On March 11, the creators of the Freelanceforcoins platform announced the launch of a new crowdsourcing market called Taskopus. The standalone application is similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace but anyone can participate, payouts are near instantaneous and bitcoin cash (BCH) is used for settlement due to the chain’s low network fees.
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Meet Taskopus, the Mturk Alternative
News.Bitcoin.com recently reported on the newly created Freelanceforcoins. This Monday the lead developer of the platform announced a new alternative to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace (Mturk) called Taskopus. Essentially Taskopus users complete tasks that computers or artificial intelligence cannot accomplish. Users can perform the chores published by task creators and get paid almost instantly in BCH once the buyer is online. Taskopus users can also create assignments, micro-jobs, and exercises for the general public to complete.
The creator of Taskopus explained on Monday that he has approved around 30 people to test the application before the official launch. The testing is a form of pre-launch and the project is still in its earliest beta stage. At the moment the ‘creating tasks’ function is enabled manually on case-by-case basis, but there are small procedures that can be completed like reviewing an advertisement, completing a sentence, finding someone’s contact info, filling out a survey, and extracting keywords.
“There is a big difference between us and other crowdsourcing sites (besides the fact that everybody is accepted, regardless of age, country, and social status( — All payouts are immediate and final and we don’t ever keep your money and with Taskopus you can have a long relationship with a worker,” the platform’s creator emphasized.
The developer continued:
Typical micro-jobs website treats workers as completely interchangeable. Do one simple task if you fit our description and get out — Taskopus is different in that regard — You can build a multi-step selection process for your employees, educate them and give them complex long higher-priced specialized tasks.
BCH Powered Due to Reasonable Network Fees
After downloading the standalone application Taskopus, you will be given a survey to help buyers figure out if you fit their needs. After answering the questions, the Taskopus dashboard shows a home section, tasks, your profile’s survey answers, a profile, and a native wallet. The wallet is fairly basic and allows users to write down a 12-word seed phrase and send and receive BCH. After completing a few easy online errands on my task page I earned a small fraction of BCH (0.00211649). Of course, with only 30-odd testers and the developer creating experimental tasks, the platform will definitely need a decent sized community of members to keep the marketplace going strong. If the marketplace gathers a lot of attention in the future, it could very well outpace crowdsourcing services like Mturk with Taskopus’s accessibility and acceptance of anyone and everyone. The creator of Taskopus says there are big differences between the BCH-powered app and other crowdsourcing operations.
“There is one more big difference as we are also data-driven, and if you want to understand it – you can go here and read an example about classifying cities,” the Taskopus creator explained on r/btc. “And there is more — We have Javascript validation tasks, we have limits (daily, hourly), we have automated invoice payments for when you are offline, we have a REST API, Webhooks, aggregated Webhooks, profile questions, and targeting of tasks to users.”
BCH supporters have welcomed an alternative to Mturk and other crowdsourcing sites. Using BCH in order to facilitate payments is a plus and the Taskopus creator specifically chose to use BCH over BTC. “We needed a cryptocurrency that can split $0.01 into 90% and 10%, send 90% to the worker and 10% to us as a commission and do all of that with a reasonable fee (less than the amount being sent),” the Taskopus founder explained.
What do you think about the Taskopus platform? Let us know what you think about this project in the comments section below.
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Image credits: Pixaby, Taskopus, and Jamie Redman.
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