Update On Minds.com (Can You Earn Crypto Yet?)
I got on Minds.com last summer as a way to extend the reach of my content and to try it out. Basically Minds is a censorship free social media site organized a little bit more like Facebook or Busy.org. This past winter they decided to turn to crypto for their monetization structure. When I first got on there I said in my blog post that they should do this. When Steemit Inc announced STEEM Smart Media Tokens (SMT) I said that Minds.com would be a perfect match to integrate an SMT into it. Then a couple months later Minds announced that they were going to be integrating crypto.
https://www.minds.com/brianphobos
Were they going to go the way of an SMT or an Ethereum Token?
They ended up going with an Ethereum Token which in my mind was a fatal mistake. Right now when you post on there you can't earn real money. They are running on the Rinkby Test Network. I posted some of my links to my blog over here on there today to see if when I earn the Test Network tokens if they will be converted to real tokens later on. I haven't been able to find the answer to that.
What I do know is that there is a daily reward pool kind of like with the STEEM blockchain that pays users for engagement. You can also use those tokens to boost your post higher so in a way it is kind of like the upvote bots integrated into the platform.
Ultimately the site is database driven and the component that is tokenized is the payments. I think that is how we will see a lot of the sites that will utilize the SMTs in the future but ultimately until Ethereum scales I don't think the network would be able to handle all the transactions of a social network running at capacity. There are also other unanswered questions.
The Minds.com CEO said they are going to switch to the Ethereum mainnet in the summer. Question is Who's Going To Pay For The GAS?
If they couldn't wait for SMT's they should have just taken the STEEM code and built off of that code base instead of paying to use someone else's network. Or if they were going to use Ethereum why not just take that code and build off of it so you aren't sharing the network with all this other traffic like CryptoKitties and thousands of scammy ICOs?
Conclusion
I'm going to keep an eye on the situation and hopefully in the future it will get worked out to where there is some crypto to be earned over there but personally I think they are partially going down a dead end.
What do you guys think?
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Some people are just in a hurry, Ethereum is currently handling 874,478Tx with 100% of its capacity and 46k out of the 874,478Tx are unconfirmed with fees paid on them already.
Those guys should move to Steem if they want to transact well
Yeah it is such a bottle neck on Ethereum. I'm not sure why these companies haven't figured that out. I guess VICE and SMOKE figured it out but we will see if they get off the ground soon.
Gas prices are too high to do tipping with Ethereum.
I mean, just the minimum charge times 1Gwei is too costly.
Yeah it gets way too expensive. I don't understand how we know this and these teams of developers working on this stuff don't see that right from the start. smh
I was curious how their crypto idea was progressing. I had an intuition that is was going to be poorly executed.
People are so territorial and possessive. They want to own their answers. It takes humility to accept someone else has a better solution.
It is certainly hard to integrate it and get the governance model down to where it will sustain itself.
Thanks for update minds.com. Always love your blog :-)
Thanks, it is certainly one to watch out for.