Month: January 2018

Getting to grips with Gems Alpha

Gems.org  (see our intro here) have released their alpha product to the World and can be accessed here http://portal.gems.org/login.

First things first you will need Metamask installed. Then as this is a test implementation link your Metamask to the Ropsten test network – that’s where your sample earnings will be stored.

First page is pretty simple: a slide show of 3 slides telling you about Gems and a Start button:

Click “Start” and it will tell you to log in with Metamask, so click the Metamask icon on the browser tool bar  and click “Sign” and you’ll be logged in and shown a list of sample tasks.

Click “Join” and you will be presented with a maths problem and a warning that no real Gems will be earned  (mind you if I could something for the sample tasks I’d be here all day ☺). When I first tried this I got an error at this point, told them and it was fixed very quickly – great response!

Once in you are assigned your first task – mine was calculate 0 – 4 (is this different for everyone?)

 Once you have you submitted the answer the Total Pending increments and once validated you get a the opportunity to undertake another task.

This is a very clean implementation and if they can keep the simplicity it will be an amazing application. They obviously have a very clear vision of where they want this to go, hopefully it doesn’t get cloudy. Sometimes you use an application and even in the early stages it just feels well constructed and this is the case here. From one dev to those on the Gem team well done!

It will be great to see some samples of more complex tasks. I look forward to following this project.

Gem Alpha: http://portal.gems.org/

Gems website: https://gems.org/

The articles on this site are opinions and for information purposes only.  It is not intended to be investment advice.  Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

© copyright 2018 Russell Weetch

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Doing the Carboncoin Coinswap

NOTE: You cannot swap coins that you acquired after 23:59 GMT on January 22 2018. You can still swap coins bought before that time. You can no longer swap Carboncoin for CCE under this scheme. You will be able to swap them for the new Carboncoin when it is released. There are other coins you can swap on a week by week basis: see https://www.carboncointalk.com/ for details.

If you hold Carboncoin ($CARBON) and have yet to swap some for the new token, then time is running out. This isn’t a why, it’s a how. Have a look at my interview with Chris Carbon if you want to know more on the why.

I suggest read the whole article through before starting.

First some basics:

  • You do NOT have to swap your $CARBON for the new token ($CCE)
  • You can swap up to 50% of the $CARBON for $CCE. Each $CCE costs 100 $CARBON, so if you swap 1,000,000 $CARBON you get 10,000 $CCE.
  • You must hold your $CARBON in a Carbon Wallet to participate in the swap.
  • $CCE (Carbon Coin Ether) is a holding token, once the new development has been completed it will be swapped into the New Token, let’s call it $NEWCARBON. This might be on its own blockchain or running on something like EOS – deciding that is part of the development. When you swap back it will be the reverse exchange rate, i.e 1 $CCE will get you 100 $NEWCARBON.
  • The $CCE token is an Ethereum ERC20 token so you will need an Ethereum Wallet – you CANNOT use an Exchange.

Setting up your Wallet

  1. If you hold your $CARBON at YoBit you will need to transfer it to a Carbon Wallet (if it is already in a wallet, then skip to here).
  2. Download the wallet from https://carboncoin.cc/ – there are wallets available for Mac OSX, Windows and Android. The latest version is 0.9.5
  3. Install it on your computer/device.
  4. Now run it. You will need to wait while the chain synchronises. This can take a while.
  5. Now get your public key from the Carboncoin wallet.
    1. Click on Receive and then on Request – you do not need to fill in the other fields
    2. Now copy your public key / address by clicking the Copy Address button.

What to do on YOBit

  1. On YoBit login and go to your Wallets
  2. Now, find your $CARBON wallet and click to withdraw.
  3. In the ‘Withdrawal Address’ box paste your Carbon Wallet Public Key (see 5.2 above).It is important that the withdrawal address is  correct, if it is not you will LOSE your coins. So first off do a small trial say 1.01 $CARBON, any amount above 0.01 (that’s YOBit’s fee) would be ok. Enter your trial amount in the Quantity box. The bottom 2 boxes will auto complete. Click “Withdrawal request”.Now wait for this to appear in your Carbon wallet – it won’t take long. If you don’t receive it, give it 15 minutes or so,  then the likelihood is that the address was incorrect. But assuming that you receive it, go back to YOBit and start the withdrawal again but instead of entering a value in the Quantity box click the ‘Max’ link as you’ll want to be transferring all your $CARBON won’t you?
  5. Now Click ‘Withdrawal Request’ and wait.
  6. If your Carbon Wallet is still open a notification will pop up saying that funds are arriving. This is almost immediate.
  7. Go to your Carbon Wallet and click on Overview. You will see the Pending transaction and your updated balance.
  8. Now wait until the Pending is merged into your Available balance.

Getting Ready for the Swap

You will Need:

  1. Your Carbon Wallet Public Key(s) that hold your $CARBON.
  2. A Ethereum Wallet – Make sure that it is a wallet that
    a) gives you control over the private keys
    b) supports tokens.Note that FreeWallet does not support $CCE only tokens on exchanges and it is highly unlikely that $CCE will be traded, at least short term.The My Ethereum Wallet (MEW) is popular and been tested with $CCE. You can access it here https://www.myetherwallet.com/ but please double, no triple, check you are in the right place. Go through the install info slideshow and then go to the ‘Setting up MEW with MetaMask’ from the link on the last slide.
  3. Your Ethereum Wallet Public Key where you want the $CCE sent.

The Coin Swap!

  1. Join the Slack group here https://carboncoin.slack.com/. If you are not already a member you will need to get an email invite so head off to the Telegram group where you can arrange that.
  2. Go to the “Coinswapping” channel and post a message to @aliblackwell, @ebenezer or @zuludykes (the admins). They will then DM you and ask for your Carbon Public Key.
  3. They will verify the amount held.
  4. They will Direct Message (DM) you with the amount you are allowed to swap (50% of your holdings) and the Carbon Address to send it to. They will also ask you for your  Ethereum Public Key where you want your $CCE token held.
  5. To send your $CARBON, open your Carbon Wallet, go to “Send”. Copy and Paste the address sent to you in the DM, enter the amount to send and click the ‘Send’ button.
  6. Once the admins have confirmed receipt they will issue you with your $CCE.
  7. To see the $CCE in your Ethereum Wallet you will need to add a custom token. To do this on MEW you go to the address that it has been sent to and click ‘Add Custom Token’
  8. Now complete the form and click ‘Save’Contract Address: 0x47f92ebf4881359469bceffe1f753fe910701024
    Symbol: CCE
    Decimals: 8
  9. Now your $CCE will display in the tokens list
    alternatively you can go to https://ethplorer.io and paste in your Ethereum Public Key

If you want to see how the swap is progressing have a look at https://etherscan.io/token/0x47f92ebf4881359469bceffe1f753fe910701024#balances where you can see the balances that have been issued by address – you should find yours in there somewhere.

Hope this has helped.

The articles on this site are opinions and for information purposes only.  It is not intended to be investment advice.  Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice and do your own research

Disclosure: I hold $CARBON and $CCE

© copyright 2018 Russell Weetch

Mechanical Turk and the Blockchain

The original Mechanical Turk was a fake chess playing automaton from the 18th century – a mechanical illusion that allowed a chess master to hide inside the machine1. The term has more lately come to mean a service that can be used to place small tasks which require human intelligence (a major use is for enriching AI data, or in China for internet censorship) – a market of employers and providers (Turkers). Amazon provide such as crowd sourcing market place through the AWS service ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk‘2 as do others such as CrowdSource and RapidWorkers3.

The market is there – a 2015 World Bank Report4 estimated that there were 500,000 workers registered with Amazon Mechanical Turk and according to Alexa.com4 the site had 750,000 unique visitors in December 2015.

One issue centres around fees – validated work costs a lot for the employer and the worker gets very little. The enabling sites charge fees of up to 40% (looking at the Amazon site, it seems a nightmare to work out5);

Secondly, validation of work can be difficult. One method is to recruit 5-15 workers for each task – a very expensive overhead.

Another issue is that the pool of labour is constrained by a huge number of people not having access to a bank account.

Gems is a new project from Rory and Kieran O’Reilly looking to improve the whole process using the Ethereum blockchain. The aim is to provide a protocol for contracting workers to perform micro tasks and a mechanism to prove validity of the work do based on a solid economic supply and demand model with no central fees.

As a protocol Gems provides the basis for others to develop dApps to run on it – that makes it a highly extensible platform.

Overall the aims of the project are:

1. Removing the middleman taking a large fee
2. Verifying accuracy of results from crowdsourced tasks
3. Supplying and building reusable interfaces
4. Removing the need for existing banking infrastructure
5. Properly incentivising and disincentivising miners and requesters

 This is a project backed by a very strong set of advisors: Biz Stone (Twitter, Medium), Joey Krug (Pantera), Ben Maurer (reCaptcha), Luis Cuende (Aragon), Joe Urgo (district0x) …. wow!

This is one to watch.
Gems.org

The articles on this site are opinions and for information purposes only.  It is not intended to be investment advice.  Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

© copyright 2018 Russell Weetch

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

3 http://moneypantry.com/amazon-mechanical-turk-crowdsourcing-alternatives/

4 http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/11/the-size-of-the-mechanical-turk-marketplace/

5 https://requester.mturk.com/pricing