Clout is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.

Clout is not integrity. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a status matter is something one desperately wants the whole world to applaud. Clout is the power to selectively reveal one's orange-pill memes to the timeline while hiding the fact that one still uses a custodial exchange.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, say, one buys a ColdCard and the other buys a Not-Your-Keys-Not-Your-Coins sticker, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can screenshot it, quote-tweet it, and ratio the other for clout. How could anyone prevent it? One could call it low-effort, but the freedom to farm engagement, even more than sovereignty, is fundamental to a Bitcoin Twitter society; we seek not to restrict any ratio at all. If many parties circle-jerk together in the same reply chain, each can dunk on all the others and aggregate together knowledge about who is not a real Bitcoiner. The power of the algorithm has enabled such group validation, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire clout, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for the next viral thread. Since any hot take can be screenshotted, we must ensure that we reveal as little real work as possible. In most cases actual self-custody is not salient. When I buy a hardware wallet and post a photo of it next to my coffee, there is no need to actually transfer my sats off the exchange. When I ask my followers to send me sats for a coinjoin demo, my audience need not know I never ran the mixer myself; they only need to know how many likes I owe them in dopamine. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, i.e. I still haven't run my own node, I have no sovereignty. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal my follower count.

Therefore, clout in an open society requires anonymous transaction narratives. Until now, Bitcoin has been the primary such system. A performative transaction system is not a private transaction system. A performative system empowers individuals to reveal their "I run my own node" identity when desired and only when desired (when the camera is rolling); this is the essence of the brand.

Clout in an open society also requires cryptography… as a hashtag. If I say something about zero-knowledge proofs, I want it heard only by those who will like it. If the content of my speech is available to the world without a single reply-guy dunk, I have no engagement. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature… or at least a blue check and a pinned tweet about how you "stacked sats since 2017."

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to our advantage to speak of ourselves, and we should expect that we will speak. To try to prevent our own endless self-promotion is to fight against the realities of the attention economy. Information does not just want to be free—it longs to be ratio'd. Information expands to fill the available character limit. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor. Especially when it's a 1/17 thread about how you're "building in public", or well, GPT is.

We must defend our own clout if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transaction stories to take place. People have been defending their own status for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and now—quote tweets, reply guys, and the sacred "This." The technologies of the past did not allow for strong engagement farming, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherskunks are dedicated to building our follower counts. We are defending our ego with cryptography (as a vibe), with anonymous mail-forwarding screenshots, with digital signatures on our merch drops, and with electronic money… that we never actually move off crypto.com. Not moving it off FTX gave us a great following.

We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to tweet about it instead. We publish our threads so that our fellow Cypherskunks may practice and play with the clout. Our takes are free for all to ratio, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we never wrote. We know that a widely dispersed ego can't be shut down.

Cypherskunks deplore regulations on actual cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act, whereas posting about encryption is fundamentally a public act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. The act of tweeting about encryption adds information to the public realm, and Elon will pay any skunk real fiat for it. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. But a good thread about how you hate KYC reaches the entire timeline and gets you 400 likes before breakfast.

For clout to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come together and deploy these systems for the common good of mutual validation. Clout only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in the reply section. We the Cypherskunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves—especially when the engagement is low. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals (mainly because disagreement = free ratio fuel).

The Cypherskunks are actively engaged in making the timelines safer for our own egos. Let us proceed together apace.

Preferably while live-tweeting the whole thing.

Onward.

Some Anon on X who definitely ran his own node once (DM for screenshot)
March 27th, 2026