Cryptocurrency Is the Next Frontier in the Quest to Abolish Cash Bail

> I'm not arguing if its right or wrong, but the author sure doesnt seem like they understand what theyre talking about.

I think they understand - to a point. It's just a few steps removed from what they normally think of, so is easily confused as "from thin air".

If they solicited people to draw doodles and simple cartoons in their free time and send them in, and they would auction those off, it wouldn't be "from thin air".

If you have your computer randomly generate fractals or images and send them in and people purchase the aesthetically pleasing ones, that's also not "from thin air". You've just traded your direct effort for use of your computer, which includes increased energy costs, and possibly slowed computer usage.

Replace images that are aesthetically pleasing for a bit of cryptographic hashing that helps the whole market, and you're where we're at today. Costs are there, they are just so small as to be easily lost in the rest of your costs, and the work is there, just abstract and automatic enough that it's easy to not realize it's work. Fundamentally it's no difference than everybody contributing a doodle though.

Are you sure? If I'm reading this correctly https://whattomine.com/coins?utf8=%E2%9C%93&adapt_q_280x=0&a...

A 1080Ti will mine 0.0396XMR every 24hours (yielding $4.71 at current prices).

Presumably a CPU will fare significantly worse?

Exchange fees and tx costs are negligible (especially compared to the variation in elec prices depending on where you live).

Edit: as I understand it there's really no such thing as an ASIC resistant coin. Rather there's just an understanding that if ASICs get produced for XMR/VTC the devs will change the algorithm and fork the coin. If that's the case, surely these PoW coins are still susceptible to needing more and more hash power for a return as difficulty goes up (though perhaps less aggressively/rapidly compared to BTC?)?

Re: your first point

I don't think it's an attempted solution to a problem of efficient wealth transfer, I think it's an attempt to solve the issue of marketing a charity. Any charity's argument is essentially 'give us your wealth so we can do something good with it for people who do not have wealth'. Being able to reduce the cost for donators to something as low as the cost of electricity and the simplicity of downloading and running an app seems like a viable strategy for targeting a much wider audience of donators.

That's not to say it will succeed, or that there aren't other issues with this idea. But I do think that it is a good idea to try to target people who wouldn't be making a direct donation anyways.

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.

Classic silicon valley-like thinking. Try to "disrupt" a system without understanding what it is for and why it was designed the way it was.

Bail is designed to prevent flight risk. It is set high enough that you'd have a hard time coming up with that much money without being forced to stay and appear. Having strangers pay your bail means you have no reason to stay. It makes bail jumping more likely. People having a hard time making bail is working-as-intended. It may be hard to swallow, but the system was purposefully designed this way. If you dislike it, write to your senator. Paying others' bail, even as inefficiently as this, will change nothing.

Very very inefficiently, actually. Mining on "unused cycles" on most PCs will generate negligibly small amounts of money. Even multiplied by the number of people foolish enough to enrol in this, it will still be a negligible amount of money. So who decides 1/10th of which criminal's bail this will go to?