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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I just skimmed through the article, but the gist seems to be: download this app in large numbers, we will use your phone as bitcoin miners and use the mined coins to pay for bail.

This is just so fucking absurd. The problem with bail is not a technological one, its a legislative one. I think Kamala Harris has taken the right steps and publicly stated how absurd it is that we jail so many fellow citizens for being poor (or unable to furnish bail money).

Overpromised technology hurts the people who try to use it but also erodes trust in technologists. I can't believe this has survived the smell test. If I missed something, please do let me know.

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You're right that policy needs to change but raising money via mining to actually free people can change those people's lives while we press for a legislative solution. It's an abstract problem for you but why merely sit around waiting for policy to change when people still suffer from bad policy?

Added bonus: when there is energy around sidestepping bad policy that is another sign to legislators that the policy should indeed be changed.

A better solution IMO would be to set up a trust/charity that provides bail money. Using technology to solve problems is great: I just don't think this is a particularly good solution. And Government agencies are very very conservative: if you pilot a program and it fails to deliver, they will essentially no longer listen to you.

It's hard to get people to donate their money directly. You might be able to get more people to passively donate CPU cycles and electricity than to directly donate money. And please don't argue there's no difference because people definitely are more likely to do something if you make it easy for them to do it.

I understand from an engineering perspective this has a cost but the idea is clearly to find a way to get more people to donate to a worthy cause.

> A better solution IMO would be to set up a trust/charity that provides bail money

Um, been done. Its called “The Bail Project”. [0]

This crypto-mining project is just a fundraising project (not the only one) for the Bail Project.

> I just don't think this is a particularly good solution.

It's not a solution to the bail problem, it's just an added funding channel for something that aims to be (part of) that solution.

[0] https://bailproject.org

It uses Monero:

https://bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com/about.html

If it used Bitcoin it would clearly be absurd because CPUs are useless for mining.

I don't pay enough attention to cybercoins to understand how worthwhile it will be to mine Monero.

It is still worthwhile to mine Monero and it's little "litecoin" style brother Aeon.

And this from the whitepaper:

> We also compute a new XMR-to-USD price, modeled as a random walk (a monthly change is uniformly random on the interval [-5%, 5%]). For each miner, we also sample the XMR mined (directly as its estimated USD value) uniformly randomly from the interval [$1, $4]. This mined USD is added to the bail fund

Makes me wonder if they understand the volatility of cryptocurrency.

Speaking of Kamala, I like what one blockchain is doing with in terms of 'creating elections' and voting mentioned here https://medium.com/@gaetanconsulting/3-icos-with-working-pro...

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