King of Pennies

CaptchaCoin is a unique cryptocurrency project. The simplest explanation is that you solve "select the correct image" captchas and earn crypto tokens for doing it. If that sounds too good to be true, it's because it really isn't *quite* that simple; it's an experimental project still in its very early stages, and right now the money is essentially in ground-floor investment of your time rather than putting anything in your pocket in the near term.

Is CaptchaCoin Legit?

I first stumbled across CaptchaCoin in November 2024, but apparently it's been operational since sometime in 2022. At this point I'm 95% confident it's not some kind of an elaborate scam, but it is a very experimental idea that might ultimately amount to pie-in-the-sky.

But one of the chief reasons I believe it's not a scam is that there's almost nothing to spend money on, and it's completely free-to-use and free-to-earn. The captchas are also generated and solved within CaptchaCoin's own ecosystem, for the purpose of "strengthening its blockchain" somehow; you're not solving captchas for third parties or other websites or anything like that. This page explains more about the technical details of what solving captchas does for CaptchaCoin's own chain.

Basically, you can invest a small amount of easy labor for what might turn out to be a considerable reward later. The project does not offer any guarantees of anything, and I can see several ways in which it might eventually fall apart, but right now it's roughly analogous to working Bitcoin faucets 15 years ago before anyone had any idea it would turn into anything.

What is CaptchaCoin?

The project's litepaper provides a much more detailed overview, but I'll try to summarize the main points. At the retail "money-making" end the purpose is to eventually transition to a captcha system used by websites and apps to verify human users, and also to be listed as a general cryptocurrency in and of itself. At the user end, at least for now in the "pre-launch" phase, you solve sets of captchas and get chunks of coins in return.

What can you do with the coins? Well, for now, not much. Once you start mining coins, you'll see some eye-popping estimates of what they'll be worth (presumably in USD) once the launch phase begins. At the moment they can be traded via Litecoin through the website, but the current going price is a whole lot more modest. The estimated launch price seems to be about $15-ish per coin, but current trading prices are at more like 10 cents per coin.

One of its more interesting features is that you don't necessarily have to personally mine to earn coins. The project offers tools for embedding a sort of "paywall" on web pages or apps to have users do a little mining to gain access to your content, a feature I'll dive deeper into a little later in the post.

Getting Started With CaptchaCoin

Another one of CaptchaCoin's central selling points is accessibility; it's meant to be a simplified form of crypto with fewer knowledge barriers to getting started in earning and trading.

Getting started is simply a matter of choosing a username and password, and you can optionally set an email address for account recovery purposes. You don't need the password to mine, just to do anything related to transactions to or from your wallet.

You have a basic mining mode, and then a few other more exotic options for earning coins. Let's cover the standard mining mode first. You're presented with a screen full of scrambled images, and have to pick the "most clear" of them. This has gone through several different changes but seems to have settled on picking either a spiral or orb image at this point. You have to get six of these correct in a row (a "solve") to mine a percentage of a coin, which changes over time. As of this writing it's about .04 coins per solve, so it takes about 25 solves or 150 individual clicks on images to earn a full coin.

There are some alternative mining modes that have their advantages and disadvantages. One is called "competitive mining," in which you're seeing a screen of images that someone else might also be seeing. First person to click on the right image takes the pot, and you get more than the usual rate for winning this battle. However, this mode disappeared for an "update" back around December 2024 and hasn't come back since.

Another alternative mining mode is "diamond mining." With this mode, each individual solve nets you a random amount. There is a table showing a fixed percentage possibility, ranging from getting absolutely nothing to a whopping 10,000 coins. But the most likely result for any solve, and the only ones I've personally gotten so far, is to get a fragment of a coin ranging from .01 to .75. This can make earning move along faster with a little luck, but there's a big downside to this mode - you don't earn "logs" while doing it.

Logs are another central concept that's important to understand. You earn these alongside coins with your mining, but only in the "regular" mining mode. Logs are needed to make wallet transactions, it's essentially the "gas fee" of this coin. But the important part to understand is that if you don't earn any logs within a 24 hour period, they start decaying (disappearing). Coins will never disappear, but logs can disappear on you quickly without any mining activity.

Diamond Mining

CaptchaCoin "Casino Modes"

CaptchaCoin also has a small "casino" section, but there's no actual gambling. Instead there are several games: a lottery, the "irrational game," and a "random mining" mode that looks like it was the precursor of "diamond mining" and may be deprecated now as it doesn't seem to work.

The lottery has you mine for lottery tickets in a slightly different mode, where you pick an image containing readable letters then type in what the letters are. When you do this successfully it now says you earned "0 tickets" but if you look in your wallet it actually did give you a ticket for each correct solve ... I just don't have any idea if or when the drawing is going to be, as I think I still have tickets from three months ago sitting around. This mode is also problematic as you sometimes either get blocks where none of the text is fully readable, or it appears readable but it keeps insisting you're typing in the wrong letters.

Earning lottery tickets

The "irrational game" is the only one that requires you to bet some coin, specifically 0.89 coins right now to play. It's a little hard to explain but it seems kind of like last-minute bid sniping on eBay, you can see the full rules broken down here.

Options for Content Creators

As previously touched on, one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that you don't have to personally mine to earn. At least two options for content creators to embed CaptchaCoin features on their sites have been announced thus far: Tip Jars and the CapWall.

The tip jar is pretty simple, you can create a personalized link to add to your content while in your CaptchaCoin account. Users follow a link that goes to a one-off captcha solve that contributes a coin chunk to the creator's account. You can try it out at this link if you feel like leaving us a tip!

The other feature is the really interesting one. The CapWall lets you create a mining instance on your web page that acts as a paywall for content. Instead of paying up, users simply do a little mining to unlock your content, and the proceeds go to your CaptchaCoin account. However, after playing with it a little bit, it doesn't seem to actually work yet.

Questions About CaptchaCoin

While I do think the project is legitimate and has potential, the documentation of features/functions and transparency could definitely use some improvement. I can also see at least a couple possible major points of failure that could wreck the whole thing. These are my concerns about it:

> It's a "you don't actually own your wallet" situation right now, not a true cryptocurrency. Everything is handled through the captchacoin.net website. So at any time, as far as I can tell, your earnings could disappear or be locked off for a number of reasons: devs just up and quit on the project, technical issues ... also hacking as there's no indication how robust the security is. Supposedly everything done through the website is backed by a blockchain somewhere, but you kinda just have to take their word for it at this point.

> It seems to be relying on the inability of AI to recognize images well enough to solve the captchas. That's something that the world's biggest tech companies are dumping huge research money into constantly, however. If AI starts solving the captchas, does that render the project obsolete?

> A Telegram group is listed as the main source for new announcements, but if you check it out it's just a sprawling 24/7 group chat that's usually about other crypto stuff and whatever else. I'm not sure how to tease out the important announcements from all the blather. Telegram is also kind of a headache in general if you don't already use it anyway, first it has to be installed on a phone and associated with that phone's number to let you in, THEN you can use the desktop client with the number (via SMS verification every time) to browse ... big pain just to keep up with news. There are also official X and Reddit accounts but they seem to be updated much less frequently (gaps of months between posts right now).

> While you have to do some sort of mining every 24 hours to stop logs from decaying, it's not clear exactly how much. Is one click on an image good enough? One solve? I saw an offhand comment on Telegram indicating you need to mine an entire coin per day, but I have no idea if that's true or not. If it is, mining one coin is very manageable right now (maybe 5-10 minutes or so of clicking), but it just continues to get harder over time and presumably it won't be eventually.

Should You Give CaptchaCoin a Try?

As mentioned, I'm fairly certain this isn't a scam as there are much quicker and easier ways to run a scamcoin that don't involve years of indirect buildup and all this elaborate website stuff and paper-writing (just ask Hawk Tuah). But it's an apparently one-man or several-man shoestring project that could very well fall apart in a number of ways. The upside is that, at least at this point, you only need to invest a little time here and there to potentially earn some decent money, and if the thing goes kablooey that's all you're out in the end. And even if it never goes far beyond the current trading price of about 10 cents per coin, that still might be useful money for those in developing countries at least.

Links

Block explorer

Forum post laying out the long-term plan in non-technical language

CaptchaCoin Reddit account

X/Twitter account

If you've seen any television or internet commercials claiming that people have recently won an iPad for 30 cents or an Xbox for a dollar, then you have already had some exposure to penny-auction sites. The hook here is that bids can only be increased in very-small fixed increments, and site users have only a finite amount of "credits" which they have to spend to place each bid. Therefore, in theory, an expensive item could end up selling for a relatively low price if it flew below the radar or if all other interested parties just happened to be short on credits at the moment.

Of course, it rarely works out that those expensive gizmos sell for pennies on the dollar, or these sites would be out of business immediately. It isn't too uncommon for products to sell for slightly below retail on these sites, but after various fees and shipping, you might not be coming out ahead. You also have to consider the loss from all the non-refundable credits you will have spent bidding up items that you ultimately didn't win.

Here is a look at how the legitimate penny auction sites operate, and how the outright scams work. Note that a site being listed as "legitimate" doesn't mean that you'll commonly find deep discounts there; it simply means that the site has a fairly transparent business model and will not outright defraud its users.

Legitimate Penny-Auction Sites

Most of the big-name sites that have made enough money to advertise on national TV (such as Beezid and DealDash) are legitimate. When you use them, however, you'll find the ridiculous deals the TV ads offer are about as rare as a blue moon. To understand why, you have to understand how the whole business model works.

Penny-auction sites can only function if the site itself directly stocks the items in question and distributes them. So it's not like eBay or Amazon Marketplace, where you have millions of individual sellers with their own inventories simply using the same interface and rule set. The reason these big sites tend to be the only legitimate ones is that they are the only ones with the capital and leverage to negotiate favorable wholesale deals with product manufacturers.

The big penny-auction sites have a stock of popular consumer goods that they got for a decent price by buying in bulk. They still have to make a profit selling them, however. This is where the concept of "credits" comes in. The ideal situation for the site is when an auction concludes above what they paid per unit for the item, so they make a profit on it plus all the credits that people spent while bidding it up. Even if the auction concludes slightly below what they paid, they may still turn a profit if enough bidders dumped enough credits into the auction. As long as the bid total gets high enough, the site is making money.

They might also add on to this profit margin by way of post-auction fees, such as a mandatory flat shipping and handling fee that exceeds the actual cost of shipping, or a percentage owed on each auction to be paid by the winner. In addition to charging for credits, they might also require an annual or monthly subscription fee to participate. The large sites manage to avoid heaping on fees, as they have been shown to drive away customers, but they usually sneak at least a little something in there to ensure some amount of profitability on nearly every transaction.

There are a couple more added twists that set penny auctions apart from the more standard e-commerce model. New bids usually extend the auction time by some amount. The purpose of this is to eliminate "bid sniping," where everyone interested in an auction simply waits until the last possible minute to fire off a low bid and hopes theirs is the one that makes it through just before closing. The other method is to limit the number of items you can win per month, in an effort to control "sharp" bidders who have found a way to game the system.

If a legitimate penny-auction site is well-funded enough to keep a good inventory of products they got at a good price, they don't need to resort to much in the way of chicanery. Most of their auctions will close at or near what they paid for the item, and some will shoot above retail as people get into compulsive and irrational bidding wars. This is all more than enough to offset the rare occasions when someone manages to get lucky and pay only a fraction of an item's value.

Not-So-Legitimate Penny-Auction Sites

Smaller sites that can't compete on inventory have developed an unfortunate pattern of doing it through deceit and fraud instead. One nefarious tactic that is commonly employed is to use an automated bidding "bot" that will gradually drive every auction up to the site owner's desired price. They may even hire people at "click farms" to do it manually to make it seem even more legitimate. Still others will simply not ship a bunch of items, or use a vague listing to try to get away with shipping a cheaper item.

A popular tactic for fly-by-night scam sites of this nature is to operate semi-legitimately for a while until customers start getting wise to them and complaining en masse. Then the site suddenly folds up and disappears with everyone's deposited money and credit card information.

Gambling With Pennies?

Since penny-auction sites started to become popular in the late 2000s, there has been ongoing talk about regulating them as though they were lotteries. So far, no concrete moves have been made, but both the FTC and Better Business Bureau have issued sharply worded warnings about these sites, indicating that they are being looked at as a form of gambling. Once in a while you can snag a nice device for a fraction of its actual value, but it's wise to go in expecting the same odds you would with a casino slot machine.