What is mining who

My writing is pretty much me reflecting on my experiences and observations of the world around me, with two core intentions in mind. The first is to be able to discover opportunities to improve myself and subsequently my continued experience, the second is to present it to an audience in the hope that there is some value they can extract to improve their experiences. It doesn't matter what the topic is on, whether it be about financial consideration, personal mindset, societal weakness or a fiction story or poem, these two intentions remain constant.

Last night I wrote a post on various aspects of price, the crypto industry and the future and mentioned how ownership of experience is a very important aspect of Hive for me, where I own my content, my tokens and my account. This ownership allows me to perform various activities as well as do something that I think is part our hardwiring as humans, I can leave my mark on the world.

The art of share

I think that this is driven by our social tendencies and our desire to be connected to others. Art is more than raising questions in the viewer, it is about being able to traverse space and time and talk to people we will never meet, leaving our impression on them, influencing their thoughts and behavior in some way. It doesn't matter if they are cave paintings depicting hunting techniques, or YouTube videos explaining how to service a vacuum cleaner, we are built to share our thoughts with our community, whether it be the family and friends close to us, or strangers on the other side of the world we will never meet, nor know their name.

Digital cavepeople

Just think about the paintings that we have discovered from the past and the insight it has given us into the way people lived, whether it be the sprayed hands in the Aboriginal caves, or the hieroglyphs in the Pyramids, stories are shared. The internet is an extension of this and just like the stories of the past, most will not survive as storage media gets destroyed, becomes unreadable, crumbles into dust.

But, this doesn't stop us from wanting to share, to have our activity recorded and the digital environment leverages our social desires to encourage us to participate in the narrative, to put our perspectives on life forward. With the development of Blockchains, we are able to more accurately record what we put into the ether and, with the decentralization of storage medium, we are able to better secure our stories and lower the risks of loss.

Me mining

The Hive blockchain uses these human processes and desires to mine the token it creates, to distribute it out from the spring that is the Hive inflation pool. We call the process of distribution selection Proof of Brain, but it is actually down to Proof of Network, where our many activities and interactions build relationships between us, others and the distribution mechanisms built into the code. The brain comes into it through being able to work out how things work and what adds value, both as a creative force on the supply side, and the consumptive force on the distribution side.

In actual fact, it is more than a supply and demand relationship, as the supply and demand is bi-directional. The creator both supplies value and demands value, the consumer demands supplied value and supplies token value back to the creator. It becomes a circular economy, that if successful, should be able to grow enormously, for as value increases in the token, demand increases from the suppliers who will supply more and create competition on the supply of token coming from the demands of the consumer.

Mining me

The access to the inflation pool requires payment, with that payment being activity of some kind, buying tokens, interacting, providing service and content in order to develop the relationships between what we do and the mining pool. We are trading our activity for tokens, but in doing so, the cost is our transaction of interaction with the blockchain. For content creators, the cost is the stories we share, the communications we make with other participants in the community, with what we contribute stored immutably to the blockchain, to create a mass of communication, now, and forever.

We are being mined of our stories and relationships by the Hive blockchain in the same supply and demand relationship that we have with our audience. Hive demands our transaction, we supply it in order to gain access to the values of the Hive blockchain, whether it be the token, the community, the immutability or just a place we can store our thoughts safely. A place we can leave our mark on the future, by leaving our transaction in the present. Each post is a painting on the cave wall, a handprint that can travel through time toward tomorrow, or until the medium used becomes dust.

Traveling without duplicating

The cave can be protected as sacred, the painting stored in a safe, but ultimately, each is a unique object that will fall afoul of time, a natural disaster will wipe out the cave, a fire destroy the painting. The blockchain allows for the replication of our shared stories, while maintaining consistency, where each instance on the blockchain isn't a copy, it is the original, marked, timestamped and verifiable - no matter from where or when on earth it is viewed on the blockchain.

From the moment the transaction is committed to the blockchain, it becomes part of the blockchain itself, usable, searchable, but belonging to both the contributor and the blockchain itself. Each transaction is made to create relationships between the blockchain and the pools of values, and in exchange, each transaction creates a growing pool of information and communication that tracks our past and directs our future.

Glass-walled cave

This is a clever way to mine and distribute a token, even if it is imperfect in many ways. We talk about token utility as if it is the token itself that has to do something, but this is not the case. Utility is in the token encouraging activity, participation, directing behavior. The utility of HIVE is that it encourages us to be part of the community, to create relationships, to reflect on our experience and share our thoughts from the diverse perspectives we each have. In so doing, we add our value to the blockchain to create a pool of experience resources, where some are useful daily, some might be useful for years to come, but they are here on the Hive blockchain, collected together in a single cave with glass walls.

We participate for many reasons and rarely are they singular. Some of us do it for the money, some for the concept, some for the community, the immutability, the space to share, the time to reflect, the relationships and network or the potential to be part of changing the world of information flow, by connecting who we are to the economy in a way we can all benefit.

Upon their walls

Mining information and communication is not new, it is how we have grown as a species from primitive cavepeople to a society that can organize flights to Mars. The marks we leave are vastly different, but our desires to leave them are not. The internet has allowed for a far greater information mine to be built, but for the longest time, the extraction of the stories of our lives has been performed by the very few, and the value it has has been distributed back to those few, the owners of the platforms, the gateways that manage our information.

We are being mined, but we are not seeing the value of the extraction distributed back in any meaningful way, other than the feeling that we are leaving our mark on the world. Yet, that mark is not owned by us and it is malleable, not immutable. We have seen how what we say can be twisted, hidden, deleted as if it never existed at all. We paint on their walls and they have they can erase us as they choose.

Piece of mine

We are starting to wake up to the relationship between who we are, what we share, the relationships we build and the value they are worth. We are starting to see that what we do has value and now, there are ways to own the mechanisms of distribution, but we have to pay a cost of participation. We are slowly as a society starting to pay attention to what has been taken out of sight and our thoughts on what is valuable to us are shifting, the paradigms changing.

Hive offers participation at a granular level, a transparency and a consistency of our journey. It records our individual stories to create a store of value in a pool of information and relationships and while we mine the pool with who we are, who we are is being mined by the blockchain. We collect tokens, it collects us.

And we still hold ownership.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]