Bitcoin Forum

Correct me if I'm wrong in how I understand how Bitcoin works. This idea is based on a very rough understanding, but I'm just throwin it out there to see if it has any merit.

Two of the problems with bitcoins are 1) Slow confirmations needed for micropayments, 2) A looming Double-Spend threat. Currently Bitcoin takes use of a great deal of computing power but it neglects utilizing the person behind the computer.

The idea is the merchant could poll random nodes to verify a transaction is visible from their end.  This random poll would be real people scanning a the block looking for the transaction in real time. These people are verified to be 'active' by some sort of refreshing Captcha (or some other device) which would need to be authenticated by the miner every X period (lets say every 5 minutes).The active miners would only be presented with an address and an ammount and would only be able to 'vote' verified/unverified.  The merchent would then be provided with the tally of yay/nay's.  I guess you could even set the level of verification, such as how large your sample is and even re-polling against other samples.  This would come with a fixed fee (lets say, .0001 per verification per average sample) which would then be split up among those who did the verification.  To protect against a 51% majority, the merchant could ask for a sampling of 51%+ (up to their choosing) and resample after that (1+N polls of 51%+) as their sample size.

Is this feasible?  Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Intriguing idea.  It would have to have a verification code or something. 

However, I'm not so sure how much you'd be able to make with that... sounds time consuming and not very scalable.

Well its just a rough idea, its more than open to being built upon if there is any merit to the idea.

Let's say the it's .0001 for the polling and the average would be 10 users (preferably as far geographically away from eachother as possible).  That's .00001 for each of those people.  But that's per poll.  If there are hundreds/thousands of transactions that need to be verified every hour, it adds up.  There are many people who could/would do this, such as elderly, disabled, stay-at-home parents, kids, people in countries where the average days wage is single-digit dollar amounts, etc.  There could be a system that if you're consistently in the minority of the votes (as in you're just screwing around) the lower your accuracy the less verifications which get routed to you.

Recaptcha uses a system where they give captchas mixed with a scanned text a computer can't read.  Ten people or so have to give the same answer for the scanned text or it won't be accepted so one person putting the n-word won't get it erroneously put into an ebook.  This can work for mining bitcoins.  It can make it so mining isn't dominated by whoever is rich enough to buy the best hardware.

If miners have to solve captchas, i would quit mining and never look at bitcoin again.  >:(

Gmail uses visual captchas that are human unreadable, but there's software that can read them at 97% accuracy.  So it won't be a visual captcha.

I would hire ten thousand ethiopian children and become the king of captchacoin.

It's a silly idea and you are a silly person for suggesting it.

What's silly about it? Is it overall just not going to work, or impossible to code, etc?

Also, it wouldn't affect normal. 'Active Mining' would be completely optional, so normal miners wouldn't have anything to do with any captcha.

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/7/30/pleasewaitki128618993914882791.jpg

You are attempting to replace a cryptographically safe system with a bunch of people solving captcha's. That's what's wrong with it.

I proposed something vaguely similar to this about a week ago in a thread about joke currencies: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39696.msg492233#msg492233

Make this and I will invest!

http://decaptcher.com/ $2 per thousand.

That sounds surprisingly cheap if it's done by humans, are they just working as quality control for the output of a computer program or are they actually typing them all in by hand?

$0.002 / captcha? probably about 5 seconds per captcha, 20/min ($0.04), 120/hr ($2.40)...

That's not really cheap for a third-world country. I mean by our standards it's sweat-shop labor but think about people who don't have jobs anyway, as long as there is business backed up nonstop then it's actually pretty good money for just typing.

I think you mean 1200 per hour but yeah, that does put it into perspective.

No no this would be a merchant service....


You know what, nevermind.  Yes, I'm talking about a massive p2p captcha game.   ::)

i think decaptcher is run by a company in india. Not 100% though.

But yea, lots of people in India make their living off solving captchas.

Captchas don't stop spam, but it's a clever way to give more people jobs  :D

.

Well I was thinking the captcha would -only- be used to to make sure the guy behind the keyboard is human.  The rest of the time he'd just be answering polls for merchants about various transactions.

Maybe you guys have already lost me.  In either case it's just out there to be built upon. 

Don't make me mock you with lolcats once more.