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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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