32/ S/o to @C0inAlchemist @loomdart @_prestwich for their insights on BitClout

31/ Will update this thread later with: - how they process profile transfers (SWAP_IDENTITY) - how BITCOIN_EXCHANGE works and how many Bitcoin have been converted to $BitClout - how they price $BitClout - and some other interesting stuffs Gotta go for now

30/ Half of the miners are genesis public keys and some have updated their profiles Some even have already used the block rewards to buy creator coins

29/ Not sure what the total block reward is so far but last I counted there were at least 11k $BitClout mined by Block 9000 (excluding the 8 million from Block 0) I have found around 20 public keys that have BLOCK_REWARD on their transactions - gonna assume they are the miners

28/ Speaking of miners, 9,900 blocks have been mined so far Since launch day, the average block time is ~5 minutes Block reward is usually 1 $BitClout but can vary - the largest I've seen so far is 340 $BitClout for Block 3727 https://t.co/2Isd6WPrgi

27/ From what I've seen so far, genesis public keys that have updated their profiles are mostly investors and team members (including miners) Some use real profiles, others anon. There are even meme accounts

26/ These investors are all genesis public key owners with pre-mined $BitClout that have also updated their profiles chamath, who holds genesis public key #9, has 87.5k $BitClout from the Block 0 reward in his key https://t.co/sizw1r2GX6

25/ In fact, the top coin holders of the highest value Creators are mostly genesis public keys or accounts that have received pre-mined $BitClout from them charitee, who is in the top 5 coin holders of these Creators, is genesis key #244 who has updated their profile

24/ Other genesis keys used their pre-mined $BitClout to buy large amounts of Creator coin Genesis key #347 spent around 24k $BitClout on elon & naval coin, pumping their market cap in the process and is now the top holder of both their coins https://t.co/W2CAp8wpqJ

23/ Some genesis keys were emptied out - their $BitClout distributed to other keys For example, all 41k $BitClout in Genesis key #105 were sent to public key BC1YLhhjMfZBCFw(...) https://t.co/7TSduWZ528

22/ As previously mentioned, there are transactions dating from Mar 1 recorded on the 133 genesis public keys that contained ~2.3 million of the Block 0 reward By my last count, around 800k $BitClout have since been transferred out of the keys or spent on Creator coin

21/ By checking the transactions of the genesis keys, we could find out how the remaining pre-mined $BitClout are utilised and the team behind it Additionally the block explorer also lets us know who currently mine the blocks & how many BTC have been swapped for $BitClout so far

20/ On the other hand merlin's job is to give out 0.00002 starter $BitClout to every new user that signed up - to pay gas fees for simple actions like updating profile or posting A quick Twitter search for 'merlin bitclout' brings up this tweet from the day of the second launch

19/ Transactions show that master is mainly used to distribute $BitClout to influencer profiles, which were then all automatically used to buy their own coins master performed this task on 2 separate days: Mar 1 and Mar 11, the day before first launch https://t.co/4QGAf3ym6r

18/ Out of the 133 genesis keys that have shown activities since Block 0, around half have updated their profiles and could now be browsed on the BitClout website - including Genesis #102 and #131 They are respectively called "master" and "merlin"

17/ Since genesis public keys are preloaded with pre-mined $BitClout from Block 0, I reckon it is safe to assume that whoever is in possession or has access to them (482 keys in total) is part of the BitClout team or an investor

16/ We could see from the block explorer that all those $BitClout that were distributed for updating profiles and pumping purposes came from the genesis block reward 2 genesis public keys were responsible for distributing the funds: Genesis Public Key #102 and #131

15/ On Mar 11 starting from Block 5529, a similar process of sending $BitClout to each profile so they could buy their own coin began This time the amount was larger but varied arbitrarily This is why every profile comes holding their own coin and why their value is artificial

14/ Repeat the above 15,000 times and now you've got 15,000 'reserved' influencer profiles on BitClout The next step was to make the profiles look so valuable that the influencers would be enticed to claim theirs, thereby endorsing it What to do? Artificially pamp it of course

13/ On this early stage, all those empty keys went through 4 transactions - got sent a bit of $BitClout for gas - spent it to update profile as scraped from Twitter - got sent a larger amount - spent it to buy their own coin Check out Block 2 for example https://t.co/PkOmM0THWL