What is mining and Who ...
My writing is not my experience but only 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.
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.
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. steemit demands our transaction, we supply it in order to gain access to the values of the steem 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.
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.
steemit 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.