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Comment by techtalsky | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.

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I agree you can make more. But, one thing to consider is, you have to have a bank account to deposit turk money into or buy things from Amazon. Neither of those has the immediacy of Bitcoin.

Also, a lot of homeless have issues getting a bank account. We have millions of "unbanked" people in the US alone.

Eventually, you would expect that a Bitcoin-based crowdsourcing platform should come into being.

You can withdraw the Amazon Payments balance in the form of $5 Amazon gift cards. Then you can sell those to people for $5. A homeless person will have trouble with that, but people with homes and no bank account seem to be more common.

Since it's relevant: scam requesters are abundant on Mechanical Turk, and they can kill your earning potential if you don't avoid them. I wrote a thing on how to do that: http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mecha...

watching commercials every day

I don't think the YouTube clips that he watches are commercials. From TFA:

thanks to a service, called BitcoinGet, that shamelessly drives artificial traffic to certain online clips

Seems more like aspiring YouTube stars paying for traffic to their videos so that they rank higher on YouTube's site.

The other app he uses - Bitcoin Tapper - does seem like straight up being paid to click on ads though.

I suggested Mechanical Turk to a homeless guy I had gotten to know briefly, and he seemed legitimately interested in the idea, although he said he didn't have a bank account. I'll bet lots of homeless people would use Mechanical Turk if they simply knew about it and had a way of getting paid.

cmd-F Mechani

Oh, there you are.

Exactly. You can easily make ~10cents a minute, that's 6 dollars an hour. It's probably pretty hard work but the premise of this is just so...

If you're homeless in america, sign up for mechanical turk. You'll make more than enough for food.

> If you're homeless in america, sign up for mechanical turk. You'll make more than enough for food.

How do you receive money?

This used to be true, but a huge proportion of Mechanical Turk jobs these days are scams, which either don't pay out at all, or end up paying less than $1/hr. Amazon has completely neglected the platform and it's rotted.

How do you make 10 cents a minute? Have you ever tried?

When I needed money I tried... I made $2-$3 per hour writing articles. Transcribing audio, doing surveys and small 5 cent tasks all paid less per hour.

I've only ever created HIT's. Normally paid waaaay over $10 an hour.

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