Adeniyi Abidemi
3 min readApr 25, 2022

SOCIAL MINING : A FAD OR A PROBLEM SOLVING TOOL?

It is without a shred of a doubt that the crypto space has experienced various hypes and trends following the advent of Bitcoin in 2008. We have seen the evolution of DeFi, to the NFT craze(where Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet for a whooping $2.9 million USD), down to the metaverse, and now the order of the day is… Oh yea, social mining.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MINING?

There has been a lot of beliefs that projects cannot survive without the venture capitalists and whales, who take all the wealth associated with the success of projects, just like how the miners have benefited hugely from making transactions possible in the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, leaving crumbs to the other parties that have also, in one way or the other, contributed to the success of the blockchains. This anomaly births the simple idea that anyone who can help to build an open source cryptocurrency ecosystem, should be rewarded in its native currency, which helps the blockchain on his way to truly becoming a decentralised autonomous organisation.

HOW DOES SOCIAL MINING WORK?

Based on the idea that any community user can upload and describe the workdone for the ecosystem, which is validated by other community members (called validators) following set rules and incentives. Workers (community users) and validators are rewarded in Reward, Influence and Points; or what I refer to as the “RIP of Social Mining”, which is then translated into tokens at the end of the month, bearing in mind that what you give is what you get, ranging from a few cents to thousand of dollars, depending on both the quantity and quality of work done (payouts depend on so many factors and these factors vary from project to project, and on how much is ear-marked for social mining)

SOCIAL MINING AS A REAL LIFE TOOL

Beyond what is known to be possible using Social Mining in the blockchain technology space( as the DAOLabs is presently a proprietor of), it is a tool that can help solve a lot of efficiency problems in contemporary business. Using the education sector as an example: Social Mining can help improve on teachers performance by rewarding the teachers with the highest contribution the best salary and incentives (the RIP of social mining can be used as a yardstick for this), while their colleagues and a part of the student body can be validators. This will definitely improve the students education and the ripple effect on the society will be massive.

Employees are known to walk out of toxic environments and not jobs, Social Mining can put an end to this toxicity in the workplace, if an employee sees that he has an equal playing field with every other employee, and knows that he gets a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, such employee sees value in his work and this increases his efficiency, which invariably improves the company’s output in general.

Fads come and go, but like every other man or woman, who would love to have a fair chance at life and wealth creation, I am fascinated about what social mining can do to change the status of an individual, who is ready to put in the work, and how this can change the way we do business, both in the crypto space and in our everyday existence.