Earlier this month, I visited a computer institute to make an inquiry on a program. And to my greatest surprise, I found the receptionist of the institute playing Hamster Kombat on her phone while attending to me. I had to implore her to keep the phone aside and finish answering my inquiry so she could return to her tapping and crypto mining.
The receptionist is not alone in this frenzy. Tapping of phones for mining cryptocurrency has become a pandemic. From hospital staff to students and secretaries at both public and private institutions, everyone seems to be tapping away on their phones in search of an “airdrop” which is a fancy name for giveaways.
The game that I found the receptionist playing had already been warned against by the Iranian government earlier this year. It is so popular in Iran that the government believes it is part of the West’s grand soft war against the Islamic Republic. Which has been known to be a reputable adversary of the West and their allies.
With some 270 million players, Hamster Kombat has more players than there are people in Nigeria; the most populous black nation on earth.
We are still battling with social media addiction and its adverse effects on the way humans relate in social settings. Crypto Mining has entered the fray, bringing with it a whole new dimension that had never before been seen.
For years, people have been using Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and even Telegram (The host of these mining activities) without getting any monetary reward for their time. Then all of a sudden, Notcoin appeared and paid its players a handsome reward for pressing the phone.
This action by Notcoin single-handedly changed the way people view their internet usage. For the first time, social media users learned that the time they spend pressing phones, reading gossips on blogs and engaging in idle talks can actually be turned into real money. And all hell has now broken loose, quite literally.
It is therefore essential for us, as members of a society who are interested in its activities and how such activities shape and define the overall fabric of our society, to look into how this tapping frenzy is influencing our social relations as a people.
These impacts will be discussed under the following subheadings as follows:
Decline in Productivity and Crypto mining in Nigeria
There is an obvious decline in the work productivity of chronic crypto miners. As it is evident in my experience with the receptionist who could not differentiate between her work and crypto mining until I interfered.
This crypto mining requires tapping phones at the shortest time interval possible. For example, players of Hamster Kombat are required to log in every three hours or lose out on their potential profit per hour earnings accruable for the time period beyond three hours. Three hours is too frequent for a 24-hour day. Other games require even more frequent logins as quickly as on an hourly basis.
It is true that other mining projects are played once in 24 hours but it is difficult to find crypto miners engaging in only one project. Some miners engage in as much as a hundred projects which consume a significant portion of their productive hours.
This addiction is fueled by what crypto terminologists refer to as ‘The Fear of Missing Out’ or FOMO in short. This is why users tend to join on every bandwagon, both the ones that are credible and those that are potential scams.
Deceptive Behaviors
This FOMO is what drives social media influencers into using their massive following to hype crypto projects. And because many Nigerians are in a state of financial decapitation, such buzz created by influencers appeals to them.
What these influencers, or as they call themselves, ambassadors, do is to sell a fantastic idea of a project and create the impression that it has the potential to give players a huge amount of money.
Unknown to the players, these influencers are just using them for referral purposes and for the cash these projects pay them to sell their game. In the end, the project owners and the influencers cash out big time on the effort of the millions of players who end up getting paid peanuts or none at all.
In order to lure subscribers, many deceptive tactics are deployed by influencers. These include posting screenshots of their crypto wallets as a testament to the legitimacy of crypto to pay big. Sometimes, when the influencers are desperate to lure people into such projects, they resort to doing giveaways either of cash or data. On the condition that their followers follow the link they provide to sign up for such crypto games.
Recently, a crypto project called Pixelverse launched and their method of distributing their tokens made crypto players very angry. The project allocated only 10% of the token’s supply to be shared amongst its 75 million players.
The example of Pixelverse underscores how deception and manipulation take center stage in how some of these crypto projects are run. And in the end, it is teaching both ambassadors and players the art of employing gimmicks and deception solely for the purpose of benefiting from referral rewards.
Break in Interpersonal Communication
As is common with most games addicts, when they are engaged in their games, they tend to completely cut off from their immediate environments. Crypto mining also provides such an immersive experience that tends to absorb players away from their immediate environments and become addicted to the crypto spaces of the universe.
Players of crypto games can be physically present but they are mentally in a whole different world. With each tap, they are mentally calculating the share of coins they have gathered. Some serious players gather as much as a billion tap shares from such games.
What this results in is a breakdown of interpersonal communication. Spouses are sadly losing their partners to this new immersive world and workers are also getting distracted from their work. Even receptionists whose primary job description is communicating with clients have found themselves overpowered by the compelling pull of these crypto games.
In higher institutions, students are often seen tapping at their phones from under the seats while receiving lectures. This creates a break in communication between the lecturer and students which may reflect poorly on such students’ academic performances.
A Risky Side Hustle
As it has been seen, it is not only the unemployed that engage in crypto mining, it cuts across all sectors and age groups.
One of the biggest patronizers of such crypto projects as alternative sources of income are students of tertiary institutions. With the increase in tuition fees the rising cost of living, and a student loan scheme that has yet to materialize, Nigerian students are left at the mercy of these crypto projects as sources of assistance.
Some university campuses were already designing in-campus employment opportunities such as domestic chores, dry cleaning, tutoring, and nannying for students who are financially disadvantaged to engage in as sources of extra funds. But these novel initiatives are being overrun by the crypto hype. Students will rather tap away at their phones than engage in these noble tasks to earn extra bucks.
It is no wonder that a leading politician in Russia is calling for the ban of Hamster Kombat in the country. He described the game as an enabler of youth who believe they can make money lazily and with minimal effort. He also described the frenzy as a mental psychosis.
It is true that the mental toll of engaging in crypto projects on its players can be enormous. It is a gateway to other risky financial endeavors such as spot trading, futures, and margin trading which all have very close similarities with gambling.
Colonization of Social Media Use
Overnight the frenzy of crypto spread across social media like wildfire. Late May and early June this year saw the highest surge of mentions and discussions on crypto mining on virtually all mainstream social media platforms.
In the North, crypto miners were at loggerheads with scholars who kept calling the attention of miners on the dangers of becoming addicted to crypto mining. Scholars also believe the speculative and unregulated nature of crypto makes it in direct contravention of Islamic law.
But crypto miners would not have any of such preaching. They went as far as calling scholars who called out their addiction as ignorant, archaic, and outdated.
Beyond the public diatribes and debates on the place and suitability of crypto mining in Islamic and societal laws, there is also an aggressive encroachment of crypto into virtually all social media groups.
You will hardly belong to a group on Whatsapp or Facebook without seeing invitation links to crypto mining being shared. It has almost reached a point where those who purposely chose not to engage in crypto mining are seen as weirdos.
What this means is that a paradigm shift is happening right in front of our eyes. And as of now, there doesn’t seem to be a trick that can be used to counter the rise of this phenomenon.
Crypto has become somewhat of a cult following with anyone who opposes tagged as an enemy. Miners go to the extent of reporting accounts of those who criticize their activities and having such accounts banned. They have essentially become a nuisance of sorts on traditional social media.
Conclusion
The seed of greed and desire for quick money has already been sowed and taken deep roots in the hearts and minds of many Nigerians by crypto. We are witnessing an event that is unsettling every notion of our financial systems and understanding. And as it stands, there isn’t anything anyone seems to know about how it can be stopped.
Shall we sit and allow the flood to wash us all away or join in the frenzy but with the aim of sanitizing it without letting it break what little is left of our very fragile social fabric? This is a question to which we have to find an answer to soon as the social impacts of crypto continue to be felt in our society.
