[Tristan Lall]

So, if a person can deposit 50 coins per minute, and therefore 3 000 per hour (assuming they can work continuously), achieving the million-and-a-half coin total was the equivalent of something like 380 to 400 hours worth of coin-depositing (a.k.a. mindless crap¹).

If you paid a person the minimum wage in Wisconsin ($7.25/h) to do that work for about 390 hours, that would be over $2 800. My conclusion is therefore that we need a way of sending small cash payments to Wave Robotics with minimal overhead—and then we need to convince ChiefDelphi users to stop wasting time and just pay up! The world is better off that way, because those ChiefDelphi users get to donate to a good cause, their employers get the benefit of the hours of labour that underwrites their donations, and the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation gets to keep its money.²

Now, I'm pretty sure this was actually won—and lost for that matter—by programmers and their dueling scripts, so the net loss to society could be smaller than that $2 800 figure. On the other hand, how many of us would be happy at a wage rate of $7.25/h? (I'm thinking that this enlarged the loss to society, given the calibre of participants in this thread.)

So next time someone posts asking you to click on something repeatedly or do some other menial task, and the sheer absurdity of it doesn't dissuade you from helping out, either:

• Automate it out of a combination of expediency and protest. (The problem-solver's solution.)
• Consider that once you've impulsively accepted the "challenge" of dropping virtual coins in a virtual pig as a means of contributing to the team, you'd actually be better off checking if Wave Robotics has a "Donate with Google Checkout" (or other equivalent) button on their webpage.

Actually, the real problem-solver's solution is this: figure out a way to overcome the frictional effects of small financial transactions (e.g. impulse control, authentication, etc.), and account for the (minimal) recreational benefits of playing this game, with the overall objective of making donations as attractive as spending time dropping coins in a pig. That way everyone actually wins.

¹ Full disclosure: Minesweeper is fun too. But I'm deliberately keeping my time-wasting labour to myself, so that nobody knows how much time I'm wasting.
² Practically speaking, I know that income and labour aren't often this granular, but I think the point about more productive uses of labour stands.