Issues with Bitclout one pager / white paper

[scottstirling]

Document key concerns and doubts:

1. "significantly higher throughput and scale [than Bitcoin]" - experience and observation show this to be false with Bitclout up and down and inconsistent throughout the day when it has high traffic or rolls out core code changes to the Angular app.

2. "Like Bitcoin, BitClout is a fully open-source project and there is no company behind it-- it’s just coins and code." - not at all like Bitcoin in that the source code repository and versioning history is closed/secret as of the publication time of the white paper and to date (4/13/2021). Nor is there any explicit selection of an accepted open source license, such as Bitcoin's MIT license, nor any formal declaration of public domain "unlicense," only the phrase "fully open source" with no further context or clarification.

3. "The price of BitClout doubles for every million BitClout sold. This makes BitClout naturally scarce, resulting in 10 to 19 million BitClout minted in the long run (less than Bitcoin’s max supply of 21 million)." - issue is that doubling the price doesn't make a resource scarce.

4. "the value of someone’s coin should be correlated to that person’s standing in society. For example, if Elon Musk succeeds in landing the first person on Mars, his coin price should theoretically go up. And if, in contrast, he makes a racial slur during a press conference, his coin price should theoretically go down." - conclusions without premises or evidence. "should" is a market prediction here derived from unexplained assumptions or principles.

5. "Thus, people who believe in someone’s potential can buy their coin and succeed with them financially when that person realizes their potential." - more conclusions derived without premises established.

6. "with BitClout you can buy someone’s coin and then retweet them" - "Coming soon! Reclouting is not currently implemented." pops up whenever anyone tries to use the "retweet" or "reclout" function in Bitclout. UPDATE: reclouting function appeared overnight 4/9/2021.

7. "If you know someone with a lot of clout, or if you know someone who knows someone, you can buy a coin and send it to someone else so that they can buy and retweet them." - everyone realizes intuitively after some reflection or having associated BitClout and Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode the absurdities and harm that would also be unleashed by such a platform. Influence peddling is regulated if not prohibited and illegal in many areas of business, technology, healthcare, law, military and politics. Not clear the pros would outweigh the cons but this white paper doesn't go into any depth on such things.

8. "an 'automated market-maker,' and it’s the same concept that powers protocols like Uniswap and Bancor." - TODO: research this claim.

9. "Just like Bitcoin, anyone on the internet can run a BitClout 'node' that serves the BitClout content, and every node on the network stores a full copy of all the data" - Not "just like Bitcoin" because where's the code other than the released version we can see behind Cloudflare? Where is the repository, source code, version history, and organization to manage commits to the codebase that is being deployed live to the Internet via accounts with Cloudflare and other organizations currently?

10. "anybody can build apps on top of the BitClout data without the risk of being de-platformed" - false. The whole platform depends on Cloudflare account setup for DNS and SSL over which someone has control and for which someone is paying. The risk of being de-platformed is high if you choose to build on something over which you have no control and into which you only have access via reverse engineering.

11. "When you visit bitclout.com, you’re using our node, but there are already dozens of nodes on the network, all run by people like you." - There is no proof of this assertion nor definition of what "node" means in that claim. All we have knowledge of, as far as I am sure yet, are several Angular instances (aka “nodes” because they run on Node js in a kubernetes cluster), which we can deduce from unique instance IDs in externally exposed HTTP headers.