Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down.
On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.
Would you be willing to accept or at least corroborate that cryptocurrency mining is one of the cleanest sectors and a boon for sustainability?
70-80% of that energy use is renewable energy or reducing pollution - specifically hydrocarbons. So existing energy is not being wasted or reallocated, and additional unclean energy is not being ramped up to facilitate mining, and previously wasted energy that was going into the atmosphere is now being used.
The educated discussion is to make sure it stays this way. As nation states are the only actors that could mine at a loss with inefficient ways.
Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
>Download 1.00, released 07-04-2020
Mindblowing that this is still under active development after all this time. I can't wait to get home and play it to see what's changed.
Downloading singularity-1.00-win.zip from https://github.com/singularity/singularity/releases/tag/v1.0... also fails.
Edit: Cylance doesn't like the main exe. I think Cylance is full of shit.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/39e13204ff3dea8b00a93f73...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity
Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)