Unocoin, an India-based bitcoin exchange, has joined hands with Purse.io to complete the cycle from Mechanical Turk to Indian rupees.
Purse.io, a Bitcoin startup, was launched last year and enables exchanging Amazon gift card credit and bitcoins at attractive prices. The start-up claims that people can save 20% on Amazon items by purchasing with bitcoin.
Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, is an initiative by Amazon to employ human intelligence (i.e. manual work) for tasks that cannot be executed by computers. Since then it has expanded into a global crowdsourcing marketplace, linking "requestors" with workers (a.k.a. providers, or Turkers) to accomplish such tasks.
Majority of Turkers are based outside the U.S., and therefore they have limited choice of payment options, that is, a USD check in the mail, or an instant Amazon gift card balance. Purse.io can solve this problem by converting this balance into bitcoin and Unocoin, on the other hand, would have these converted to Indian rupees for workers based in India.
