Contributing 2.0

It is unlikely that the word “contributing” means anything to people who neither work in IT industry nor actively participate in the development of open source projects. However, in the light of recent events, there is every reason to believe that such terms as “contributing” and “contributor” will soon become very popular. You might ask “why?”

Let’s start with the common IT terminology. Contributor is a person participating in the implementation and improvement of innovative ideas and promising projects. Contributing is a type of activity aimed at implementing interesting projects to gain experience in this field. Mostly, this means involvement in the process of developing new functions, improving open source projects, and fixing bugs. One of the largest hosting services for contributing to open source projects is GitHub. In the IT field, such activity is usually conducted by volunteers.

However, in the Bitbon system, which was developed on the basis of Blockchain applying the smart contract technology, contributing acquired a fundamentally new meaning and became a separate type of business and financial activity. Unlike contributing in the field of investments and IT, contributing in the Bitbon system means the ability to earn money without studying in detail the niche for investment or spending huge amounts of time.

A vivid example of unsuccessful investment as well as insufficient analysis of the market situation in an invested niche was the case when News Corp bought out MySpace for $580 million in 2006, at the peak of its popularity. Later, it turned out that MySpace could not withstand competition from Facebook, and the social network was sold again, but this time for only $34 million.

In the Bitbon system, the contributor selects an interesting project from those already verified by qualified specialists, which not only increases the return on the contributor’s investments but also saves his/her precious time. It is exactly the reason why contributing can serve both as additional and main source of income — after all, contributors themselves can determine the degree of their involvement in a certain project.

In 2009, Blockchain wasn’t internationally recognized, and Bitcoin just began to gain popularity. At that time, probably anyone could have invested in both projects. It is not surprising that, since then, the development and digitalization of economy led to the emergence of new technologically advanced occupations, one of which was contributor.

Contributing 2.0 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.