Vertcoin: The First Crypto Community That Taught Me All I Needed To Know About Proof of Work Blockchains

I mastered the concept of Proof of Work when I joined the Vertcoin community.

But before I understood what Proof of Work really meant, before I could explain consensus mechanisms, mining algorithms, hard forks, and all those things that once sounded like Greek to me, I was simply trying to build a community.

How did I join?

I have always been a fan of creating WhatsApp groups.
I love bringing people together, teaching people content marketing, copywriting, and, at some point, AI prompt engineering.
I enjoy seeing people learn something from me and then use that knowledge to make money or improve what they are doing.
So, at that point, I already had different communities where I was teaching and sharing ideas.

Then an idea came to my mind.

This idea came shortly after the new centralized exchange I was working for crashed.

That experience made me start thinking about other ways I could make money within the crypto space without necessarily depending on an exchange or one particular company.
While observing Crypto Twitter, I noticed something.
A lot of crypto projects were making posts and getting almost no engagement.
You would see a project with thousands of followers, but when they made a post, there would be maybe 3 likes, 2 comments and one retweet.

 I started thinking about it.
 What if I could create a community of people whose job would be to engage with these projects?
 The idea of creating an engagement community, what people now commonly call "reply guys", came to my mind.
 At that time, the idea was not rampant.
 In fact, I didn't even know that people were already doing something similar.
 I genuinely felt like I had come up with something unique.
 I started imagining it.
 What if I could have 100 people, each with individual X accounts, and we could sell engagement to crypto projects?
 For example, we could offer 100 replies, likes and retweets per post for $50.
 I had already made my calculations.
 If a project could pay us $1,000 monthly, we could attend to about 20 of their posts.
 At that point, it made sense to me.
 The idea actually came from observing how many crypto projects were struggling to get real people to interact with their posts.
 And I had experienced something similar before.
 I had been in a team where we were paid 10,000 Naira monthly just to engage with a project's posts.
 So I already knew there was a market for it.
 I told my community members about the idea and they were excited.
 Most of them didn't know anything about Web3 at that time.
 That became one of our first challenges.
 If we wanted to approach crypto projects and present ourselves as a professional community, we needed people with good-looking Web3 accounts.
 We couldn't just have random accounts with no crypto-related history and expect projects to trust us with their social media engagement.
So we started thinking of ways to grow our accounts and our community at the same time.
We eventually agreed to start hosting midnight follow-for-follow Spaces.
We would gather at night, connect with other people, follow each other, interact and try to build our accounts.

Then a suggestion came.
Someone said that while we were hosting these engagement Spaces, we should also give some crypto projects free engagement.

The idea was simple.
Instead of telling projects that we had a community of people who could engage with their content, why not just show them?
Maybe we could tag different projects, give them free engagement and watch their reactions.
If one of them noticed what we were doing, they might become interested.
Maybe that would be the easiest way to get our first client.
So that night, we started tagging different crypto projects.
Out of all the projects we tagged, only one showed serious interest.
Vertcoin.
A man called Aslan reached out to me.
He told me he loved what we were doing and asked how much it would cost to get my community into the project.
 

At that moment, I was excited.
Someone was actually interested.
I told him $2,000 monthly.
He looked at the price and said it was too much.
We negotiated.
Eventually, we agreed that he would be paying $100 worth of Vertcoin into our treasury every month.
Looking back now, $100 was honestly too small for what we were trying to do.
But at that time, we were more interested in getting the opportunity than the money.
Instead of giving him engagement from 100 people as we originally planned, we reduced it to 30 people.
 

But Aslan was concerned about bot engagement.
He didn't want a situation where we had fake accounts or bots pretending to be real community members.
So he decided to host a Space.
The interested members of my community could come up and speak.
That way, he could hear their voices and have some proof that these were actual human beings behind the accounts.
That was my first real interaction with the Vertcoin community.
Later, he came up with another idea.
He created a Zealy campaign where my community members could be rewarded directly by him.
He also gave me a special role in the Vertcoin community so I could help coordinate my community members.

And that was how I entered Vertcoin.
But honestly, when I joined, I didn't understand anything.
Everything was sounding Greek to me.
I was just there because of the opportunity.
I was coordinating my people, trying to make sure they completed tasks and participated in the community.
But as I started interacting with people in the community, something changed.
I started becoming curious.
I started doing my own research about Vertcoin.
And that research opened my eyes to things I had never really paid attention to before.

I started asking questions.
What exactly is a consensus mechanism?
What is a mining algorithm?
Why does a cryptocurrency need miners?

What is Proof of Work?
Why is Bitcoin using Proof of Work?
What is a hard fork?
What is a soft fork?
What is the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork?
How was Vertcoin hard forked from Bitcoin?
Why did Vertcoin choose the mining algorithm it was using?

These were things I had never bothered to understand before.
Before Vertcoin, my understanding of crypto was mostly around buying and selling.
Pump.
Dump.
Profit.
Loss.
Airdrops.
Token launches.
Community campaigns.
And whatever new opportunity was trending at the time.
But being around the Vertcoin community forced me to look deeper.

I started understanding the technology behind cryptocurrencies.
I started realizing that there was actually a reason these networks were designed the way they were.
I began to understand that crypto wasn't just about making money from coins going up.
There was an entire system underneath it.
There were people running nodes.
There were miners.
There were different consensus mechanisms.
There were developers making decisions about how networks should function.
There were communities that cared about decentralization.

And then I started understanding Proof of Work differently.
Before then, "Proof of Work" was just another crypto term I had seen people throw around.
But with time, I understood that it wasn't just a fancy word.
It was a mechanism that helped a decentralized network agree on the state of the blockchain without

needing one central authority to decide everything.
The more I learned, the more I started seeing crypto differently.
Vertcoin didn't just teach me what Proof of Work was.
The community changed the way I looked at cryptocurrency.
I started seeing crypto beyond pump and dumps.

Beyond profit and loss.
Beyond the next token that could potentially make me money.
I started seeing how cryptocurrency could actually be used as a currency.
I started understanding why decentralization mattered.
I started understanding why people cared so much about mining and network security.
And most importantly, I started realizing that if I wanted to talk about crypto, I needed to understand what was happening underneath the surface.

Ironically, I entered the Vertcoin community because I wanted to provide engagement.
I wasn't looking for a crypto education.
I wasn't looking to become a Proof of Work expert.
I wasn't even looking to understand the technical side of Bitcoin or Vertcoin.
I was simply trying to build a community and find a way to monetize it.
But that opportunity introduced me to a community that ended up teaching me more than I expected.

The funny thing is that sometimes you enter a community because of what you think you can gain from it, only to realize later that what you gained was much bigger than what you initially came for.
I came for engagement.
I stayed because I started learning.
And somewhere along the line, I went from someone who didn't understand what Proof of Work meant to someone who could confidently explain the concept.
That is how Vertcoin became the community that made me master the POW concept.