the content that's the most controversial. So whatever is going to stand
out, whatever is going to get the most shares, the most angry replies, like that's what they're
going to promote. And like maybe you want an alternative network that doesn't do that.
And so supposedly, these are all the reasons why Twitter is now going to invest in up to
five people to work on this blue sky project. It's weird that they would propose something
like that just because it makes no financial sense for them to kind of do that. And so
I was still having the back of my mind like, yeah, but there will still be you know, you
have to run the software, you have to run the servers, you have to do all that kind
of stuff to kind of power it. And there's I mean, the thing with the blockchain is you've
obviously got the mechanism to reward the people for running the servers. If you can
if you can pay to iron coins and all that kind of stuff, you've got the financial reasons
as to why people would run for nodes that would power this. And so you kind of separate
the financial incentives for like, why do I want to operate this thing? Well, because
if I can get more people active on my nodes, then you know, I can make more money that
way. Versus I want to control the advertising, I want to control what people see and so I
kind of stuff too. So I think that's that's why this is really interesting technology
to me is because it splits that what you show versus how you run the system now is decoupled
right now. Like you said, it's that there's financial incentives to kind of show specific
content in a specific order in a specific way. Once you get into like the blockchain
and Bitcoin stuff, you've kind of split the sort of operational expenses and how people
make money is we're helping make money now on Bitcoin is is by speculating and kind of
appreciating the value of their coin. So I also am similarly skeptical of checks tweet.
My prediction is this, that they're going to put together this team of researchers is
going to take them forever in a day to do anything. And then three years later, no one's
even going to remember that they even did this. Because if you look at the incentives,
like you're right, like what what incentive does Twitter have to allow people to create
alternative Twitter competitors that are better? Like they have zero financial incentive to
do that. And so why would he even announce that? Probably just because he was getting
a lot of heat during the election, you know, like back when diaspora was big, they had
this huge Kickstarter to fund, you know, their alternative to Facebook. And like, I think
the biggest donator was Mark Zuckerberg, because it makes him look good. Because he's like,
this is never gonna work. It's gonna fail. I don't care if they get, you know, whatever
amount of money is gonna fail, because it's super hard to do. So let me look like a good
guy and donate to this. So one of the the similarly, I guess, sketchy things about Bitcloud
is that there's a lot of trust that you have to have to use the site. Like number one,
there's been a lot of crypto scams that have happened over the last decade, is gonna easily
be one of those crypto scams, right? They've got $213 million. And their Bitcoin wallet
right now, people are putting money into it to Bitcloud, there's literally no way to take
it out, right? There is no feature on the website that says, Oh, God, I've been, you
know, I speculated on mobs, I made, you know, 10x my money, I speculated on Ryan Hoover,
you know, I tripled my money, now I have all this money, I want to take it back out and
convert it into US dollars. Like you try to do that, they're like, this feature has not
been implemented yet. Which is obviously like, you know, raising all sorts of red flags.
Do you think it's safe to invest in Bitcloud? Are you putting your money into it?
I put a few hundred bucks in, right? Like, I'm not I'm not putting my entire life savings
in someone gonna mortgage the house and put it onto my coin or anything like that. Do
I think it's a scam based on what the reporting is in terms of who's involved. Like you said,
that $200 million didn't come from the people using the platform. It came from investors
who who in many ways have been awarded already, because the money is now in their coin, which
is on the platform. So is there likelihood that that this platform will succeed? Yes,
because the investors want it to succeed now, because their coin is now worth way more than
they invested already. Also, some people have taken money out, they're just doing it off
of the chain right now. So they there's various telegram groups and things like that, where
people basically said, Look, I've got 100 Bitcloud coins that I want to sell. And somebody said,
I'll purchase those. And then you just send them to me afterwards.
It's interesting trying to assess whether or not something's a scam. Because everyone's
got we all have like our different criteria and are different like things we look at like
the credibility of investors is really a big thing. You know, these aren't no name total
idiot investors. Like these are like the who's who like some of the top VC firms, probably
the top two VC firms in Silicon Valley have invested and a lot of people who like are
staking their public reputation on this. But like the counter argument to that is like
okay, well, how many competent well known people invested in Theranos? And that was
a scam the whole time. Like how many people invested in WeWork, which is a basically failing
business model propped up by the charisma of the founder. And then you know, maybe the
other end of the spectrum, you've got like job rule got scammed by the fire festival
guy. And thought that was gonna work out. So there's a possibility like things still
don't work out. One thing that gives me a lot of I guess confidence is that unlike Bitcoin,
which is you know, invented by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, like who even knows who
that is, this was invented by some guy named Diamond Hands is his pseudonym. But like everybody
actually knows who it is, because he like went around to the investors like convinced
them to invest and like, the the secrets out like his name is like Nader, he's on Twitter,
you could talk to him, he talks about it, he doesn't deny being the guy behind it. So
he's like, you know, like if he runs with the money, like people know who that guy is,
they know where he lives. They could find it.
I think there's a difference between is this a scam? And is this thing real, right? I think
it's real. So I don't think it's a scam. Now it's real. Now, does that mean it's going
to succeed? Does that mean that you're actually ever going to make all the money back that
you put in? Does that ever mean that you're actually going to make a fortune out of this
thing? It's the stock market. No, because a very, very rich, very, very smart, very,
very, you know, PhD people lose a ton of money on the stock market every week, every day,
every month, every year. And so yeah, if you think you're going to just like come in and
speculate and make a whole bunch of money, no, you probably lose it just like just like
you do in the stock market.
Well, there's like, yeah, there's a lot of risks. There's number one, you trade poorly.
So you're going to lose all your money. Number two, there's like the platform risk itself
where bit cloud in particular, it's like, from what I can tell, there's this guy, his
Twitter handle is underscore pressed, which his name is James pressed, which he has been
like on a tweeting storm to take down big cloud. He's done his own crypto companies
before. He's worked as an auditor for blockchain technologies. And he's like, this website
is total trash. It is completely insecure. Every time you log into the website, everybody
in the big cloud team can basically see your see your password. And so you're not supposed
to go websites like that, you know, like the average Bank of America employee doesn't know
my bank credentials and like couldn't take my money. But the average big cloud employee
like could theoretically empty out my account and take all my money. So it's like super
insecure. They just didn't build it right. And like, that's like the tip of the iceberg
in terms of like, all the different problems with the website. And so like, there's like
a platform risk thing where like, they might just get hacked, or they might just lose all
your money, or they might have an employee run away with all your money. And that has
nothing to do with you not being able to trade it has to do with the fact that like this
particular big cloud client that they built isn't really good. The upside to this is pretty
massive though. Like if you, you know, I'm probably gonna put some money into it, probably
not very much because I don't want to get it's just not wise. But I know people, friends
and friends of friends, we put in like 20, 30, $50,000 and have turned it into half a
million. Just speculating on people because right now it's like the Wild West. And for
example, here's here's like, what I would do if I run big cloud right now buying people's
coins and I am just not I don't have any money in the platform. So I'm not buying anything.
I would immediately go to my brother, I actually texted him this morning, like, have you heard
about big cloud? And he's like, No, not really. And then he looked into it. He's like, Oh,
there's my profile. And so I would go to my brother whose profile is basically empty.
And his coins are $3.25, which means nobody's bought his coin, right? Oh, just buy a bunch
of his coins because like he's a popular guy. He's got a lot of Twitter followers, just
nobody's thought to buy his coin in big cloud yet, right? So it's pretty much guaranteed
that assuming big cloud does well as a platform, people will eventually buy his coin and it
will be worth significantly more than $3.25. And so what everybody's doing in this sort
of early phase is just looking for these overlooked investments, these people who like no one
is thought to buy their book, big cloud yet because the platform is so new. And it's basically
just kind of like free money that you also can't access or ever withdraw.
No, I think and that's what a lot of people have been doing, they built various like scraping
bots, they look for Twitter when people are like announcing that they've signed up for
big cloud and stuff. And so the minute somebody tweets it, they go and purchase the coin.
So they and then it will kind of appreciate immediately because again, everybody else
sees that tweet now and then everybody wants to purchase that coin as well. I think the
thing that's really interesting to me is just obviously, look, I don't think Facebook and
Twitter are going anywhere, right? Like they're an established part of the internet economy
of society as a whole. What percentage does big cloud need to take? Like if they took
10% of the user base from Twitter and Facebook and everybody was like, you know, I'm not
going to tweet anymore, I'm going to use big cloud instead. How much is that worth? And
if you can, if you can buy, you know, that now for like, you know, 0.0001% of what the
value will be in a year, how much are you going to make on that? So that that to me
is the interesting thing is that it's not that it's going to be the only social media
platform ever to exist from now moving forward. It doesn't have to be right? Like if even
if it makes a modest inroad into the social media space and becomes another player, then
you've already got massive, massive potential, massive, massive value that you can pull out
of that thing. So another thing people have been tweeting about this that I'm curious
to hear your thoughts on are that it feels very dystopian. Like there's a whole episode
of Black Mirror, where it's like social credits and this woman is like running around and
every interaction she has with people, they can basically like upvote her or downvote
her and she has a certain number of like points next to her name. And like once her points
are low enough, like nobody wants anything to do with her. And her life is just like
one unfortunate event after another because like things are just so hard. And you know,
Bitclout feels kind of the same. You can imagine a future in which everyone has, you know,
their own coin on Bitclout that's worth a certain dollar amount. Like that kind of reflects
on like how valuable you are as a person. We're doing it on Twitter and Facebook right
now. Yeah, the more followers I get, the better I feel about myself because I got more followers.
It's just it there's not there's not that direct correlation between a USD value attached
to it right now, as opposed to the number of followers and the number of likes every
tweet that I send or number of retweets it gets. It's happening right now already. It's
just a little bit under the surface and it's a little harder to figure out what Bitclout
said. You know what? Let's just let's just rip away all of the band-aids and stuff and
we'll pull back the curtains and we'll just collect the way it is. This is what you're
worth.
What's going on? Yeah, that's what makes it super exciting and super fun. And I mentioned
this earlier, like if you are holding somebody's coin, you have like a lot more influence over
that than if you had, let's say you bought like, you know, a share of Coca-Cola stock,
right? There's not much I can do to make Coca-Cola stock go up. I can like start telling all
my friends about Coke or whatever, but like that's not gonna matter because quite frankly,
Coke's so big that like my shares aren't worth anything. Whereas if I buy like, you know,
stock and like my buddy who I know that like next week he's going to launch some big project
right?
I can basically like front run everything. Like I'm an insider trader, right? Like I'm
an inside trader. Like I just know all the details and I can like buy stock and like
things are so small, people who are so unknown that like I can single-handedly move the needle.
You know, I can make their Bitclout price go up because I tweet about it. Like that
completely changes the game. Like that's not really... I don't know what's like the biggest
analog for that. Like maybe angel investing, where you're investing in companies before
there are other like investors and you can like tweet about them and blow them up. But
people, it's infinite. Like there's so many levels down you can go where you can have
way more influence than if you buy stock in public companies.
One of the reasons I'm kind of really excited about it is especially for somebody like myself,
right? Like you've seen my long list of things that I've built over the years. And really,
I mean, to be completely frank and honest, most of them aren't worth anything anymore,
right? Because they were just fun little side projects that I built at the time. And it's
more hassle to kind of build the monetization aspects into those things, right? So it takes
more effort than it's worth into how much value you can kind of extract out of those.
And we saw my Bitclout, I almost don't need to worry about that anymore, right? Like the
more things I launched, the more people are talking about me, the more my reputation increases,
the more my coin will be worth. So I'm kind of indirectly, but almost directly making
more money every time I launch something, every time I announce something, that's real.
I mean, I'm not just talking about just announcing stuff that doesn't exist, but if I actually
build and launch something, it will have an impact on the value of my coin. And even if
the project is just like a six month long project and it's cool and it's fun, it's still
going to raise the value of my coin. And if it ends up being a project that kind of launches
and kind of takes off and spins off on its own, it's very easy to spin that into its
own coin and just kind of let it run all by itself and kind of as well.
So that's true. It's almost like there's like short term investing. Like, okay, I think
you know, I got a tip. I think the stock's going to jump up the next day, but then I'm
going to dump it because I don't truly believe in the underlying asset. Like I just have
a tip where I think, you know, things are going to pop versus long term, like, you know,
I'm long stripe. You know, I think 10 years from now, stripes get worth a trillion dollars.
So I'm just going to hold. And now there's a way for me to long term invest in you. I
don't have to go to you and be like, what, what new project are you working on? Let me,
you know, drop a safe or something and invest in your project. I can just be like, Hey,
I'm going to buy mobs is big cloud coin and hold onto that for 10 years. Cause I'm pretty
sure that 10 years from now, mobs will have been doing amazing stuff. And some of it will
have caught on and it's just going to be better. So I love that aspect of it. And you can basically
get the proceeds of that a 10% of it anyway, and start using it immediately to find whatever
you want to do.
And it's effectively, uh, you know, what people have been doing with, well, people have been
talking about doing with things like ISIS, um, and kind of things like that too. And
it's, I think that other elephant in the room is, okay, what does the U S government think
about this? You know, that's the other elephant there. Cause like, there's some of the things
that you saw, you know, some of the things we talked about in terms of like, well, insider
trading, I mean, effectively it is insider trading, right? Like, but if, if it isn't
really a security, you can't really do insider trading. So the question is, is this really
a security? I don't know. And so it's going to be interesting how the IRS treats this
and it's going to be interesting to see how the U S government treats this. And so it's
going to also be interesting to see, since it's a decentralized blockchain, how much
influence does the U S government have on this thing as well? Right? Like, I mean, can
they, can they, can they impose any restrictions on this? Yes. At some point you're going to
want to pull your money out. So they have some say about how you pull your money out.
But ultimately if it's a platform that could run anywhere on the world on any number of
servers around any part of the globe, I don't know what they can do about it.
I'm curious about like what the best strategies will be, you know, like, because there is
one, one strategy where you don't do anything of usefulness yourself. You don't do anything
of utility yourself. You don't make anything. You don't care about your own coin. You're
just constantly speculating on other people's coins. And this is already what investors
do. It's like one of the main complaints about wall street, you know, like, what do you guys
actually create? Nothing. You're just, you're just moving money around, right? Whereas like,
you know, other industries like build things that are of utility, or you can take the other
approach where you're like, no, I want my coin to be amazing. And so that's an incentive
for me to do amazing things. You know, I want to be better. I want to write really good
thoughts and ideas. I have a great podcast to build cool products. And like, you know,
you sort of get richer because you're being amazing and you own part of your coin.
I mean, for me, it's because of who I am because of what I do. I want to do this second. I
want to do that because I know I have a direct influence on the value of my own coin, right?
Like I know if I build and launch things, I know what the impact is of that. Just speculating
and purchasing other people's coins. The risk just goes way out the window, right? Like
in terms of, you know, you're going to think something's going to happen. You're going
to invest in people. People aren't going to do things. People aren't going to launch things
the way that they're supposed to launch things. And they're going to say weird things and
people are going to sell their coin and stuff. So just like, just like with the investing
in stocks, it becomes way risky, way riskier and it's outside of your control about whether
it succeeds or not. Now is the upside higher on that? Yeah, probably because you're able
to spread your, your time and your funds across any, just like any, any venture capitalist
does now. They don't invest in one thing. They invest in a hundred things and one of
them makes a fortune. So like I said, I only put a few hundred bucks into this thing because
I think, I think there's potential there, but I'm essentially investing that in myself
at this point, but I've been spending the last two and a half weeks. I've been on the
platform, you know, focusing more on like growing my following. Like I've got like 600
followers already kind of on the platform and stuff, because I think longer term, the
more engaging that you can be on the platform, the more, the more value that you can add
on the platform, the more valuable your coin will ultimately be anyway.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm looking at your, your personal bit cloud account,
your coin price is worth $1,100 per coin and a total market cap of like almost 60 grand.
And then for your project, bit cloud follow, you also made an account for that. And it's
worth even more than you are already, right? It's got a, it's going for $1,300 and it's
got a total, total market cap of $64,000. And like, it's making me think, okay, I need
to get any hackers on bit cloud. I need to get, I need to get like every project I do
on bit cloud, and then you don't have to pay any money, you know, you're not like buying
a trading anything, you're just building your thing and other people are putting money into
it.
And you can still invest in it earlier, right? Like I bought bit cloud follow when it was
when it wasn't worth anything, right? Because it wasn't worth anything. I bought, you know,
I bought eight or nine coins of it back then, but it didn't, it cost me less than 100 bucks.
That investment is now worth like 20,000 bucks or whatever it is. But so that's that, you
know, that investing in yourself becomes a lot easier as well. Yeah, I don't have to
worry about setting up legal companies, S corps and LLCs and all that kind of fun stuff.
All I got to do is transfer in some Bitcoin it purchased and I've invested in myself.
But it also in terms of my side projects and stuff, it's a good indicator of whether I
think I'm on to a really good idea or not. If I can get some smart people investing in
that coin early, it means hang on a second. I think I might have something here, especially
understanding who they are and kind of where they are in the industry and stuff like that.
It's like, well, you know, I'm not just wasting my time here because I know that they're smart
people that that's what the speculating I think is kind of interesting as well right
now people speculating that these ideas have value and understanding who they are and understanding,
you know, why they entered and why they purchased those coins. I think is these also really
good for founders and creators like myself to kind of understand why people are investing
as well.
Listen, I could talk about this for hours and hours and hours. I'm sure we will offline.
But hopefully listeners know a little bit more about Bitclout now. I urge you don't
take any investment advice from us. We are not professionals. We're not telling you to
go do this. I think that it is extremely risky and there any number and we haven't even covered
like half the things on my list that might go wrong with the site like it was debt. It
was literally down for like half of March and you couldn't even use it. And I tried
to send some big cloud earlier yesterday. And it was just like, you can't send more
big cloud that is in your account. And it was like less than what was in my account.
So it's like they're trying to work out the kinks. And who knows if this thing is going
to get hacked or go down. But assuming it does work out and assuming lots of people
adopt it, I think it's pretty promising. And at the very least will be a lot of fun.
The biggest investment that you make in any of these things is your time. Whether you're
on Facebook or Twitter and stuff, you spend hours posting stuff interacting with people.
Your biggest investment is your time. And I would rather invest that time in Bitclout
because the upside for me is the sky at this point. What's my upside on Twitter? I don't
have an upside on Twitter.
There really isn't. I was talking to Ashley Higgins who runs like product and strategy
at Product Hunt. And I was asking her like, oh, where's Product Hunt going? And she was
saying, well, the way I look at products is the first thing she thinks is like, what question
is this product answering? Or more specifically, what problem is this product solving? That's
how she always looks at things.
And I think for social media in general, that answer has been changing over the years. It
used to be connection. What was the point of being on Facebook to connect to your friends
and your family and talk to them? Isn't this so cool? We can have a group chat. It was
so new.
And then with Twitter and Instagram, it became kind of like status. It's like, wait, now
there's all these strangers who follow me. And there's like a little number representing
my followers. And I guess I'm a high status person because all these random people think
I'm cool. And look at all these likes that I'm getting.
And now I think it's just like, it's just purest form of money. I want to make money.
I want to fund my projects. I want to pay for the roof over my head. I want to be able
to buy food. I want to be able to live my best life. And all of that, that's the question
that BitCloud is asking. And what is more motivational than money? Very few things.
It's just super direct and to the point because you can exchange it for whatever you want.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this being widely adopted. It's a much stronger reason
to use BitCloud if assuming it works out and it's not a scam and the website doesn't crash
all the time, then there is to use something like Twitter at the end of the day.
Well, mobs, as always, thanks for coming on the show. Do you want to let listeners know
where they can go to find what you're up to on BitCloud?
BitCloud slash you slash Mabasharikbal is my profile. And then obviously all my other
projects are on iworkedon.com. So just go find me on iworkedon.
All right. Later, mobs.
See you later.