How do we use technology for the betterment of human life? Not everyone is lucky and there are many across the world in need of food, shelter, healthcare facilities, education and much more. There are various organizations spread across the world who are working hard, round the clock to ensure that everyone gets the basic necessities of life and an opportunity to lead a quality life.
All these activities conducted by these organizations or even individuals at times require money and they usually raise the required money through donations, fundraising events, government and corporate grants etc. There are thousands of online donation and fundraising campaigns happening over the internet for various causes every day. People interested in making a change often donate either cash or bitcoin (in few cases) for these campaigns.
Bitcoin has become an important tool for fundraising, mainly because of negligible transaction fees and ease of cross border transactions. Now, a Boston based developer has come up with an innovative campaign to raise funds for charity. Jacob Evelyn, a 24 year old graduate from Yale has started an online project called Compute for Humanity.
Compute for Humanity project allows people to contribute their computing power for charitable causes. Compute for Humanity is a crowdsourcing project where the contributed processing power will be used to mine bitcoin. Jacob Evelyn has a day job at Panorama Education, a startup that builds remote cryptocurrency mining software. He has used his expertise and the learning gained from his day job into Compute for Humanity project
Cryptocurrency mining, especially bitcoin mining is virtually impossible with a regular PC. However, mining with collective processing power from a large number of PCs connected to a network is different. The application created by Jacob Evelyn as part of Compute for Humanity which the volunteers download and run in the background to share processing power ensures that the load is evenly distributed to every system connected on the network.
The bitcoins mined as part of the crowdsourced initiative will be distributed to the partner non-profits. Compute for Humanity currently has three partner non-profits namely, Pencils of Promise, Watsi and GlobalGiving.
