A charity pool for bitcoin mining.

[Anonymous]

I am tired of people saying folding@home and seti are better projects because bitcoin mining just wastes energy for no good reason.

So my idea is to setup a pool (possibly at  https://xf2.org ) and all the proceeds except for running costs would go to bitcoin charities.

If people leave their computers on for folding@home wont they also leave them on for the EFF ?

This idea came about when sgornick brought up the fact people were mining for the xkcd pool and that here is no need to grief such a pool because the purpose isnt to enrich yourself it is to benefit charities you support.


We have an existing charity management system at witcoin and Id like to expand it to include this project.
http://witcoin.com/charities


Do you think this is a project you would support ?

P.S. mined bitcoins means the charities know the exact history of the coins and dont have to worry about anonymous donations with this method.

It also provides a semi permanent bitcoin faucet for charity accepting organisations as long as people support it with their mining.

[commlinx]

One extra class of people who might like this also are people who mine on work computers. I guess some could convince their employers to allow it to support charities, whereas lining you own pockets might not go across so well .

Personally I wouldn't use it, I'd rather treat BTC like any currency and donate when and to whom I see fit. There are some charities are support and a few that I don't so I'd rather make the choice myself and also depending on my own circumstances at the time. I think one idea you'd want to implement is a list of chechboxes for each charity next to a user account that's all on by default so give everyone a choice of who they wanted to support. It does sound like a cool idea, just not one I'd use personally.

[Anonymous]

I think the checkboxes would be unticked because it would be obnoxious to have to uncheck 9000 of them.

[ribuck]

Personally I wouldn't use it, I'd rather treat BTC like any currency and donate when and to whom I see fit.

Same with me.

But I think it's a fantastic idea, because it totally removes one objection that some people have to Bitcoin.

[Ian Maxwell]

Even if I trust a charity to do good with the money they receive, I don't really trust them to do well with it. If I'd spent the last month mining for my favorite charity, they would have received about 200 bitcoins---and probably sold them as fast as they got them, for a total of something like $195. Since I'm one of the bulls, I'd rather hold off on donating until those 200 bitcoins are worth something like $20,000.

But I don't think this is a bad idea to get attention from people currently giving their cycles to fold@home, etc.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

To be clear - you'd mine but not receive payouts, correct? All blocks would go straight to charities?

I'd imagine a slider that the miner can adjust between payouts for himself and for charities would be a good option - people are fairly charitable, and I'd be willing to put 10% of my mining to charity I think, if such a pool were setup. Use Luke-Jr's generated coins trick to send them directly to the charities as well, and bam, clean coins directly in the wallet.

[Anonymous]

I can foresee a special miner someone might want to create that lets you adjust what percentage of mining power you contribute. Call it the charminer   

Imagine a normal miner but one which allows you to carve off a set amount of your hashing power to a charity pool. Just like you can choose an amount of transaction fees you pay each time.


Even further you could have an extra check box in your client that let you donate an amount to the charity management org each time you send a transaction. The new multisend capability in the latest client could handle it I assume.

[Anonymous]

To be clear - you'd mine but not receive payouts, correct? All blocks would go straight to charities?

I'd imagine a slider that the miner can adjust between payouts for himself and for charities would be a good option - people are fairly charitable, and I'd be willing to put 10% of my mining to charity I think, if such a pool were setup. Use Luke-Jr's generated coins trick to send them directly to the charities as well, and bam, clean coins directly in the wallet.

Yes that is the idea. We just added heaps of charities to witcoin so what we need to do is find out which miner solved a block so they can choose who the reward goes to. This would also motivate sites to accept bitcoin because they could setup mining teams and compete against others - just like the leaderboards on folding. 

What is the most appropriate pool software people would recommend ?

[Nicksasa]

I'm a folder myself, and we fold mostly for the competition and bragging rights on our forums. Or we have lost someone because of cancer or such.

There's a rather huge diffrence between FAH and the EFF :p