[ANNOUNCE] CoinWorker.com beta - earn bitcoin in minutes via tasks in browser

[WargeGeoshington]

Can you add on option to set the threshold ourselves?

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

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

[1714959329]

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[1714959329]

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[WargeGeoshington]

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.

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 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 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.
 

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.

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?)

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.

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

[Wordlet]

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.

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?)

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

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.

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

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.
 

[WargeGeoshington]

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

[J180]

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.

[Krakonos]

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.

[WargeGeoshington]

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

[dooglus]

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.

[payb.tc]

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  

[WargeGeoshington]

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.

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.

[WargeGeoshington]

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  

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

[biqs4zi4f]

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 
Just to give you a hint why all other jobs are empty already but this one still got >5000 points available.

[Wordlet]

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.

[Inaba]

Pretty cool... subscribing with this post.

[Bitsky]

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.

[payb.tc]

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.

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.

[WargeGeoshington]

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.

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

[Bitsky]

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.

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.

[Bitsky]

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.

[kiba]

What revenue you derive from this project?