Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
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.
Have 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.
Not 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.
Thats 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.
I actually utilized an API that did just that in some automated software I wrote with a friend a few years ago. Was actually sort of interesting how it all worked with sending the captcha then checking for the solution string after the person had solved and inserting that back into the page before carrying on.
Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
The combination of being played on a real world map and covertly growing/spreading reminds me of Plague Inc. I wonder if any inspiration came from this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity
Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)