Welcome again, this is Dave Tatera here. I've got some more exciting BitClout news and updates to share with you. I'm super excited to get right into this here in just a second. Today I'm going to go over the BitClout Explorer.
What Is The BitClout Explorer
So there's this this little guy over here. If you haven't seen it before this is BitClout Explorer. You enter in the field here, where it says block hash transaction ID, public key. You put a public key in there and what will happen is this will pull up every single transaction related to that public key. I can imagine for some people it's a huge file and for others it's much, much smaller.
Depends how many transactions and how many things you have done, but there's some really useful information you can learn from looking at the block about what someone is doing about what they're buying, what they're selling. If you want to go back and look at your own history and see what you bought or sold. But It also can help tell if you have a fake profile that you're looking at, which is really, really useful.
Use The BitClout Explorer To Weed Out Scams
There's a kind of a niche trick to be able to weed out a bunch o scam profiles. I'm going to dive right in and I'm going to use my own public key just to make things nice and clean. I'm going here to get a copy of the public key and we will throw it right into the explorer. It's going to take it a minute to pull it up, but you can see mine up here. So you can remember it ends in this zat. So anytime you see a public key listed in a transaction today, that ends in zat, you know that's referring to me.
It's gonna look a little different depending on whether it's a transaction of me buying something or transaction of somebody else doing something. You're going to see different things. For example, this first one that comes up, you can see right here this transaction type is private message. So this is recording a private message that was sent between this CFG person that ends here in CFG and me. I'm right down here the zat.
Different Types Of BitClout Transaction
It doesn't give you all the information about what was actually in that particular exchange there, but you know that these two people had a private message. So we're gonna move on down to the next one, and the next one is a like. You can see right here from the transaction type, I'm gonna skip that.
Here's a submit post, and another like, and a follow. You can see we're checking out all these different transaction types, submit posts, pretty soon we'll get to a coin one. Here's another like, follow, submit post. A lot's happened since I last bought any coins, huh?
It's Sunday afternoon. The market kind of tanked over the weekend. We all lost some money in crypto. Anybody who had money in crypto is seeing their money go down. So I kind of have sat back and let a lot of things sit still, but I am shocked that I don't have a coin transaction.
Every Sale And Purchase Recorded
The blockchain keeps track of every purchase or sale on BitClout. This is public record and anyone can look at it, so be careful. If you decide to pull some stunts, you won't be welcome for long.
Creator Coin Transactions
Here's our first creator coin transaction. So here we go. Now we got a creator coin. This means that I either bought, or I sold creator coins. When you see this transaction, that's, that's what that's a reference to. So how do you know if it was me buying or selling? You're gonna look and see the first two ones here. That is my coin. That is my name right there, zat. And then you're going to see the third one is this right here, this key right here.
Let's go pull up this person and I'll show you how to follow this. I like BitCloutPulse to put these in. They, they do a great job pulling up things by public key. When I pull up this public key, you see it as this guy called WthdrawBitClout.
Let's Look At WithdrawBitClout
What happened was that I purchased some WithdrawBitClout. It's one of the new exchanges that's popped up, I like the way that they operate and I've done another video on them. I'm a big fan and maybe I'll reference them again, but they're, they're really awesome.
So that's the coin that I was buying. So you can see now this is me buying this coin and how do you know what to buy... Right there? Then the amount that was bought, the portion of a creator coin. If you're not familiar with this, it ends up being a nine decimal point number.
What's A BitClout Nano
If you were to imagine nine numbers at the beginning, like 0.005, creator coins is what that ends up being. Nanos are a little confusing, maybe I'll do another video to explain the difference between the nanos and the regular coins. But nanos are basically, 10 to the negative 9th. Negative 9 decimal places before the end.
That is just telling you how much I bought. So this says, I bought this creator coin and that's how much. Let's move down and see if we can see here's another one. This is where I sold this creator coin and you can see it because there's a sell down here. It tells you how much of the creator coin I sold. In fact, this was when I was going to pick up a little bit more of WithdrawBitClout.
Public Keys Are... Public
Everyone on BitClout can see your public key. That means that any transaction you do which records on the blockchain is there for anyone to see. Some info (like private messages) is not stored this way.
Learning To Read Public Keys
I sold a couple of coins and picked up a little bit more of them. Sometimes you'll even see ones where my creator coin creator coin was in this line and these two have someone else's key and this had mine ending in the zat. That would be either them buying or selling my coin, and this would tell you how much. You can see the transactions. Who's doing the buying or the selling, whose coin they're buying or selling, whether it's a buy or a sell, and how much. So that's the way you basically read it.
You read it, this person is getting this person's coin, buying or selling it, here's how much they're buying or selling and here's whether they're buying or selling it. One extra cool thing that this lets you do and thisI think is unbelievably helpful, is if you go down to the very, very first transaction.
It was my coin and it was transferred in by this guy. This guy transferred into my account a little bit of BitClout. Well, what does that mean? This particular key lines up very nicely for us. If you happen to look and see who that one ending in 7s6. If you play with the explorer, you will get really used to seeing it, cause this guy is Merlin.
How Merlin Can Help You Avoid Being Scammed
I don't know if you remember Merlin, Merlin was probably your first investor. In fact, he should be the very first person on there who sent you a tiny bit of coin under one circumstance, you verified with your phone. So what does that mean?
A lot of the people that are making fake scammy profiles. They can't sit there and keep remaking profiles over and over and over and over again and verifying with a phone. BitClout doesn't verify with a voice-over-IP, you have to use a real actual cell phone.
So if you see that 7s6 at the end, it means they verified with a real phone. Don't get me wrong, I've gone in on phone verified profiles, where I pulled it up in BitCloutPulse. When I put the coin in and it'll list three different profiles because the person has changed the name of it a few times and they're using it in a scammy way.
Scammers Running Multiple Profiles
That can happen for sure, but they're not running a ton of different profiles. They're not one of these profile farms, because they can't be. You can't do that if you are going to be authenticating with a real cell phone.
Anyway, that's the tip there, I hope this helps you guys to understand the Block Explorer a little bit better and be able to see what kind of transactions are going in and out. If you have any questions regarding crypto scam, please put them in the comments down at the bottom.
Aloha