Today marks my official debut as a social miner for the Harmony Social Mining (HSM) initiative. I will start participating in value-adding activities that will help the Harmony ecosystem grow and mature. In order to do this, I have enlisted myself to be a content writer in HSM with the primary focus on writing articles that explains various aspects of the platform. To begin with, let me give you some background on Harmony and Social Mining. This should give you a clear picture of why I have decided to participate in HSM despite the hectic schedule I have and higher-earning opportunities if I spent my time doing freelance writing.
Harmony is a relatively new high-performance blockchain which has been gaining much attention in the cryptocurrency space lately. It differentiates itself from other blockchain projects by providing a production-ready solution to the Blockchain Trilemma that has plagued blockchain developers for years. Harmony’s solution is so innovative that they have introduced another element in the Trilemma which they believe should carry as much importance as the traditional three elements, Privacy. They call it the Blockchain Quadrilemma. They were able to do this by utilizing the Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) and Sharding technology.
Explaining how these technologies work goes beyond the scope of this article, but I do have plans to discuss them in the near future when I have gained enough understanding, experience, and confidence to go over them. I can, however, share with you what they do. EPoS plays a critical part in the decentralization of the selection of block producers and at the same time introduces a mechanism that prevents top stakers from over-staking and bottom stakers from voter apathy, thus enhancing consensus participation. On the other hand, Harmony sharding technology is a horizontal scaling solution that enables it to process transactions concurrently while maintaining consensus in a decentralized setting.
Interestingly these two technologies are the two top goals of the next Iteration of Ethereum network, the leading smart contract platform. The current version of the Ethereum network is just not scalable enough to handle transactions of the many dApps built on top of it. In addition to this, when its network is congested, transaction fees exponentially increase rendering the network excessively expensive to use. Worst, transactions are not confirmed or experience severe delays due to its Highest-Fee-First-Serve (HFFS) transaction scheduling. PoS and Sharding were supposed to solve this but are yet to be implemented.
Due to a history of delays, many are doubting if Ethereum developers will make good on their promise to release Ethereum 2.0 on January 3, 2020. Conversely one can describe Harmony as a fully realized production level Ethereum 2.0 which is not only available NOW but uses similar technologies with superior implementations. Harmony also features an EVM compatible Virtual machine and a planned one-click migration tool that will enable Ethereum developers to leverage Harmony’s blockchain technology with minimal effort. This highlights Harmony’s strong point in terms of its technology and as a blockchain organization.
The Harmony team of blockchain engineers and its technology are two of the main reasons why I decided to participate in their Harmony Social Mining activities. Its team members distinguish themselves as blockchain engineers rather than just plain blockchain developers. This implies they have a strong affinity towards efficiency, accuracy, precision, timeliness and other engineering principles. In other words, each member has clearly defined responsibilities, knows exactly what they are doing, aware of why they are doing it, identifies precisely where problems are, when it should be dealt with and more importantly how they will approach the problem.
This kind of discipline is rarely seen in many blockchain teams, especially in a decentralized environment. More often than not other teams are in disarray lacking coordination and cohesion, resulting in delays and missing key milestone deliverables and worse churning out half-baked and inefficient solutions with many system design flaws.
Harmony’s culture of excellence is not surprising given the fact that the team members come from the most prestigious higher education institutions around the world and have experience working from the most dominant technology companies. No wonder Harmony did not have a hard time getting listed or shortlisted in the most trusted and influential exchanges in the world.
Now that I have explained the reasons why I wanted to participate in Harmony’s awareness program, let me share with you why I chose Social Mining as the primary platform to participate. Let me first give you a quick background about Social Mining. It is essentially a new community-driven marketing tool created by DAO Maker. It offers various blockchain-based organizations like Harmony, a plugin solution to become a decentralized autonomous organization. Furthermore, it enables them to reward community members who add value to the project’s ecosystem using their own protocol tokens.
DAO MAKER aims to build a Network of strong and high quality cryptocurrency projects, that are all supported by Social mining and its network of high value human capital.
While the Social Mining Platform provides the venue where Projects can reward value-adding community participants they do not determine how much or who gets rewarded in the platform. Community members take on the role of validators to qualify contributions as well as to quantify how much rewards participants should get. The system uses a sophisticated algorithm to compute the exact amount of rewards social miners get. It takes into consideration the voting weight of validators based on their influence and reputation they received from their contribution as well as those delegated by other users.
Validation is the process of evaluating contributions and decide whether the contribution should be rewarded or penalized. They are incentivized to always upvote contributions that add value to the Harmony ecosystem. They are also encouraged to downvote low-value contributions, while not rewarded, ensures that higher quality and Higher value contributions are better rewarded.
It is also a way to protect the reward pools from undeserving social mining activities. Moreover, this serves as a strong reminder that only those who contribute something of value will receive good rewards.
Membership in the DAO Maker’s Social Mining Platform is limited to deserving projects. All projects that want to be included in their platform are carefully evaluated to see if they meet the high standards of the platform. This ensures a pool of high-quality social mining sites. The same can be said with people who can participate in social mining. While everyone is welcome to join only those who are willing to hold a certain amount of tokens of the project are qualified to social mine. This requirement ensures that only those who hold the project’s native assets are given the chance to participate in social mining.
Social mining is the idea that users that help build an open-source cryptocurrency ecosystem should be rewarded in its native currency.
By applying so many checks and controls in the social mining platform will consist of social miners who have a more vested interest in the project to succeed. They are more loyal and better-informed token holders and more importantly, as the CEO of DAO Maker says, effectively turned the typical community of passive investors into a decentralized engine of systematic value creation that is governed by the community itself. This means the community will have members with a higher degree of knowledge about the project and will be holding a higher amount of token as token holdings are directly proportional to social mining influence, which in turn affects rewards.
What makes Social Mining such a wonderful platform to work on is the fact that you will not need to build another social media network. Instead, you will just leverage your existing ones. Social Mining Platform has already integrated with Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram into its system allowing participants to automatically claim contributions. You can also contribute by using Medium, Steemit, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and other relevant social media networks. This is the primary reason why I love social mining, I can keep using STEEM-based social media network to contribute to my social mining activities as well as my other social media accounts.
New social miners can register using a referral link or using one of your social media site like Twitter or Facebook as well as you Gmail account.
The very first thing you need to do is head over to the Harmony Social Mining registration page and register your account. If you like you can use my referral link here. Once you have registered you will also have your own referral link. This is used to incentivize onboarding new social miners. Each time you invite one new user you will receive 15 ONE points. Each of your invites will earn 10 One Points. Please note that you are only limited to invite 5 new users a day.
Once you log in the very first thing that will greet is the community platform onboarding survey. The survey is used to determine your role in the Harmony Social Mining Community. You can skip this and try to do it later. Your role indicated is not fixed in stone. You can always change your role anytime. Since I plan to share blogs I chose to be a content writer. Of course, this does not stop me from submitting other forms of contributions. Once done immediately head over to the Profile page of the platform to set up your account. The first thing you will see is two fields to declare your wallets.
There are some requirements before you can start Social Mining Harmony. You are required to have 10,000 ONE tokens worth around 55 USD at present exchange rates. However, this may increase soon as the usual minimum requirement for social mining is around 100-150 USD worth of tokens. No need to worry as you will not lose custody of these tokens. You will just have to put them to a non-custodial wallet. At present, there are three token standards where Harmony exists, ERC-20, BEP2, and its mainnet tokens. We have no use for mainnet tokens right now in the social mining activities thus we will focus our discussion with the two standards.
BEP2 One Wallet (Binance Chain-based) Does not require a verification transaction unlike ERC-20 Wallet (Ethereum-based) that needs to conduct a 0 ETH transaction. It takes 24 hours before your ONE tokens inside these wallets are confirmed.
ERC-20 Harmony Tokens (ONE) can be stored in any non-custodial ERC-20 wallet. To qualify you just have to register the address of your ERC20 wallet where you are holding the required minimum of ONE token. Once you have inputted your ERC-20 wallet address in the wallet field the Social Mining platform it will ask you to verify your address by sending 0 ETH to a specified address by the platform. Make sure you also have enough ETH gas to make the transaction and send it to the required wallet address. When the transaction is confirmed a green box with a check icon will appear next to your address.
Remember wallet verification is not Instant. It takes 24 hours before your wallet is verified.
All you have to do is just wait 24 hours for your wallet to be verified. You know you are in when the “10,000 required tokens“ box in the “My Rewards page” turns green. For the benefit of those who have no experience in using ERC20 wallets here are some of my recommended wallets you can use. Trust Wallet, MyEtherWallet and Metamask. You can also use any ERC-20 hardware wallets as well, like Ledger or Trezor. If you chose to use the BEP2 wallet instead, the process is almost exactly the same except you don’t need to verify the wallet. All you have to do is to declare your BEP2 wallet address where the required minimum token are held.
For clarification, the ONE-5F9 tokens are BEP2-based Harmony tokens. Even though it was not clearly indicated in the Social Mining platform you can use either one of the wallets (ERC-20 or BEP2). Just in case you want to convert one token to the other the Harmony team has created a token bridge where you can do this. Here is the link to the website.
The next section on the profile page calls you to accomplish your basic information. More often than not you would have registered using an email and that email is automatically reflected in the email field. If you have registered using your social media account like Twitter or Facebook it will use your email account from these social media networks. Just fill in your username and some information about yourself. You can also set your preferred profile pic. Although it is not required it is better if you can give a short bio about yourself in order for other social miners to know what you do or what is your interest.
In this section, you are asked to link your social media accounts to the Harmony Social Mining Website. Currently, you are able to link Telegram, Reddit, Twitter, and Github. The last three social media accounts are quite easy to accomplish, you just have to make sure you are logged in the various social media accounts and just approve the authorization each time you link them. On the other hand, in order to link your Telegram, it requires you to chat with a Telegram chatbot with username @HarmonyCommunityBot to set up your account.
The Harmony Social Mining platform requires social miners to undergo KYC procedure depending on the cumulative reward amount you receive for your work. There are 4 levels of KYC and the system will require you to accomplish them once you receive certain amounts of rewards.
This page allows you to browse to the different contributions of the Social Miners. You can also click on each contribution and engage the Social Miner.
Now that you have set up your account and your wallet has been verified with the required amount of tokens you can start engaging the Social Mining community. You can do this through the Community board where you can validate some of the contributions of your fellow social miners. This will give you a good idea of what other social miners are doing. You get rewarded when you validate contributions. Initially, your upvote will carry less weight but as you gain rewards this will increase due to your influence and reputation. Validating contributions is the easiest way to contribute to social mining.
Twitter contributions can easily be claimed here. So long as you meet the minimum requirement you will be rewarded. Of course, the community will also vote on your contributions.
The second easiest way is to contribute to using Twitter. You can retweet and create valuable tweets and claim those activities on the Twitter board. You can contribute Original Tweets if you have more than 25 followers. Each of the Tweets will give you 10 ONE points. They should be at least 25 characters long and have the #HarmonyONE hashtag. You can only claim tweets that are not more than 5 days old and limited to 2 Tweets a day. You can also do retweets which also earns you 10 ONE points. You need to have 70 followers and it is limited to a maximum retweets of 2 a day.
You can also start creating original Reddit posts and commenting on official posts. However, I cannot share with you what are the requirements for Reddit since I have yet to reach the minimum reputation to participate which is 1.0. I will discuss this further when this option opens up to me. You can claim Reddit contributions in the Reddit Board. Lastly, if you correctly linked your Telegram to Harmony Social Mining platform you should earn 30 ONE points.
You can link our account by messaging this chat bot: @HarmonyCommunityBot
You can report your contribution using the “Submit Activity” board. Most of the time you will be submitting Generic as Activity Type. However, you can also submit a bug report or a feature request. Your activity can be one of the following. Marketing, Business and Tech. There is also Team request, a submission for activities that the Harmony Team asked from the social mining community. Once you have indicated those you can now submit a link of your work and give a title. Lastly, you have to describe your contribution. It is here where you have to show proof of value (PoV).
To get the greater chance of getting higher upvotes you have to show them what value your contribution brings on the table. Quality is always appreciated over quantity. Other social miners know when you put effort into your work so your work. Recently the platform started showing statistics about the traction of each contribution this means validators will have now a measurable basis for their upvote. Finally, you should include tags for your activity to make it easier for other social miners to find your contributions when searching.
There are two pages where you can monitor your progress as a social miner. The first one is the My Activities page. This page shows you the statistics of all your activities including all the upvotes and downvotes you have accumulated. It also shows you a report of all the upvotes and downvotes you have given out. On the other hand, the rewards page shows you all the payouts you have received so far.
This page shows you how you are faring compared to the other social miners in the network. It is a good way to benchmark your performance and be inspired on the possibilities of what you can achieve. You can arrange them by username, influence, Rep, Rep ratio and earned Points. I also find this page useful when searching for specific social miners.
Now that my journey in Harmony Social Mining has begun I plan to share with you the lessons I learned and experiences I have while exploring Harmony as well as using the social mining platform. Hopefully, my insights will help you in your own journey to discover the enormous potential of Harmony’s blockchain. Aside from documenting my learning experiences, Together with other social miners, we are in the process of forming a team in our local community to help increase the number of Harmony Social Mining participants as well as spread word about Harmony blockchain. This is in response to Harmony Team’s call to form teams and leverage each other’s strengths and core competencies and create communities around Harmony’s ecosystem and its decentralized applications.
I hope you have all enjoyed my introduction about starting Harmony Social Mining. Next time I will introduce the team we have formed and the reveal the plans we have in-store to increase participation and engagement of our local community in the Harmony social mining platform as well as in other relevant parts of the Harmont Ecosystem. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog-post and hopefully, I see you around in Harmony’s Social Mining Website. If you have any questions about what I wrote of notice any error please make use of the comment section to get my attention. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
