Cryptocurrency Is the Next Frontier in the Quest to Abolish Cash Bail
injusticetoday.com
injusticetoday.com
> “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.
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.
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.
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?
They haven't been to court yet, they might be innocent.
the presumption of innocence is an international human right. justice-by-statistics is an extremely bad idea.
Considering that we are talking about bail (meaning 1-2 weeks in jail, not a lifetime in prison) and we have justice systems that are right 80-90% of the time, I lean towards the more pragmatic statistical approach.
The "internationally recognized human right" thing seems like a thought terminating cliche, not sure why that should be the end of the discussion.
i brought up the human rights angle because your line of thought appears to run counter to article 11 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights...but it's interesting that you can dismiss that by calling it a "cliche".
The first search result I got back says that median retirement savings are <$500 for youngish people.
That $1k is only "small" for us rich folk.
In fact your arrogant assertion that this isn't injustice is fucking offensive. I am having trouble not attacking you personally because of how ignorant you came off in this post.
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.
And calling the massive waste of resources involved in Bitcoin mining ethical is fucking hilarious. Congratulations, Libertaria has invented a new kind of evil.
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.
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.
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.
No, they aren't. That is government.
Charities are organized for a specific identified charitable purpose and are generally not, even in theory, any less narrowly focussed on that identified purpose than a for-profit firm is on serving the common, usually financial, interests of it's stockholders.
> This is why competent nonprofits are judged by metrics like administrative efficiency nowadays.
The administrative efficiency measures used by outlets like Charity Navigator are feel-good metrics that favor unevaluated, uncontrolled funnelling of money in the hope of achieving the notional objective. A real charity efficiency measure would measure its cost-effectiveness at achieving outcomes that are its charitable purpose, not administrative vs. program funding measures (and, as a consequence, would probably only be directly comparable within the same domain.) Administrative efficiency is used because it's cheap, easy, and portable across domains, not because it's even remotely meaningful.
Erh, this is literally how every bank does it when they extend a loan.
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/epis...
This is just so fucking absurd. The problem with bail is not a technological one, its a legislative one. I think Kamala Harris has taken the right steps and publicly stated how absurd it is that we jail so many fellow citizens for being poor (or unable to furnish bail money).
Overpromised technology hurts the people who try to use it but also erodes trust in technologists. I can't believe this has survived the smell test. If I missed something, please do let me know.
Added bonus: when there is energy around sidestepping bad policy that is another sign to legislators that the policy should indeed be changed.
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.
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.
https://bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com/about.html
If it used Bitcoin it would clearly be absurd because CPUs are useless for mining.
I don't pay enough attention to cybercoins to understand how worthwhile it will be to mine Monero.
> We also compute a new XMR-to-USD price, modeled as a random walk (a monthly change is uniformly random on the interval [-5%, 5%]). For each miner, we also sample the XMR mined (directly as its estimated USD value) uniformly randomly from the interval [$1, $4]. This mined USD is added to the bail fund
Makes me wonder if they understand the volatility of cryptocurrency.
I was trying to figure out if you could encode a bail arrangement with ethereum somehow before clicking on it and was disappointed when it was just fund raising.
> If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is
If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems impossible, that’s because it is.
There are no free lunches.
If you're looking for a distributed computing initiative to support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...
Not sure what that straw man has to do with being rewarded for mining cryptocurrencies and exchanging them for fiat though. That is clearly very possible and often profitable.
This idea is predicated on an intellectually dishonest premise that mining crypto is "free". Naive do-gooders will run this app without realizing the hidden costs.
https://github.com/thenewinquiry/bailbloc/blob/401cb4f288d88...
Concede the point that users would be making an informed (albeit minimally) decision.
https://github.com/thenewinquiry/bailbloc/blob/401cb4f288d88...
Thanks for engaging in a friendly, respectful dialogue with links to source!
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?
Does it actually in practice prevent flight, or does it just fuck over people who can't pay?
Like I said. This is a problem that need to be solved legislatively, not by paying others' bail inefficiently.
This stunt seems more like a way to market for donations. Agree that it's unlikely to generate much, and the electricity cost means it'd be way more efficient to just donate money directly.
Certainly a legislative solution to the injustices around bail is the right way to go, but I'm not holding my breath for something like that any time soon. Hopefully orgs like this are just an interim, stopgap measure, though.
I had a $0 bail for a misdemeanor (first time offense). Then two former federal prosecutors got involved in my case and had the Judge revoke my bail and set it for $75,000.
I spent 5 weeks in LA County jail trying to fight my case until I gave in, brutalized by the conditions and the endless fake court appearances (dry runs). The people that work in that industry are dangerous, deluded and wreak havoc in communities.
I feel so much empathy for the hundreds of thousands of LA inmates who are unfairly subjugated to such a system. It is perpetuating chaos, gangs and fractured lives.
The FBI has video surveillance cameras in all the jails because of police abuse and the former Sheriff is heading to federal prison.
I commend any group trying to fight for reform. LA's problems are directly tied to malicious and excessive policing, bails and boilerplate plea deals.
“Rationalized” rather than designed.
> 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.
In practice, it's not for the rich, and it's set high enough that the poor can't afford bonds much less the bail itself.
> Having strangers pay your bail means you have no reason to stay.
The project this provides an additional funding stream for already exists, and the vast majority of people whose bail is funded do not skip, so this is empirically not the case.
> People having a hard time making bail is working-as-intended.
It's clearly not working as intended by anyone who would fund the project this funds.
> If you dislike it, write to your senator.
Seeking change in the laws (which many people are, at local, state, and national levels) is not incompatible with seeking to take legal steps to mitigate harms of the current system in the meantime.
I find it amusing how those pumping coins seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that whatever fantasy world conjured up still lives within the confines of our legislative & financial laws.
http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/parts-of-speech/nouns/Coll...
Mining Monero for charity.
Thoughts?
Or if you really want to use cryptocurrencies, buy some XMR/BTC/whatever off an exchange and donate that.
At current prices (depending on electricity price) it is more efficient to mine Monero than buy it outright, especially off an exchange (which incurs tx and trading costs).
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?)?