>Wen didn’t have any money of his own. (This past January, he had a balance of negative sixteen dollars in his Royal Bank of Canada savings account.) But his mo

>Wen didn’t have any money of his own. (This past January, he had a balance of negative sixteen dollars in his Royal Bank of Canada savings account.) But his mom had some bitcoin, which she’d bought a few months earlier after hearing about it from a friend on WeChat. She lent all of it to her son, and he then converted a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of it to bitclout.... We spoke on April 30th. At that point, he owned multiple BitClout profiles, which he told me had reached a combined estimated value of half a million dollars. Today, he’s grown that figure to approximately $1.7 million, or nine thousand and four bitclout, or sixty-eight hundred pairs of AirPods Pro. “To me, it’s just numbers,” Wen said. Wow, the article read like it was written by BitClout PR. Stories like this with no balance are incredibly irresponsible. Glosses over the fact that its closed source and anonymous founders. Towards the end they also mention that there's no official way to get your money out: > When he discovered that there was no official way to get his money out of BitClout, he saw an opportunity. Is it just me that sees all these things as red flags? The article compares the founder to Bitcoin's founder, although they do mention the possibility of "the beginnings of grift" > It is unclear why the main founder insists on anonymity, though it may have something to do with mimicking Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the unknown founder of Bitcoin. Whatever the reason, diamondhands runs the risk of creating a kind of Elizabeth Holmes effect: like her Steve Jobs-inspired black turtleneck, the BitClout founder’s mimicry of Nakamoto may appear less like a signal of validity and more like the beginnings of a grift. > (On June 12th, the supply of bitclout will be capped at fewer than 11.5 million coins, at which point the price of the currency will be determined purely by supply and demand.) It's no coincidence this came out 2 days before the advertised "deflation bomb". What happened to journalism? [EDIT] I think the prices are made up... Someone is "worth" $1,000, but you can't get your money out and they mint new coins. Every account has a different amount of coins associated with it. So if I want to buy a share, they (BitClout) just pick a price, they mint new supply and that's the new price. Again, you could have coins "worth" a lot, but that doesn't mean you can get that value. I tried checking out BitSwap, the exchange mentioned in the article, but there's no market, just a button to "Get Priority Access". It seems incredibly scammy. Its unfortunate that there are a ton of articles on how Bitcoin is a scam where (despite its flaws) it has potential to transform the world, but an obvious scam like this gets glowing press.