6 ms·

This is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: > “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” Grayson Ear

This is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: > “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” Grayson Earle, who dreamed up and co-leads the project, told In Justice Today Does this person actually understand how crypto mining works? (Classy of them to take a swipe at the very technology enabling their project, by the way.) Even with a GTX1080 TI, at $0.12/kWH you'd be lucky to make $0.01 of profit per hour mining Monero. Most people will be mining at a loss, meaning a direct donation would be more efficient. Secondly, the whole idea of raising a general fund to pay the bail for accused criminals is absurd. How are the recipients selected? What happens when they actually do abscond and the money from the fund is lost? Bail serves an important purpose in mitigating flight risks. Why don't the authors of this project work on a technology solution that accomplishes that without collateral? Say, a cheap GPS tracking device or smart phone app.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mvarner 9y ago
Re: your second and third points, they're donating directly to an already established bail fund that's been around for a few years and have seen 90% of the people they bail out show up to trial. The authors don't choose who the recipients are, but it seems the flight risk of the people selected is pretty low.
kbenson 9y ago
> > “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” I'm not really a proponent of cryptocurrency one way or the other, but I'm not sure it's any less absurd than generating money out of paper/textiles and ink. Drawing a picture of a $1 bill on an appropriately sized piece of material doesn't make it money, the supply, demand and efficiency of exchange does (and the demand is often generated by a backing from a government, but doesn't have to be). We had private bank notes long before we had government backed notes.
- bfuller 9y ago
  Not just that but most money isn't even in the form of cash. It's literally just numbers on computers generated by the fed out of thin air. I'm not arguing if its right or wrong, but the author sure doesnt seem like they understand what theyre talking about.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > 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.
s73ver_ 9y ago
Bail can serve that purpose. However, in many instances, it's really just an unreasonable tax on the poor.
- bfuller 9y ago
  I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on a website where most people probably make close to 100k but bail would be a lot more fair if it were based on total income.
  - cloakandswagger 9y ago
    Typical bails are so small already that I can't seem to get riled up over this particular "injustice". An assault and battery charge will generally get you a $10K bail. Assuming the typical bondsman charges 10%, that's a measly $1,000 to be walking the streets again after assaulting someone. I can already hear the stampede of justice troopers coming to tell me that $1,000 of emergency funds is too much to ask of your average accused criminal. How many of you would be amenable to say, a $100 charge for an ankle bracelet? Or a work-release program that allows them to attend work while waiting for trial?
    - codefined 9y ago
      > again after assaulting someone. They haven't been to court yet, they might be innocent.
      - cloakandswagger 9y ago
        True, but it's more likely they're guilty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#cite_note-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#cite_note-5
        sincerely 9y ago
        oh dear. the presumption of innocence is an international human right. justice-by-statistics is an extremely bad idea.
bfuller 9y ago
Hilarious. Does he not realize how the fed works?
- jMyles 9y ago
  I don't understand why people are downvoting you - this was my first thought as well.
- adventured 9y ago
  You're spot on in pointing that out. There is one problem with that however. The Federal Reserve system is directly supported by the economic output of the entire US and the taxing power of the US Government (it's further supported by the vast global demand for dollars and the dollar as the global reserve currency; that global reserve status can be further ensured by the US military). For example, if US budget deficits get too great, requiring support in the form of QE by the Fed, which then causes the dollar's value to drop, the US Congress can increase taxes to lower or eliminate the budget deficit. A healthy US economy is critical to supporting the Fed's abilities as it pertains to the USD. All of the Fed's actions and all of the things the Fed can buy, are directly linked to the US economy. You can certainly print incredibly vast quantities of fiat - that won't help you at all if your economy is toast, if people don't fundamentally believe in what backs the currency, just ask Venezuela or Zimbabwe. When the Fed debases the dollar, what they're doing is taxing the wealth & economic output of the US economy, not solely manufacturing value out of nothing, they're spliting off value from an existing economy (and to a lesser extent global economic value from eg dollars & commodities held overseas). Absolutely nothing like that exists for Bitcoin.
  - cloakandswagger 9y ago
    Bitcoin's value is backed by its hashing power and all the resources required for that. Arguably a foundation just as valid (and more ethical) than a nation state's guns and bombs.
    - librarian42 9y ago
      Bitcoin's value is backed by people's belief in Bitcoin. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth any more than Dogecoin. And calling the massive waste of resources involved in Bitcoin mining ethical is fucking hilarious. Congratulations, Libertaria has invented a new kind of evil.
0d311 9y ago
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.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  The problem is the extreme inefficiency of the trade-off. That electricity is probably being converted to Bitcoin at a much worse exchange rate than a large miner would get, so we are essentially wasting electricity in order to give the donor a better story than giving directly.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Charity donations are driven by lots of things that are inefficient but provide a better story. The inefficiency is, in effect, part of the cost of marketing a charity. Charity fundraising is about maximizing net donations, not maximizing donation efficiency. There may be some causes where the potential donor pool is such that the latter is important to the former, but, irrational as it may be, it's generally not.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      > Charity fundraising is about maximizing net donations, not maximizing donation efficiency. In any other domain, I would agree with you, but charities are at least theoretically about maximizing total gain to society, not just the narrow interests of the charity organization itself. Doing the equivalent of the broken window fallacy in order to capture a larger share of nonprofit donations is literally the definition of organizations turning parasitic and no longer serving their original purpose. This is why competent nonprofits are judged by metrics like administrative efficiency nowadays.
taw55 9y ago
> “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” Erh, this is literally how every bank does it when they extend a loan.
ritchiea 9y ago
Bail is broken [0], that's the assumption they're starting with. They and many others have observed that bail lends the wealthy an opportunity to walk free with little cost, overfills jails, creates debt/costs for innocent people who are never convicted of crimes and has created a market for businesses to profit off of justice system inefficiency. Whether you agree or not is for another argument. They believe the bail system is not working and that it's a worthy cause to raise money for people that would be stuck behind bars because they can't afford bail. And while there are clearly engineering costs to mining, this app provides users a passive way to donate to the bail reform cause. The theory is clearly that people who otherwise would not donate will download the app and donate CPU cycles. Getting people to open their wallets is harder than getting people to donate their CPU cycles. "Direct donation is more efficient" is only an effective argument against this if it is the case that every potential user of the app is equally likely to enter their banking information and donate a small sum monthly. I suspect many people who would not be willing to set up a small monthly donation would be willing to donate CPU cycles & electricity. 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/12/536905881/episode-783-new-jersey-bails-out https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/12/536905881/epis...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mvarner 9y ago

Re: your second and third points, they're donating directly to an already established bail fund that's been around for a few years and have seen 90% of the people they bail out show up to trial. The authors don't choose who the recipients are, but it seems the flight risk of the people selected is pretty low.

kbenson 9y ago

> > “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” I'm not really a proponent of cryptocurrency one way or the other, but I'm not sure it's any less absurd than generating money out of paper/textiles and ink. Drawing a picture of a $1 bill on an appropriately sized piece of material doesn't make it money, the supply, demand and efficiency of exchange does (and the demand is often generated by a backing from a government, but doesn't have to be). We had private bank notes long before we had government backed notes.

bfuller 9y ago
Not just that but most money isn't even in the form of cash. It's literally just numbers on computers generated by the fed out of thin air. I'm not arguing if its right or wrong, but the author sure doesnt seem like they understand what theyre talking about.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > 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.

s73ver_ 9y ago

Bail can serve that purpose. However, in many instances, it's really just an unreasonable tax on the poor.

bfuller 9y ago
I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on a website where most people probably make close to 100k but bail would be a lot more fair if it were based on total income.
- cloakandswagger 9y ago
  Typical bails are so small already that I can't seem to get riled up over this particular "injustice". An assault and battery charge will generally get you a $10K bail. Assuming the typical bondsman charges 10%, that's a measly $1,000 to be walking the streets again after assaulting someone. I can already hear the stampede of justice troopers coming to tell me that $1,000 of emergency funds is too much to ask of your average accused criminal. How many of you would be amenable to say, a $100 charge for an ankle bracelet? Or a work-release program that allows them to attend work while waiting for trial?
  - codefined 9y ago
    > again after assaulting someone. They haven't been to court yet, they might be innocent.
    - cloakandswagger 9y ago
      True, but it's more likely they're guilty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#cite_note-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#cite_note-5
      - sincerely 9y ago
        oh dear. the presumption of innocence is an international human right. justice-by-statistics is an extremely bad idea.

bfuller 9y ago

Hilarious. Does he not realize how the fed works?

jMyles 9y ago
I don't understand why people are downvoting you - this was my first thought as well.
adventured 9y ago
You're spot on in pointing that out. There is one problem with that however. The Federal Reserve system is directly supported by the economic output of the entire US and the taxing power of the US Government (it's further supported by the vast global demand for dollars and the dollar as the global reserve currency; that global reserve status can be further ensured by the US military). For example, if US budget deficits get too great, requiring support in the form of QE by the Fed, which then causes the dollar's value to drop, the US Congress can increase taxes to lower or eliminate the budget deficit. A healthy US economy is critical to supporting the Fed's abilities as it pertains to the USD. All of the Fed's actions and all of the things the Fed can buy, are directly linked to the US economy. You can certainly print incredibly vast quantities of fiat - that won't help you at all if your economy is toast, if people don't fundamentally believe in what backs the currency, just ask Venezuela or Zimbabwe. When the Fed debases the dollar, what they're doing is taxing the wealth & economic output of the US economy, not solely manufacturing value out of nothing, they're spliting off value from an existing economy (and to a lesser extent global economic value from eg dollars & commodities held overseas). Absolutely nothing like that exists for Bitcoin.
- cloakandswagger 9y ago
  Bitcoin's value is backed by its hashing power and all the resources required for that. Arguably a foundation just as valid (and more ethical) than a nation state's guns and bombs.
  - librarian42 9y ago
    Bitcoin's value is backed by people's belief in Bitcoin. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth any more than Dogecoin. And calling the massive waste of resources involved in Bitcoin mining ethical is fucking hilarious. Congratulations, Libertaria has invented a new kind of evil.

0d311 9y ago

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.

smallnamespace 9y ago
The problem is the extreme inefficiency of the trade-off. That electricity is probably being converted to Bitcoin at a much worse exchange rate than a large miner would get, so we are essentially wasting electricity in order to give the donor a better story than giving directly.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Charity donations are driven by lots of things that are inefficient but provide a better story. The inefficiency is, in effect, part of the cost of marketing a charity. Charity fundraising is about maximizing net donations, not maximizing donation efficiency. There may be some causes where the potential donor pool is such that the latter is important to the former, but, irrational as it may be, it's generally not.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    > Charity fundraising is about maximizing net donations, not maximizing donation efficiency. In any other domain, I would agree with you, but charities are at least theoretically about maximizing total gain to society, not just the narrow interests of the charity organization itself. Doing the equivalent of the broken window fallacy in order to capture a larger share of nonprofit donations is literally the definition of organizations turning parasitic and no longer serving their original purpose. This is why competent nonprofits are judged by metrics like administrative efficiency nowadays.

taw55 9y ago

> “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” Erh, this is literally how every bank does it when they extend a loan.

ritchiea 9y ago

Bail is broken [0], that's the assumption they're starting with. They and many others have observed that bail lends the wealthy an opportunity to walk free with little cost, overfills jails, creates debt/costs for innocent people who are never convicted of crimes and has created a market for businesses to profit off of justice system inefficiency. Whether you agree or not is for another argument. They believe the bail system is not working and that it's a worthy cause to raise money for people that would be stuck behind bars because they can't afford bail. And while there are clearly engineering costs to mining, this app provides users a passive way to donate to the bail reform cause. The theory is clearly that people who otherwise would not donate will download the app and donate CPU cycles. Getting people to open their wallets is harder than getting people to donate their CPU cycles. "Direct donation is more efficient" is only an effective argument against this if it is the case that every potential user of the app is equally likely to enter their banking information and donate a small sum monthly. I suspect many people who would not be willing to set up a small monthly donation would be willing to donate CPU cycles & electricity. 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/12/536905881/episode-783-new-jersey-bails-out https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/12/536905881/epis...