hCaptcha's Background

hCaptcha is a product of IMI. An AI/ML company with a focus on metalearning and visual domain machine learning at scale. We build and operate massively scalable systems (billions of videos per month) to enable video analysis services for customers like one of the top 3 US clouds.

It was originally developed to address our own needs in image labeling. More data generally produces better results, and we have a really large amount of data to use. Building and validating labeled datasets was too time consuming and expensive with existing solutions.







hCaptcha

hCaptcha is designed to solve the most labor intensive problem in machine learning: labeling massive amounts of data in a timely, affordable, and reliable way.

More data generally produces better results in training machine learning models. The recent success of deep models has led to increasingly large datasets, almost always with some human review. However, creating large human-reviewed datasets via Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, etc. is both slow and expensive.

hCaptcha allows websites to make money serving this demand while blocking bots and other forms of abuse. hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that earns website owners money and helps companies get their data labeled.

Creating economic incentives for website owners by providing a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA will democratize access to high volume human evaluation.

This system will test for bots at least as well as reCAPTCHA while at the same time paying website owners for their audience.







TL/DR

Earn Passive Income for visitors who solve Captcha on your site with hCaptcha. 1000 Solves = $1 if they are true. There is a reputation oracle system that prevents rewarding sites who have high traffic bots solving Captcha and also a blacklisting mechanism.

The solves that are from HUMAN's are rewarded.





Want to get the hCaptcha Plugin?

Sign up on the Website at hcaptcha.com - Psst. There's a referral Bonus too!







Is it hard to get hCaptcha on my website?

NOPE! There's a Wordpress Plugin with Instructions HERE







More information below ...







For Website Owners

Earn more with hCaptcha as an additional revenue stream

hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that pays you for every correct answer your visitors submit. Integrate in minutes.





For AI & Machine Learning Companies

Low cost data labeling at scale.

hCaptcha enables high volume data labeling & human review for machine learning systems, while saving time and money.







What is the HUMAN Protocol?

The HUMAN Protocol is a new way of tokenizing human labor. It enables one person to request work, another person to do the work, and a third party to decide if the work fulfills the request and issue payment. Its first applications are in machine learning.

We are open source and the protocol itself has an open design. We have been writing code since mid-2017 with the goal of open sourcing a complete reference implementation under a permissive license.







How are hCaptcha and the HUMAN Protocol related?

hCaptcha is the first app launched on the protocol, and much of its code will be released as part of the initial reference implementation. There is a lot of overlap between the dev teams right now, but as the protocol becomes more community-driven over time we expect that to change.

We've got a nearly complete production-quality MVP implementation now, and have been using HUMAN tech for an increasing percentage of our internal workloads via hCaptcha.com since April 2018. We're currently cleaning up codebases and doing some refactoring and documentation as we take the enormous amount of code we currently have and start shipping it to the world.







Enabling decentralized labor markets

HUMAN Exchanges maintain an order book of job requests, matching labor with demand.







Factored cognition allows recruitment across Exchanges, aggregating labor.

One of the more interesting areas of research today is in factored cognition: decomposing more complicated work into its simplest cognitive components. Practical applications of this idea map very nicely onto the HUMAN Protocol.

The protocol defines standard job types that serve as building blocks for many tasks, and anyone can publish a new job type.







Exchanges set their own fees and can publish new job types.

For example, an Exchange can offer a high level job type ("scan a page") and then factor it into smaller tasks ("type in the letters or numbers") that can be sent out to other Exchanges based on available capacity and current order book price.

Anyone can run an Exchange and publish a new job type, adding value on top of labor pools across the world.







Efficient micropayments, today

Combining our new token-level Bulk API with the HUMAN Protocol smart bounty lifecycle design allows the protocol to scale into billions of tasks and users per day on the current Ethereum mainnet.







How does it work? The Bulk API extends the standard EIP20 token interface to enable efficient one-to-many payments, allowing ~1000x more efficient micropayments via message packing.

We plan to submit it as a formal standard for the entire Ethereum community to benefit from our work, and believe it is a novel and additive approach to scaling real-world applications.







Consensus - Introducing: Proof of Balance







Proof of stake models discourage participation.

In Proof of Stake each participant needs to buy tokens, which in turn increases cost and friction for new participants. We have designed a novel mechanism to address this problem for systems where every added participant increases network value.







A better deal for new network participants.

Proof of Balance benefits more invested participants and increases attack resilience without discouraging new entrants from participation in the network. (Please see the technical whitepaper on the sidebar for more details.)







Architecture Overview

- Requesters of work launch new bounties onto the blockchain that specify a job: the question to ask and the set of tasks to ask it about.

- Exchanges pick up jobs, manage bidding on job types, and serve tasks to agents doing the work.

- Recording Oracles collect potential answers and provide a rolling evaluation of answer quality.

- Reputation Oracles make a final evaluation of answer quality and reputation score per job, and finally pay out bounties.







Architectural Motivations

1. Why Blockchain?

Advantages today: allows “open books” to prove the system is fairly distributing bounties, enables efficient micro-payments, reduces required trust between protocol actors.

Even more advantages when blockchains are faster: verifiable reputation for every actor that opts in, oracle can compute earnings on-chain to further reduce required trust for interactions.

2. Why a new token?

Ethereum has perhaps the most robust smart contract support of any popular blockchain, but is currently too slow and expensive for many applications without additional development.

Our Human Token® contract thus implements a custom Bulk API that supports efficient micropayments via one-to-many bulk transfers. This enables new and interesting use cases while remaining EIP20-compatible.

We are open sourcing the audited contract with a library and comprehensive test suite to help other projects in the wider Ethereum developer community adopt this approach if it suits their needs as well.

3. Today vs. Tomorrow

Current systems: no blockchain, centralized authority, REST API. No compensation for use.

Challenge: no blockchain today has adequate performance for use as a full-scale distributed human review system. Plasma, Lightning, Hashgraph, etc are still orders of magnitude away from necessary cost/speed performance and not yet robust. Future improvements may eventually make this feasible, but still early days.

Hybrid model thus ideal: faster to build, easier to scale using robust, proven strategies. Blockchain is used primarily for settlement, rather than trying to put every bit of logic into an on-chain oracle and every bit of data directly on-chain.

4. Design goals

Start more centralized, cheap and deterministic for performance.Build in ability to decentralize each component as tech evolves.

What do we want on the blockchain?

Immediately:

- Smart bounties: requester puts HMTs in escrow, describes their order, sets price.

- Immutable hash, location (URI) of intermediate & final data, reputation results per job.

Eventually:

- Mining server trust scores

- Requester trust scores

- Neither one required for MVP. Can start with rolling reputation computation for graylists at the exchange level and mandatory request signing by reputation agent.







What do we NOT want on the blockchain?

- Data: images, texts, etc comprising datasets.

- Individual responses from mining clients: can be millions for a single job.

- Side chains (Plasma etc) not yet ready for primetime, unfortunately.

















Want to get the hCaptcha Plugin?

Sign up on the Website at hcaptcha.com - Psst. There's a referral Bonus too!







Is it hard to get hCaptcha on my website?

NOPE! There's a Wordpress Plugin with Instructions HERE







Want to know more? We have a nice FAQ list over here:

https://hcaptcha.com/docs/faq