A Review of The Gems ICO – The Protocol for a Decentralized Mechanical Turk

 

Gems is one of the latest coin offerings – and it may be one that has managed to find a killer app, and something that will differentiate itself from the other thousands of crypto currencies, coins and tokens that are on the market today.

What is Gems?

Gems is a decentralized currency for microtasking. It aims to be something similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, or CrowdFlower, but with a difference. The centralized microtasking services break up large jobs into very small tasks, and then allow a large number of people to work on those tasks, for payments that are typically just a couple of cents.

The issue with CrowdFlower and Amazon Mechanical Turk is that the requester is charged a fairly high fee to add their work to the platform, and the worker needs to go through a long signup process. In addition, they often rely on the requester having the same job done more than once, by different workers, to confirm that the job is being done properly. This is known as ‘consensus by redundancy’, and it can cause problems for workers because it delays payments, and means that sometimes properly done jobs get rejected because other workers were submitting fraudulent work. In addition, it causes problems for the requester, because it means they have to pay more than once to get the work done. The only people that win are the platforms themselves, which make more money from this way of doing things.

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