I think I opened an account there, but I can't remember to be honest. The system was full of Alex Jonesian posts, left and right and I felt like it was not somewhere where I could find a community. That being said, I was interested in the concept, still am, but I struggled to understand how the monetization was going to take off.

_minds.com

Ethereum's shortcomings

I'm not anti-ether and I want to make that clear before anyone goes after my throat. I just know, and this is not debatable at this point, that it's not ideal for microtransactions. Let's face the music, the cost of gas alone would render microtransactions painfully expensive, and this is on top of the fact that network confirmations take ten sometimes 20 minutes on any given day.

I fully realize there's a roadmap, and in the future, potentially, when Ethereum 2.0 is actually a thing, we will be looking at a system that can handle all of these things. There's the idea of sharding, for example, which if implemented, in my opinion, would be the game changer that would set Ethereum as the true king of smart contracts, but... I digress.

Point is that minds.com and hence the mind token runs on Ethereum, and because of this the very concept is flawed to begin with. They are running a mile with heavy boots on a very, very sandy beach and calling it efficient.

Utility token Mind

The concept somewhat simple: The token is not tradable (sounds like #voice), you have to earn it through content creation and interaction, or purchase it directly from them (not like #voice). At this very second they are 15 cents to buy, but if you take into account GAS prices, you would be paying close to 70 cents or so per token.

Since there's a demand for them, although relatively small, you can trade them peer to peer with other users of the platform. Since there's no actual market to do this, the whole thing is based on trust, and if you can't see the problem here, I don't know what to tell you.

So what does the Mind token do? Apparently, one thing: It boosts posts to the top. Yes, that's it. Nothing more, nothing less. So might ask yourself: Why would I buy a token on an obscure platform to boost content to a tiny audience? And I don't actually have an answer for you at this very moment.

Economic Models

Are not easy, and even more importantly they are difficult to setup within a legal framework. In other words, nobody can just open up a stripe/paypal account and begin selling tokens, without taking all the steps to avoid being sued into oblivion.

It's probably because of this that minds.com has kept its functionality and economic model very simple. But, simple to the point where I don't really think its actually working. Of course, I could be wrong here, I just don't see how.

So to answer the question...

Did it fail?

I see it standing on very feeble legs at the moment. It's an echo chamber for a very niched group and unless I'm missing a big chunk of the picture, I don't know how the funds they've collected, since it's inception and through the overpriced and cumbersome token sales.

What are your thoughts on minds.com?