hCaptcha's Background
hCaptcha is a product of IMI. An AI/ML company with a focus on metalearning and visual domain machine learning at scale. We build and operate massively scalable systems (billions of videos per month) to enable video analysis services for customers like one of the top 3 US clouds.

It was originally developed to address our own needs in image labeling. More data generally produces better results, and we have a really large amount of data to use. Building and validating labeled datasets was too time consuming and expensive with existing solutions.


hCaptcha
hCaptcha is designed to solve the most labor intensive problem in machine learning: labeling massive amounts of data in a timely, affordable, and reliable way.

More data generally produces better results in training machine learning models. The recent success of deep models has led to increasingly large datasets, almost always with some human review. However, creating large human-reviewed datasets via Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, etc. is both slow and expensive.

hCaptcha allows websites to make money serving this demand while blocking bots and other forms of abuse. hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that earns website owners money and helps companies get their data labeled.

Creating economic incentives for website owners by providing a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA will democratize access to high volume human evaluation.

This system will test for bots at least as well as reCAPTCHA while at the same time paying website owners for their audience.



TL/DR
Earn Passive Income for visitors who solve Captcha on your site with hCaptcha. 1000 Solves = $1 if they are true. There is a reputation oracle system that prevents rewarding sites who have high traffic bots solving Captcha and also a blacklisting mechanism.

The solves that are from HUMAN's are rewarded.

Want to get the hCaptcha Plugin?
Sign up on the Website at hcaptcha.com - Psst. There's a referral Bonus too!

Is it hard to get hCaptcha on my website?
NOPE! There's a Wordpress Plugin with Instructions HERE: https://medium.com/hcaptcha-blog/hcaptcha-plugin-for-wordpress-now-available-49765536c69f

For Website Owners

Earn more with hCaptcha as an additional revenue stream

hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that pays you for every correct answer your visitors submit. Integrate in minutes.

For AI & Machine Learning Companies
Low cost data labeling at scale.

hCaptcha enables high volume data labeling & human review for machine learning systems, while saving time and money.

What is the HUMAN Protocol?
The HUMAN Protocol is a new way of tokenizing human labor. It enables one person to request work, another person to do the work, and a third party to decide if the work fulfills the request and issue payment. Its first applications are in machine learning.

We are open source and the protocol itself has an open design. We have been writing code since mid-2017 with the goal of open sourcing a complete reference implementation under a permissive license.

How are hCaptcha and the HUMAN Protocol related?
hCaptcha is the first app launched on the protocol, and much of its code will be released as part of the initial reference implementation. There is a lot of overlap between the dev teams right now, but as the protocol becomes more community-driven over time we expect that to change.

We've got a nearly complete production-quality MVP implementation now, and have been using HUMAN tech for an increasing percentage of our internal workloads via hCaptcha.com since April 2018. We're currently cleaning up codebases and doing some refactoring and documentation as we take the enormous amount of code we currently have and start shipping it to the world.

Enabling decentralized labor markets
HUMAN Exchanges maintain an order book of job requests, matching labor with demand.



Factored cognition allows recruitment across Exchanges, aggregating labor.
One of the more interesting areas of research today is in factored cognition: decomposing more complicated work into its simplest cognitive components. Practical applications of this idea map very nicely onto the HUMAN Protocol.

The protocol defines standard job types that serve as building blocks for many tasks, and anyone can publish a new job type.

Exchanges set their own fees and can publish new job types.
For example, an Exchange can offer a high level job type ("scan a page") and then factor it into smaller tasks ("type in the letters or numbers") that can be sent out to other Exchanges based on available capacity and current order book price.

Anyone can run an Exchange and publish a new job type, adding value on top of labor pools across the world.

Efficient micropayments, today
Combining our new token-level Bulk API with the HUMAN Protocol smart bounty lifecycle design allows the protocol to scale into billions of tasks and users per day on the current Ethereum mainnet.



How does it work?
The Bulk API extends the standard EIP20 token interface to enable efficient one-to-many payments, allowing ~1000x more efficient micropayments via message packing.

We plan to submit it as a formal standard for the entire Ethereum community to benefit from our work, and believe it is a novel and additive approach to scaling real-world applications.

Consensus - Introducing: Proof of Balance


Proof of stake models discourage participation.
In Proof of Stake each participant needs to buy tokens, which in turn increases cost and friction for new participants. We have designed a novel mechanism to address this problem for systems where every added participant increases network value.


A better deal for new network participants.
Proof of Balance benefits more invested participants and increases attack resilience without discouraging new entrants from participation in the network. (Please see the technical whitepaper on the sidebar for more details.)


Architecture Overview
- Requesters of work launch new bounties onto the blockchain that specify a job: the question to ask and the set of tasks to ask it about.

- Exchanges pick up jobs, manage bidding on job types, and serve tasks to agents doing the work.

- Recording Oracles collect potential answers and provide a rolling evaluation of answer quality.

- Reputation Oracles make a final evaluation of answer quality and reputation score per job, and finally pay out bounties.


Architectural Motivations
1. Why Blockchain?

Advantages today: allows “open books” to prove the system is fairly distributing bounties, enables efficient micro-payments, reduces required trust between protocol actors.

Even more advantages when blockchains are faster: verifiable reputation for every actor that opts in, oracle can compute earnings on-chain to further reduce required trust for interactions.

2. Why a new token?

Ethereum has perhaps the most robust smart contract support of any popular blockchain, but is currently too slow and expensive for many applications without additional development.

Our Human Token® contract thus implements a custom Bulk API that supports efficient micropayments via one-to-many bulk transfers. This enables new and interesting use cases while remaining EIP20-compatible.

We are open sourcing the audited contract with a library and comprehensive test suite to help other projects in the wider Ethereum developer community adopt this approach if it suits their needs as well.

3. Today vs. Tomorrow

Current systems: no blockchain, centralized authority, REST API. No compensation for use.

Challenge: no blockchain today has adequate performance for use as a full-scale distributed human review system. Plasma, Lightning, Hashgraph, etc are still orders of magnitude away from necessary cost/speed performance and not yet robust. Future improvements may eventually make this feasible, but still early days.

Hybrid model thus ideal: faster to build, easier to scale using robust, proven strategies. Blockchain is used primarily for settlement, rather than trying to put every bit of logic into an on-chain oracle and every bit of data directly on-chain.

4. Design goals

Start more centralized, cheap and deterministic for performance.Build in ability to decentralize each component as tech evolves.

What do we want on the blockchain?

Immediately:

- Smart bounties: requester puts HMTs in escrow, describes their order, sets price.

- Immutable hash, location (URI) of intermediate & final data, reputation results per job.

Eventually:

- Mining server trust scores

- Requester trust scores

- Neither one required for MVP. Can start with rolling reputation computation for graylists at the exchange level and mandatory request signing by reputation agent.


What do we NOT want on the blockchain?
- Data: images, texts, etc comprising datasets.

- Individual responses from mining clients: can be millions for a single job.

- Side chains (Plasma etc) not yet ready for primetime, unfortunately.






Want to get the hCaptcha Plugin?
Sign up on the Website at hcaptcha.com - Psst. There's a referral Bonus too!


Is it hard to get hCaptcha on my website?
NOPE! There's a Wordpress Plugin with Instructions HERE


Want to know more? We have a nice FAQ list over here:
https://hcaptcha.com/docs/faq

Very interesting! I found out that this project is based on EOSIO code, may I ask you, what are the main advantages of U°OS over EOS and other forks?

CAPTCHAs, authentication codes, and click-throughs are the scourge of Internet users everywhere. Nobody wants to waste time filling out a form while they’re browsing the web, even if it takes just a few seconds.

But although these systems may be a nuisance, they serve a very important purpose. Blocking bots prevents traffic overloads, reduces DDOS attacks, discourages ad fraud, and protect against login breaches.

Still, there are other ways of accomplishing these things, and several blockchain projects are on the case. These projects aim to improve upon traditional anti-bot systems and maintain that some services remain humans-only.

So, what are these projects working on, and will they make your life easier?

Bot or Not: Identifying Humans Through Historical Data
Datawallet and Enigma have teamed up to build Bot or Not, a blockchain-based system that distinguishes human users from bots based on their historical data. This eliminates the need for CAPTCHAs, email verification, and text verification.

Essentially, Bot or Not allows you to import your data from sites like Google, Amazon, and Facebook for verification purposes. It also keeps this data private: Enigma’s Trusted Execution Environment handles data without actually revealing it at any point.

Based on this data, Bot or Not provides websites with a “degree of confidence” as to whether you are a human or a bot. Initially, Bot or Not will be integrated with blockchain-based DApps, but it could conceivably be integrated with regular sites as well.

Privacy Pass: Tokenizing CAPTCHAs and Other Puzzles
Privacy Pass is a browser extension that relies on CAPTCHAs, but it does so in a way that is a massive time-saver. Basically, it allows you to complete a single CAPTCHA and receive several tokens in return. You can then redeem these tokens to access multiple sites.

Strictly speaking, Privacy Pass doesn’t use cryptocurrency or blockchain tech. It merely uses cryptography as the basis of its token scheme. However, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum fame has expressed interest in integrating Ethereum tokens, which could bridge the blockchain gap.

Regardless, Privacy Pass aligns with the anonymity values of the crypto community: its tokens are unlinkable, so websites can’t create a composite picture of your browsing habits when you redeem them.

Privacy Pass is now in beta, and you can already try it out.


HCaptcha: Monetizing Data Through the HUMAN Protocol
HCaptcha is monetizing CAPTCHAs through cryptocurrency rewards. This anti-bot service lets website operators get paid if they allow visitors to complete hCaptcha puzzles. It’s a competitor to Google’s reCAPTCHA program, which only benefits Google itself.

On hCaptcha, users label data by completing puzzles, and machine learning companies bid to have their desired type of hCaptcha shown. Part of the rewards then are given to website operators. End users won’t profit, but their work will be put to good use.

HCaptcha is built on the HUMAN Protocol, an Ethereum-based platform that manages human labor datasets for machine learning purposes. Its “Human token” also conforms to Ethereum’s EIP20 token standard, which makes payments transparent and simple.

Geetest: A CAPTCHA Service Involved in the Blockchain Industry
Geetest is a new CAPTCHA service, and like most of its competitors, it is replacing basic transcription puzzles with more intuitive challenges. Most notably, Binance integrated Geetest’s “slide and click” puzzles into its exchange login page last year.

Geetest’s puzzles don’t use blockchain tech, but the company has partnered with DBXChain to build a separate blockchain-based identification platform. This will eliminate the need for password-based login – instead, historical user data will provide a more streamlined login system.

UMine and “Proof-of-Human Work” Blockchains
If the projects listed above aren’t ambitious enough for your tastes, consider this: researchers have proposed blockchains that rely entirely on human work to achieve consenus. Basically, these blockchains add new blocks as people solve CAPTCHA-like puzzles.

Proof-of-human work, which was proposed in 2016, pioneered this model. Like other projects in this article, it provides a possible basis for password protection schemes and bot detection. However, a blockchain based on this proposal isn’t feasible for various reasons.

UMine was subsequently proposed by researchers in 2018. It uses CAPTCHA-like puzzles in a more workable way, and its main goal is to create an energy-efficient alternative to mining. UMine hasn’t been implemented yet, but its inventors seem optimistic.

Will These Projects Make a Mark?
Blockchain-based anti-bot tools could provide a wide array of benefits. First and foremost, they could reduce the amount of work that users need to do in order to prove they are human – making the Internet a much less frustrating place.

Alternatively, these tools could monetize human labor in advantageous ways, or they could provide more efficient login systems. Since there is overlap with other types of tech, the possibilities are not limited to what blockchain can achieve.

In any case, each project will succeed or fail depending on whether it gains adoption – a challenge that all new projects face. Blockchain-based anti-bot tools may find a way to thrive despite this challenge, but only time will tell.

Original: https://cryptobriefing.com/crypto-captcha-anti-bot-recognition/