As part of my role at zMint.co advising the Etherical Team, I have been looking at upcoming ICOs. One that sounds interesting is GEMS.
Their idea is to use the blockchain to monetize human labor. The 9 to 5 economy is dead, see this great recent Steemit post from my counter-culture collaborator Hans Utter about surviving in the gig economy.
New workforce models require new financial models, and GEMS vision for a "Decentralized Mechanical Turk on the blockchain" provides an innovative solution. Mechanical Turk is Amazon.com's earlier, non-blockchain version of an online micro-tasking workforce.
Image credit: Saya Iwasaki, Medium
Last night I participated in the GEMS Alpha Test. They received more than 35,000 applications saying "what are you doing to promote GEMS". I missed their cutoff date, but was not too late to participate in their Alpha test - and I liked it so much I am writing this post anyway.
It was super easy, even fun, processing GEMS tasks. I must have reviewed more than 50 applications, maybe 100. We did not really get rewarded in crypto, but that hasn't stopped the eager GEMS community from participating.
1.5 million tasks have been completed in just 8 days. Imagine what the platform will be able to do when people are really getting paid for this, and there are millions of people using it.
The GEMS Telegram Group has 47,000 members - when I joined yesterday it had 43,000, so it is already growing at 10% per day - a pace well beyond what is generally considered "viral".
Contrast that to Mechanical Turk, which was introduced in 2005, grew to 100,000 registered workers by 2007, and had about 500,000 by 2011 and the same in 2015.
GEMS has "hit" written all over it. The company has raised $12.5 million in angel and Series A funding, from firms like Blockchain Capital, First Round Capital, and KEC Ventures. It is being driven by a promising young team. Brothers Rory and Kieran O'Reilly were named amongst Harvard's 19 Most Impressive Students by Business Insider and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 List with their startup Gifs.com, used by more than 65 million people. They were paid $100,000 each by the infamous Peter Thiel to drop out of Harvard. Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone is on their board, as well as Facebook's Ben Maurer (co-founder of that incredibly annoying ReCaptcha thingy that you see everywhere).
I see GEMS as more than just a new token that is likely to go up in value. This is a crucial technology that is going to revolutionize the world. Repetitive tasks that used to take hours or days can now be completed in minutes, using the power of crowd-sourcing. Anyone can participate, from anywhere. Why be homeless and dependent on handouts when you can go to a library, get on a computer, and help others while earning cryptocurrency?
Very interesting to watch the de-(facto)-nationalization of units of value into a wide variety of tokens and coins which will be traded on free markets. This is a massive improvement from the loyalty "points" systems that required additional layers of administration and walled-garden rewards.
Thank Kyle, let me know what you think of this one which is all about monetizing loyalty coupons. I think we will see airlines etc going this way soon
https://rouge.network/#more
Will do. Ironically, I would have signed up for WAY more loyalty programs over the years if I knew the points were interchangeable on open markets. They woulda had more of my data lol !
Steem-based Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) is another cool idea. And I've heard the rumor that the first SMT Vice Token may also airdrop to STEEM hodlers. https://smt.steem.io/smt-whitepaper.pdf
Yeah I really like this idea, would be great to get a whole bunch of truthers together on a 24/7 network and we can fund everyone with SMTs.
This is really interesting. This technology definitely has the potential to change the way the workforce operates as we know it. Resteeming.
Thanks for the resteem! It is like Steemit and presearch , the "Web 3" model = instead of getting everything for free and advertisers get our data and use it to bombard us with marketing that usually doesn't hit the target, the software platforms pay us for using them, we pay each other to talk to each other, and advertisers pay us for the privilege of a moment of our attention.
A world of infinite love and abundance :)
mechanical turk pays much less than minimum wage in most cases, maybe good for tasks that can be accomplished by people in very low wage countries. does this program pay much better than amazon's turk?
It has the advantage that the crypto you get paid increases in value over time, unlike fiat money which they keep printing more of. The purchasing power of the US dollar declines over time, in crypto it rises.
With the speed of the platform you should be able to earn more than minimum wage in an hour.
One of the things I learned researching this story is that 80% of mechanical turk workers are in the US, of the 20% overseas, most are in India
Wonderful, thanks for the resteem @gaman I am pleased to be a part of the New Steemians project.