Amazon's Mechanical Turk Alternative For Cryptocurrencies

[krishnapramod]

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the most popular micro jobs website with more than 500,000 registered workers from over 190 countries, majority of them from the US. There are a few Bitcoin freelance websites, including a couple of decentralized platforms, but compared to micro job websites, freelancing platforms require specialized skills to perform tasks whereas anyone can do micro jobs with basic internet knowledge. Additionally, if you compare Bitcoin/crypto freelance websites with any other freelancing platforms, majority of projects posted on the former are related to Blockchain technology, so a further division of skills which somewhat creates an entry barrier for people who are looking to earn some cryptocurrencies, but don't posses Blockchain/cryptocurrency related skills.

Last month, Coinbase acquired Earn.com for an estimated $100 million. The business model of earn.com is similar to that of any micro jobs website, users can earn free Bitcoin by answering emails and completing tasks/surveys. Compared to MTurk, Coinbase has more than 13,300,000 users and if Coinbase in the near future converts earn.com into a full-fledged micro jobs website, wouldn't it boost Bitcoin adoption? Yeah, you get pennies for completing micro jobs, but the point is they are not only popular in developing nations, but also in the US, Australia, Canada etc. Faucets were used to introduce people to Bitcoin (not anymore) and IMO, a micro jobs website owned by Coinbase (brand/recognition/free cryptocurrency) would be perfect to get people interested into cryptocurrencies.

As of today, Earn.com is a fast-growing, cash-flow positive business with a multimillion dollar revenue run rate. Hundreds of thousands of users have signed up to earn free cryptocurrency by answering emails and completing tasks. And thousands of senders have used Earn.com to send out paid emails and surveys to large audiences. I think it’s fair to say that it’s one of the first truly useful blockchain-based applications, where users can earn money in their spare time while senders can pay people to actually reply to their emails and fill out their surveys.

Now we’re about to take the model we’ve proven out at Earn.com and scale it up across Coinbase’s massive user base.

PS: Although there are decentralized alternatives to MTurk, I doubt they would be able to build a userbase like that of earn.com anytime soon.

https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814

[amishmanish]

Earn.com has a lot of users who will be doing a lot of small value transactions. Coinbase is the exchange of choice for lot of Americans and people in the west. That means a lot of micropayments. How do they plan to process all those transactions?

The only thing this can mean is that coinbase is looking to implement Lightning Network and be one of the large nodes. The freelancing community on earn.com is already a big userbase of bitcoin users. If this were to really happen, I think this'll be a strong push for LN adoption. Bitcoin will have to traverse the regulated territory as well as the privacy-loving user territory. Pretty sure it can manage both.

[davis196]

I think that Amazon Mechanical Turk accepts only people from the USA.I'm not from USA and I tried to create a Mechanical Turk account.It's impossible.Anyway,I might check out earn.com.This website will gain more credibility and more users will register "worker" accounts.It would be great if other micro job websites,like microworkers and rapidworkers accept crypto payments as well.