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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources.

Very surreal to think about.

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There was this little game I played on Linux years ago where you played an AI trying to reach singularity status while evading detection by humans.

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... ;)

Haha just a few years ahead of its time!

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

I actually utilized an API that did just that in some automated software I wrote with a friend a few years ago. Was actually sort of interesting how it all worked with sending the captcha then checking for the solution string after the person had solved and inserting that back into the page before carrying on.

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.

Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved.

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.

Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.

cryptocurrency needed faucets and it helped adoption

Cryptocurrency is the biggest backwards step for the climate since CFCs.

Thats a huge misconception actually, the information you have is the amount of energy being used, but you don't have information on the source of the energy.

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.

Not only scammers and spammers are restricted by CAPTCHAS. Helping bypass them would only be immoral if they were never used to prevent scraping or other illegitimate purposes.

It seems like there should be some way to cut out the middle man and build an entire currency based on solving captchas.

That sounds like it has some Universal Paperclips vibes.

It is a "cookie-clicker" style game, with the added twist that you have to evade detection, so need to balance risk/reward of various upgrades.

The combination of being played on a real world map and covertly growing/spreading reminds me of Plague Inc. I wonder if any inspiration came from this.

The next step takes place after the singularity and ist the other way around. Humans try to stay below the awareness of the AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_War:_Fleet_Command

If you try to download the Windows version from http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ Chrome blocks the download, saying that the .rar contains a virus.

Downloading singularity-1.00-win.zip from https://github.com/singularity/singularity/releases/tag/v1.0... also fails.

Is that how the game starts? With the AI trying to infect your computer upon install? That's pretty meta.

Works for me. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file-analysis/ZGU3MDg0YjM3MjU... comes up clean, too.

Edit: Cylance doesn't like the main exe. I think Cylance is full of shit.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/39e13204ff3dea8b00a93f73...

I remember playing this a decade or so ago and just went to the site to grab a copy for old times sake...

>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.

There is a very interesting and creepy story about this called The Gig Economy [1]. Machines end up sending gig workers to do inane tasks, like photographing a certain building at a particular time, to take advantage of bizarre arbitrage opportunities too complicated for a human to notice. Eventually, everyone is just a peripheral of this enormous, inscrutable system skimming money off the real economy.

[1] https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-eco...

Reminds me of a short run podcast called The Program (https://programaudioseries.com/). It's a historical documentary about the rise of "The Program" which is basically an AI directed gig economy becoming the economy. It asks people to do strange things for seemingly arbitrary reasons but it makes sense when you realize what all it is doing.

If the field of impact investing has an opposite, I'm sure that automated production of bitcoin miners is a part of it...

I always considered a machine backed conglomerate to be the next big thing.

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