Bitcoin Forum

Hello!

I've made a new service where anyone can earn bitcoin in a web browser.

You enter your payment address, perform analytic tasks that a paying company needs completed, and receive bitcoin as a reward soon afterward. (In minutes, when all is working.)

You could think of it as mining with your own mind, rather than a specialized GPU.

http://CoinWorker.com

I initially announced it on the Newbie board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60769.0;all) a couple weeks ago. There was good feedback and I worked through a few issues, and now would  love for more people to try it out and let me know what they think.

Thanks!

{Warge @Geoshington

gave it a try...but there was no tasks available

I was able to get right into a task. Pretty neat!

It's possible the back-end provider varies the offerings by region/browser, so everyone may not see the same set of tasks. That's my guess why you wouldn't have seen any, while others (and my automatic poll which feeds the 'Tasks Available' indicator on the homepage) see tasks.

I'm taking the steps to get a larger variety of tasks, and some might even be targeted at speakers of other languages. I'll update this thread and the @CoinWorking twitter account whenever a big change like that occurs.

{Warge

In the UK: No tasks available here...
Also what's going on here... looks like somebody has been cheating the system (http://coinworker.com/activity/115raFw6fuBc2koAjESAs93iS8i5enah9Q):
http://i56.tinypic.com/24biy5t.png

Those aren't txid hashes ... those are wallet hashes, lol.

Sorry there's not yet any tasks for your region.

Regarding those earnings, rates and totals of activity are being watched for anything suspicious. Note that the 'earned' times aren't exactly when tasks were completed, but when reporting catches up. (It's also the case that if there are reporting hiccups, several tasks' earnings could be rolled into one line: for example, even with only 22-point tasks, you might see a 66-point or larger earnings report under certain network conditions.)

So a burst of apparently super-human earnings may not in fact be any sort of cheating. Still, I welcome reports of anything that appears anomalous. (Thanks again if you are also the person who tweeted this log to @CoinWorking.) Part of the idea of having the logs in the open, like the Bitcoin blockchain itself, is to enable a public discussion of the possibilities.

(Depending on the level of interest and any issues that come up, there could be things like minimum delays/thresholds to be paid, probationary periods for new addresses, a more involved sign-up, and so forth in the future. But for as long as possible I'd like to run with the pure approach: "I only need your address and your thinking!")

{Warge

After a long pause, there are again new tasks available. (However, regions outside North America still might not see them.) Currently on offer...

(12 points) Would you buy this item?

"Imagine you could see what people are shopping for online. Your task is to decide if you would buy an item from a list of search results."

(13 points) How relevant are these items?

"In this task you will be asked to judge several items for how well they match a given search query. To do well at this task you will want to use all the available information displayed in the search and the product listing to decide whether the item matches the intent of the query."

There's a good chance of more task diversity soon as well.

{Warge

Who's paying for these work anyway?

The tasks come via CrowdFlower, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in crowdsourcing... but they originate with other companies/projects/researchers/individuals.

CrowdFlower lists Microsoft, Harvard University, eBay, Random House, AT&T, and a bunch of tech startups on their 'featured customers' page:

http://crowdflower.com/customer

It's not revealed who the purchaser is behind any one task-set, so I have no idea which entities are responsible for tasks that have been offered so far at CoinWorker.

{Warge

These jobs seems highly difficult for me to do. Any chance that you will have easier work for bitcoiners to do?

There's no way to predict in advance what tasks will be offered. Most tasks that I've seen have involved a lot of search result or text interpretation. I expect there will some that are more visual in nature or involve writing as well.

Also, at one point during early testing I saw a large batch of tasks that appeared to be in German, and other regional/language targeting is said to be possible from the backend.

{Warge

Suggestion: an option to delay payment until a certain amount is reached.

No kidding!

24 micro payments? yuck.

That's definitely under consideration.

During original testing, every task was paid individually... no matter how small.

Now, payments are batched (currently every 20 minutes) to minimize network transaction count/costs. So there will be some combination of smaller amounts into a single payment for busy users.

What don't you like about many small quick payments? What threshold would you suggest?

I might go to a system where balances under a certain threshold must reach a certain age (perhaps up to one full day) before being paid. But, balances over a certain threshold would be paid as soon as possible. If that were the system, what do you think would be a good threshold?

{Warge

New stuff just added:

• A new 'Extended Address' option, which lets you mix your address with a password to prevent any possible interference with your work history by others entering the same address. (There's been no evidence of that happening, but just in case!) See http://coinworker.com/extended for details.
• A Help/FAQ page: http://coinworker.com/help

And, there are now over 20 kinds of tasks available, ranging from flagging adult images (3 points) to "Search for terms and record the search results" (32 points).

{Warge

I like it! Spent ~15 minutes, got ~0.03 btc :) I know it is unpredictable, but still... what's the expected average hourly rate?

Hard to say -- people seem to vary a lot. For tasks I've tried, and formed an idea in my head how fast (and still accurate) that I think I could get with practice, I've seen other addresses complete them 2x faster. Most of the tasks I've never tried.

Some have keyboard shortcuts (arrows/numbers) that are toggled on with the 'T' key, and I think with practice some people just get 'in the zone'.

{Warge

Can you add on option to set the threshold ourselves?

If not, I'd like to see a threshold of 0.2 BTC.

I ran into a task (32 pts) where it had part 1,2,3 and then the same exact part 1,2,3 right after. Is that an accuracy test or..? I'm using chrome if that's relavent. Also another task's instructions, I think a 'is this a good image advert' one, tried to imbed a pdf as an image and it didn't work so I had to view source on it.

I also think it's a bit weird to automatically send you on to the next task without telling you. People like knowing they completed something before they have to start the next task.

I also think it'd be cool (and good business) to have a leaderboard like system where you show "Look at all the BTC other people are earning!" so more people get involved.

You could use the new 'sign message' feature in .6.0 to have people sign a message saying "I own this public address and coinworker.com can use it to identify me" and then use the verification address as a password or something, and let them use that to set their payment threshold.

I'm thinking of ways to let users set a preference, without adding too much of a registration/authentication burden. It's likely in the future, at least for 'extended address' earnings (those with a personalized-by-password worker history).

In the meantime having a default threshold that works for almost everyone is a possibility. I just don't want to discourage dabblers and first-timers with too much of a delay before confirmed payment... the excitement of seeing your first bitcoins appear, in your local wallet, completely under your own control is an important benefit of the service (for both its users and the bitcoin economy).

Any future new options for setting pay-thresholds will be announced here and via the @CoinWorking twitter account.

{Warge

There's definitely some cruft, junk, and glitching in some of the tasks, which have often been assembled from bulk data collection efforts. When these recur to the level of fouling the whole task, you should feel free to report them via the top-rght dropdown 'Help' -> 'Send Feedback', which can reach the task authors and task-assignment system. If you include your 'Contributor ID' (also under the same 'Help' drop-down) the team which handles that feedback can look up your history when investigating.  


I agree. That part of the interface comes from the task back-end, and I'm guessing it's been optimized for both the 'power contributor' who just wants to motor through things, and the task-provider, who doesn't want to distract someone who's just been trained-up. (To a large extent, all the different tasks-on-offer are competing with each other for contributor attention.) The person who wants to pause and consider different next steps for a moment? Not the intended audience. :)
 

Leaderboards can have mixed effects. The fact that all working is public is an important parallel to the public-ness of the global blockchain... but I wouldn't want top workers to be singled out for possible interference (by reusing their addresses) from mischief-making observers.

There will eventually be some highlighting of top-earners/top-earning-periods, maybe limited to secured 'Extended Address' workers, or workers who opt-in. (Maybe I should just report generalities: "The top earner today made Xbtc. N workers made over Ybtc. You are the Nth highest earner in the last 7 days." Would that be interesting?)


That's a great idea. I'm still on 0.5.2 as released... what's the best source for information about this new signing feature?

{Warge

Yah! Just showing 'the highest was x in total people earned y' and other things that don't identify people sounds great.


I can't find a simple explanatory wiki on it but I managed to find some discussions on it when it was first made:

Forum discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6428.0

Original pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/183
Second pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/524

GUI pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/582 - has some discussions on the use cases for it

tldr, basically you have them do signmessage either through the gui or with bitcoind like so:

signmessage <my public address> "I own this public address and coinworker.com can use it to identify me"

This would return a signature, you'd have them put this signature on your website and then you would do:

verifymessage <user public address> <user supplied signature> "I own this public address and coinworker.com can use it to identify me"

which would return 'true' or 'false'

True would mean they own that public address and signed that message "I own this.."

False would mean they gave you an invalid signature.
 

FYI, CoinWorker's hosting service (Heroku) is having some issues, so the site has been mostly unreachable for almost the last hour.

(It's not specific to CoinWorker... it's affecting many of their customers.)

I'll update both here and @CoinWorking when there's a resolution.

UPDATE (1h15m later): Service is back up but recovery of hoster may still be touch-and-go (http://status.heroku.com). For now, CoinWorker is again offering new work and catching up on prior earning reports/payments.

{Warge

The jobs pay a lot less if your from the UK. I get a feeling people will start using proxies to have a US IP address.

Nice work! I've tried some of them and works pretty well.

Although I had a problem (half an hour ago?) with "Search for Official Websites and Facebook Pages for UK Churches and Charities" -- I finished one and it never came up in my activities (well, I actually answered all of them with "haven't found anything", but it was true and should not matter, right?). I did it for my addr 18nZhLNLybgH2w2SQj3KokKKVcL3ce49PV, extended.

Occasionally a hiccup in reporting completed tasks can occur, and then the system will usually catch-up later. (Sometimes, you'll see the earnings from 2 or more tasks rolled into one 'reported' line when caught-up.)

But. looking at your activity, I don't see any evidence that happened here.

So, for a glitch like this, it's best to report directly to the task source, via the top-right 'Help'->'Send Feedback' dropdown. You should include the purely numeric (not Bitcoin-related) 'Contributor ID' that appears under that same drop-down to help them investigate. (See also: http://coinworker.com/help#reporting_problems about this reporting mechanism.) I can't guarantee they'll be able to create a task credit but it might help clean up the task data/logic for the future.

{Warge

Are you using floating point variables to store bitcoin amounts?

According to http://coinworker.com/activity/ I have earned 0.00621162BTC twice (I was doing the 'get-paid-to-look-at-dicks' job), and both payments went out in the same transaction.

What showed up in my wallet, and on blockexplorer, was 0.01242323.  That's one satoshi short, and leads me to think you're not using integer arithmetic.

Later I earned 4 payments of 0.00620220BTC.  They all appeared in a single transaction, and I received 0.02480882.  That's 2 satoshis too much.

you didn't 'earn' btc. you earned USD or rather US cents. it's only converted to BTC amount at the exact moment that the BTC is sent.

so, while those US cents may have been worth 0.00620220BTC when you did the job, the exchange rate changed before the payment was made.

...

meanwhile i've been getting paid to look at dicks the last couple of days and my account is stuck on 0.006 BTC owing.

no matter how many jobs i do, it all gets paid out except for that last 0.006... like if i did a job for 0.994 and my account would show 1 btc owing then 10 minutes later it physically pays me 0.994 btc and my 'amount owing' is back to 0.006  ???

As payb.tc notes, only the conversion at the moment of payment converts points (USD cents) to bitcoin.

In the meantime, even though I'm only showing individual earning-reports to the satoshi precision, the exchange rate might mean there are sub-satoshi remainders on the points-to-BTC conversion. So I think such rounding (rather than any floating-point issues) explains what you've seen.

The two that combined to be 'one short' were really just being rounded up to next satoshi when displayed individually -- for example they might have really been

0.006211617 rather than
0.00621162

So then the two of them add up to

0.012423234 which rounds to
0.01242323

Similarly the four may have really been

0.006202204 which multiplied by 4 is
0.024808816 which then to the nearest satoshi is
0.02480882

which is the 'too much' you were paid.

Such rounding should even out over time.

I am trying to use sufficiently-wide fixed-width decimals everywhere but it's possible some floats have crept in. Still I don't think usual float imprecision issues would be a factor at these levels of significant figures. 

Even though I am bullish enough on Bitcoin to think that a single satoshi could someday be worth a lot (and require a protocol revision for finer division!), right now while it's still just 1/200000th of a penny, I've not been verifying things down to that level. But I thank you for doing so!

{Warge

P.S.: Hmm, maybe on days like the anniversary of the first block I should throw a 'bonus satoshi' day, where every task unit gets +1 satoshi in payments.

This was a leftover artifact from a reporting glitch: the 'amount owed' was wrong, rather than the payments.

(I've just pushed a fix and as a result this phantom amount should be gone from any addresses affected.)

Here's the full story:

Earnings are reported to me for payment in two steps. I have to 'ack' (acknowledge) them both: first with a unique ID, then with a 'fully accepted' response. Otherwise the task back-end keeps trying to repeatedly report the earnings.

In a few cases, the first step was promptly ack'ed but the second was not. (This would happen during times of server updates, Heroku outages, or momentary system delays.) I expected the task back-end to keep trying the 2nd step. so kept the results of the 1st step around. (For a while, you might have seen these 'half-done' reports in the activity logs as tasks with no descriptive title.)

But in fact, rather than retrying just the second step, the back end was starting over from the first step. Often, also, they'd roll several tasks into one report to catch up. (If you've seen a single activity line with a points-total that's more than usual for that task, that's typically what happened.) So the right amount was eventually reported -- in a next line -- but the original 'orphan' amount was still sitting in my database, ineligible for payment but also never finished or discarded.

I hid these broken report-lines from list views a few days ago, but the header's 'owed' estimation was still counting them. That should now be fixed.

Sorry the interface was giving a mistaken impression about still-pending earnings.

{Warge

FYI: I did an hour of "Is this Twitter account for an Individual? Job 1". Used all browser hotkeys possible to get it done as fast as possible.
Then computed the hourly payment, taking into account the current Bitcoin value: I ended up with a wage of ~ 1 EUR/hour (~= 1.3 $/hour).

Considering the complexity of "Categorize Twitter Users Based On Their Primary Occupation (New task + More Countries + Better Pay!)", I think the wage might end up at roughly 0,2 EUR  per hour.
Even for low-skilled work like this is, thats unacceptable  ;D
Just to give you a hint why all other jobs are empty already but this one still got >5000 points available.

I think he said earlier that the jobs are provided by different people and the company he gets them all from just puts them together. So the different people are 'competing' for you to do their jobs by providing more pay and making them easier than others. So by not doing that job, you're convincing them that they need to pay more to get it done. :)

Pretty cool... subscribing with this post.

Looks good so far. I hope there are more tasks than just those few.

Personally, I'd like it if there was some sort of "pay now" button on the activity page. All those little transactions make it hard to keep track. So a user could collect points/coins over some hours/days and then request a payment. Of course such a button could be pressed by anybody, but worst thing that could happen is receiving a payment. Adding a captcha would help there.

i agree. i find the way it's set up at the moment to be quite spammy.

sure they save on tx fees by using sendmany. but you're almost guaranteed to have tx fees yourself when you go to consolidate all those tiny inputs.

would be much better if you could let your balance accumulate.

Indeed. I think I've seen tasks come back with changed payouts. I've definitely seen the UI improve to make answering quicker and easier: the interface for rating ecommerce search results used to require a lot of manual scrolling and had no keyboard shortcuts.

The tasks on offer seem a bit thin now but definitely in the long run, the projects injecting tasks are competing against each other for contributor attention, and making their tasks pay more or have smoother interfaces and clearer standards are some ways they compete.

{Warge

He can still save tx fees. Just replace "pay now" with "request payment" and he could wait for a bunch of requests; and if notbody else does a request in eg 6 hours, send a single tx.
I mean, we're talking about cents here. It's not like waiting for a payment would ruin your financial existence. Heck, even a single payout at midnight would be ok with me.

I tried a few tasks yesterday and received a couple of small transactions. Per se that's great, but at the same time it clutters up my client.
I'd definatively would use it more if I could trigger the payment myself, or if you'd switch to a daily transfer.

What revenue you derive from this project?

These tasks are a little hard to me..

The new "Answer a few questions about a website (Candada - DAYOFWEEK task #6)" task isn't working for me.

I clicked it, clicked the link to bring up a google page, searched in google, found the link on the 3rd page of results, clicked it, found the 3rd featured game, and filled in the form.  Then I was told:

"Could not save your work
You must click through to the specified web page."

I tried it twice, and got the same result both times.

I wonder if my ad blocker is interfering.

Edit: I tried it without the ad blocker and get the same result.

Also, they ask "would you use this site?" but not "why not?".  I wouldn't use it, because they don't accept bitcoin, and would like the option to tell them that that's the reason.

Edit: I tried in Firefox as well as in Chromium and got the same error

I believe it's best to report that to the actual company that submitted the job. Coinworker probably can't help with you with that, I think.

It would be great if this could be expanded to countries where people don't get paid a lot.  I know some people in China that get paid less than $1 an hour.  That would also promote use of bitcoin with even more unstable currencies.

Thank you Warge for inventing CoinWorker!

Now even my dad can mine bitcoins.
I get to look at boobs all the time, and wife 2.0 approves of it! (because she gets to look at cocks :) ).

I've successfully solved many 2, 3, 6 and 12 points tasks with great accuracy and I wonder why can't I continue solving tasks if there is enough tasks available on my tasks list? Right now there are 200 available tasks for 12 points, but I cannot work on them as the system is keep telling me that the task doesn't have any more available work.

Is it like there are currently 200 people solving the task, or it has to do with something else?

Thanks.

I've had to add a registration/login requirement and clearer terms of service to deal with some abuse.

Once registered, if you're sure to do your *first* work as a registered user with a preferred address/extended-address you've used before, your worker history/reputation will carry over to your login account.

I'm sure I'll need to iron out some bugs from this transition, but it then should be easier to set a personal preference on pay-frequency/thresholds.

Please let me know any glitches or problems you see (separate from those that need to be reported direct to task authors). Thanks!

{Warge

I tried to register, but when I clicked the link in the verification email it told me the key was invalid. I seem to be able to log in anyway, though.

I registered with CoinWorker today, to give it a try and I would like to share my experience with you.

I picked a task to answer questions about what people felt about a movie called Project X, judging by their tweets. At the beginning, I was in training mode. The system was asking me questions so I could get the hand of it. I think there were 12-15 question in training mode.

After that, the real thing started and I was trying to figure out what the people were feeling about the movie. The payout was 6 points for every 3 pages work, each page containing 4 questions (i.e. 6 points for every 12 questions). I answered 15 pages of questions (not counting the ones in the training mode), which is 60 questions and spend about 45 minutes. I checked my account and the balance was 0.067BTC. At that rate I was able to make 0.089BTC per hour (this is roughly 37 euro cents per hour with today's exchange rates). I guess those kind of questions were too difficult for me.... I might try sometime with a different task and see how it goes :)

But let me clear something out. The service WargeGeoshington provides is not bad at all. This post is only about my experience. For other people, it might be a lot more useful.

Try Amazon's Mechanical Turk and see how well you fare. Bet CoinWorker pays better than mturk.

You're quite right! I took a look at https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false and it seems that $0.03 to $0.12 per hour seems to be mainstream. CoinWorker is far better with a rate of about $0.45 per hour compared to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

In the end if you think about it. Is $.45 an hour really worth the time? Not trying to shoot down this project (I've even done some myself) or anything but just putting in my 2 bitcents.

I work on it when I'm in bed. instead of reading a book, which costs money, I now earn money lol

And it's so more easy to fall asleep after half an hour of boring dull tasks ;)

The tasks are very easy, the rate isn't so bad if you need to get some Bitcoins fast.
The payout is almost instant :)

Not anymore it seems:

"Payments are currently on hold for pending balances under 200 points."

That is a lot of time, to build up to .4 btc before getting paid... and right now there aren't any available tasks for me. 

Is that balance held indefinitely or will it eventually get paid out after 24hrs or something? 

I agree. 0.4 is a little high, 0.2 BTC threshold would work better.

ur at a loss as i see it then.

u spent an hr and made .45

spent some seconds typing up this reply for no cents.

and then gave up 2 bitcents.


yikes!

I don't understand why any payment is held until a certain level is reached. 

If someone only wants to do one task to try it out why shouldn't they be paid for it? 

That's better than receiving a tiny amount every few mins while you spend your time doing tasks.
Perhaps there will be an option to request a payment at some point, but for now the 200 point minimum is fine.

That's how it was originally, and I wish it could still be that way.

But, there was discussion in some places about repeating training tasks under different accounts, and then evidence of people doing automated/careless work for one address until disqualified, then repeating the process in new accounts.

(There was also talk of sharing answers to training/test tasks. While that could be an innocent attempt to more quickly learn the right standards to apply, such 'crib lists' also serve to help weaker or bad-faith workers masquerade as good workers for longer before being disqualified. That's why it's important, even with sometimes-flawed training tasks, that each worker complete tasks on their own using only the guidelines in the official interface.)

Registration and the minimum threshold are a couple of measures to make the fake-work-then-repeat-cycle less profitable. They're not perfect and will no doubt require continued adjustment over time, in order to make sure the bulk of the payments go to workers doing quality work. Unfortunately these measures also slow the flow of payments to new good-faith CoinWorkers. But, as your history of work grows, you'll be free from any delays/restrictions on new and unproven accounts.

{Warge

Decide "Yes" or "No" for Product Manuals: Manufacturer Information


if you enter NOT FOUND or not found or Not Found or nOt FoUnD, some javascript empties out that field when you hit submit and it subsequently tells you the field is required.

there seems to be no way of getting past it if you don't have a manufacturer name.

also, posting here because crowdflower support tells me i need to sign up, but couldn't be bothered.

Yep same problem, but the manufacturer is auto detected, but I still can't enter a product. Some script keeps deleting my answers.

I have 120 points pending for over 48 hours, what's up?
Address is 14dxwuQwkQiLbZjJFfciZ26xSGdRU5mKEp.

You need 200 to be able to withdrawal?

Didn't read that, I used coinworker before the registration required, wonder why they changed it.

Due to regulations by CrowdFlower to prevent abuse.

To be clear, that wasn't a specific CrowdFlower requirement, though they did express a concern to me about certain patterns suggestive of automated or careless contributors.

It looked to me like people were creating short-lived throwaway accounts to repeat training, or work on material carelessly until disqualified (and then repeat the process in a new account). So, the minimum-threshold was one experiment to make that behavior less profitable. The threshold may change and other policy tweaks will happen over time. I will try to shield long-lived, proven-reliable accounts from inconvenience due to such changes.
FYI, new registrations will reopen no later than April 16th.

{Warge

How do I contact customer support at Coinworker? 

I got a reply to messages I posted at getsatisfaction.com/crowdflower about some tasks I completed but didn't get paid for.
Michael @ crowdflower sent me some payment ids that he told me I should forward to "customer support at Coinworker"
in order to get paid.

I thought that crowdflower forum was the customer support forum for coinworker. 

Where do I forward those payment ids?
I shouldn't post those ids here in this thread should I?

I sent you, WargeGeoshington, a pm about this but am still waiting for a reply.

Thanks. 

As I mentioned on the other thread as well, a PM to me here, or mention/DM via Twitter (@CoinWorking), are the best ways to request I look into something.

I believe we've resolved this via the PMs; if not, let me know.

{Warge

It seems a task is being automated: the front page is filled with the same task by the same address:

I can't find a job worth doing from weeks...

Yeah, I saw one worth 0.75 cents the other day... who the hell would do a page of work for less than a cent ???
You'll do better walking along the highway and picking up bottles for their 5 cent deposit.

Noticed the same. Payment has gone way downhill in the past weeks; down to the point where it's not worth it.
I haven't done a task for a long time there. Especially since the tasks seem to require more work while paying less.

At this point we just need to sit back and let the invisible hand sort it out. If everybody stops doing the tasks which pay 0.67 cents (new low... saw it just now), then the tasks will need to pay more...

At this point, though, there might be enough people who are 20 cents away from the cashout that this takes a while. Or, there might be enough people content with working for 20 cents / hour that the service keeps running...

It would be a good idea to pay the remaining sums. If there are no jobs, can I get my 97 points paid?
My name at coinworker is: blueshoe
Was a lot of work.

Yeah I'd like my address paid too if possible, as I will no longer be using the service

And 3 with me. 147 points stuck there, no work to do to reach 200.