What Are Minds Tokens And How To Use Them
I've had several people request how to boost posts the most effectively, why Minds tokens weren't meant to be sold and bought on exchanges, among other questions around their tokens and the use of them.
So this video is covering all of that and hopefully helping curb the learning curve on Minds. You don't necessarily need to understand cryptocurrency or blockchain and you can treat Minds tokens as if they were Bits from Twitch which are like a point system more than a currency unless you start getting into using on-chain tokens, buying, selling etc.
I go over boosting in this video, but I've since recorded a much better video and I go through boosting in the blog associated as well here: Boosting Your Posts And Profile On Minds Blog
EDIT: You can buy on-chain tokens on ForkDelta and given the Ethereum network isn't congested you can save money by buying them at 0.02 each and spending the gas fee to use them assuming you are boosting at least 2 tokens worth it would be of equal value. If you do more than 2 tokens for a boost, you will save money. I am doing a video on this today.
Let me know your thoughts and any other questions or concerns in the comments!
What Are Minds Tokens And How To Use Them Blog
The motivation behind Minds is that tokens are rewarded with digital currency for their activities and can exchange that currency for ad space or use it to trade with others on the site.
A Minds token is an ERC20 utility token on the Ethereum blockchain that you can trade with other users or spend on ads/boosting your posts within the network. They can be stored within your wallet attached to your profile and your on-chain tokens can be stored in a Web3 wallet, typically people use Metamask which I explain how to setup. I also have a video on how to buy or sell tokens on ForkDelta
There will be 900,000,000 tokens allocated for rewards that you can earn as well as tokens spent on ads may be put back into circulation.
Your Minds Wallet
To navigate to your wallet click the bank icon beside your notifications on a desktop or if you are on mobile it will be in the bottom left.
Now when you get into the wallet for the first time it will be a little overwhelming. So we will go through each section.
Earning Tokens
All tokens you earn will be off-chain which is generally what you want because to transfer or use off-chain tokens cost you no Ethereum gas fees. You can see all the different ways you earn contribution points on Minds and what your score is for each day. Essentially your earnings come from whatever your score is in a 24 hour period divided by the overall network score of every user combined. This will give you a percent share of the daily reward pool which for me today looks like it will be close to 4.2 tokens. You can also see your previous scores which give you some indication of your analytics, but nothing super in-depth.
You can click on any given day to see a breakdown of how your score is calculated. All of these should be obvious as to what earns what. Referrals are covered later, but essentially you get those points when someone signs up via your referral link. Receiving OnChain transactions gives you a bonus and I'm not sure why since the sender had to spend the extra fees to send it. Check-ins are awarded if you have voted within 1-hour intervals meaning you can earn up to 48 points per day from it via voting on something every hour.
Buy Tokens
We don't want to buy tokens directly from Minds currently until their token listed on enough exchanges and they can offer market price. I go over all of this in How To Buy And Sell On-Chain Minds Tokens On ForkDelta.
To simplify, they have it pegged to $0.15 whereas you can get it for grossly cheaper on ForkDelta and or you could buy off-chain tokens from other users which have typically sold for about $0.10 and have no gas fees.
Withdrawing Tokens To On-chain Wallet
This takes your off-chain tokens and withdraws them to your off-chain wallet. Given you must have a wallet, pay fees to use on-chain tokens, and it's just way more time consuming and complex, I would say you shouldn't do this. UNLESS, you are concerned with the security of your tokens (losing your account), or you want to sell your tokens on ForkDelta. Otherwise keep it off-chain.
Transactions
This just shows all your transactions from whatever period of time you look at between you and Minds as well as you and other users.
Addresses
This is simple enough, if you've connected your web3 or Metamask address it will show up here or else you will have to connect it or import an address. Minds can also make you an address if need be you can create a new one and they will generate a public key and let you download your private key.
Can I create a new Ethereum address?
Can I use an existing Ethereum address?
Off-Chain Vs. On-Chain
This is explained pretty well in the Token 101 section but for simplicity sake, off-chain tokens you don't need any understanding of blockchain or cryptocurrency to use, whereas on-chain you do. Off-chain tokens have no fees attached, but are harder to accumulate because you cannot buy them without doing so unofficially from other users or earning them. On-chain tokens are easier to acquire because you can buy them from Minds or on ForkDelta for much cheaper, but they have fees (still cheaper if you know what you're doing and check my tutorial that I linked twice above). Though you do need to understand the basics of cryptocurrency, setup a web wallet, own some Ethereum, and spend a bit more time when using them because you have to set how much gas fee you are willing to pay per transaction and such.
Wire
Wires simply represent a transaction of Minds tokens. So below your profile and above your rewards tier section you will see your wires received in the past 4 weeks and how many tokens you received in that time. So you can see I received 320 tokens within 13 wires or transactions. Mind you I bought most of these from someone.
Should you decide that you want to have premium content that people must pay / donate to view you can do so in settings under the "wire" tab. From there you can set the default preview that people see and your prompt as to why they should pay for your premium content that is "locked."
I cover this in posting on the main guide, but we will quickly refresh how to post premium content
When you go to post and you click on the public button you will have a drop down menu of your reward tiers that you can choose from or just set a custom amount people have to have donated to view your content.
Recurring Wires
This shows up under your billing section for some reason, essentially it just shows your recurring payments and lets you cancel them if you should choose. Why would you even have recurring payments? Well if you want premium content from someone you could set this up or if you want to continually donate to support a creator you may think about doing this.
You can see some of my recurring donations below:
Testnet Tokens
If you were on the testnet before it officially launched then you should know a lot of this, but essentially it will let you transfer your tokens from the old network. Don't worry about this if you weren't on Minds before mid August of 2018.
Referral Link
You can use their referral link to earn some tokens if anyone joins via your link which just looks like
https://www.minds.com/register?referrer=(YOURUSERNAME)
Interestingly enough you can add ?referrer=(YOURUSERNAME) to any post and then if someone signs up from that within 24 hours you will earn tokens too. I just learned about this so this will be added to my future posts.
So for example if I were doing it for this blog it would be: https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness/blog/boosting-and-minds-tokens-explained-946293268109484032?referrer=scottcbusiness
Reward Tiers
Since we are covering so much already, we might as well cover reward tiers briefly too.
This is pretty simple, it's like how Subscribestar or Patreon works where you promise some sort of reward and people will donate to you in hopes that you honor that. There is no way to ensure someone honors what they have laid out given they can change it at anytime etc., but I've never really heard of people scamming people with fake rewards. Presumably you would only donate a lot to someone you like and appreciate and again I am assuming that you would also trust them or their reputation.
This post along with many other tutorials can be found here:
The Absolutely Epic Guide For Learning To Use Minds
Minds help and support group: https://www.minds.com/groups/profile/100000000000000681/feed
Minds FAQ: https://www.minds.com/faq
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