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Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for eve
by wallacoloo 6y ago
Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved.
It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down.
On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.
- AceJohnny2 6y agoHave an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.
- vmception 6y agocryptocurrency needed faucets and it helped adoption
- voltagex_ 6y agoCryptocurrency is the biggest backwards step for the climate since CFCs.
- vmception 6y agoThats a huge misconception actually, the information you have is the amount of energy being used, but you don't have information on the source of the energy. Would you be willing to accept or at least corroborate that cryptocurrency mining is one of the cleanest sectors and a boon for sustainability? 70-80% of that energy use is renewable energy or reducing pollution - specifically hydrocarbons. So existing energy is not being wasted or reallocated, and additional unclean energy is not being ramped up to facilitate mining, and previously wasted energy that was going into the atmosphere is now being used. The educated discussion is to make sure it stays this way. As nation states are the only actors that could mine at a loss with inefficient ways.
- anoncake 6y agoNot only scammers and spammers are restricted by CAPTCHAS. Helping bypass them would only be immoral if they were never used to prevent scraping or other illegitimate purposes.
- mxcrossb 6y agoIt seems like there should be some way to cut out the middle man and build an entire currency based on solving captchas.