Can Gems disrupt a distinctly niche market that Amazon has cornered?

Disclaimer: This post is apart of my contribution to the Gems community for the Gems community program. 

Let's get one thing straight, I am not an expert in blockchain technology or investing in crypto currencies, heck, until recently I barely understood what an ICO even was. In the past month I've been doing research into up and coming ICO's, looking for that next big thing in the blockchain space. I was led astray often by false promises and lofty claims upon doing my due-diligence while trying to find ICO's. One things for sure, I didn't really find many of these new ICO's very interesting in any sense: they mostly consisted of big ideas with a token that served minuscule utility and even if some of these coins did bring something innovative to the table I found their teams to be lacking in one way or another. Because of these two reasons I felt relatively hopeless, deciding to throw in the towel upon being defeated by my futile attempt at maybe being apart of something big in terms of a new idea or platform that could revitalize blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Obviously this post is self-evident that this has changed with my discovery of Gems. 

The first thing that caught my eye was the team that was working on this project, the whole team page is pretty much seeping with credentials and experience. Each member brings something different to the table, with the founders being very successful in a past project and the advisers all having experience that could very positively benefit the development of Gems. I personally found the inclusion of Ben Maurer to be a very interesting part of the advisory panel, reCaptcha is an incredibly successful technology project.  All in all, the team appears to be solid, a combined package that should all contribute all the resources required to launch such an ambitious project such as this. 

So Gems, a platform that is planned to bring a decentralized solution to micro-work as an emerging form of employment. This is very intriguing to me as somebody who has attempted to utilize the micro-work platform spearheaded by Amazon, Mechanical Turk, to make money part time. I've always been interested in generating income using technology in my free time, the idea of getting paid to do little tasks on my computer sounded amazing! Well upon further reading I discovered that due to a variety of reasons, Amazon's solution to micro-work wasn't very enticing. People reported that the platform paid out extremely minimal amounts of funds to workers for the work that was put in. A lot of people who have utilized the platform that I personally know compared it to "digital slavery", yikes. 

Gems looks to bring a platform like Mechanical Turk to the Ethereum Blockchain, this is truly something unique to the tokenized economy. We have many crypto currencies that are designed to serve as utility coins, platforms and micro-transactions but nothing has blended all three in such an elegant way like Gems before. In the grand scheme of things, Amazon currently has a pretty tight hold on this sector of the human-capital economy. This could be disrupted very successfully with the Gems platform, micro-work can be become more fair and provide a good way to introduce more people into the Ethereum platform and Blockchain technology. It's projects like this that make me excited for the future of Ethereum, I'm incredibly interested in ideas and platforms that disrupt the global economy, whether it pertains to trade or labour. I could really see Gems playing a big part in the 'revolution' part of the blockchain revolution. A warm feeling emerges inside of me when I find projects that make it more accessible for people to contribute to the blockchain community, I think Gems has a ton of potential to allow for this contribution in a big way.