Since I put Bitcoin in the title of a blog post, it’s only a matter of time before my readership jumps 12,000%. But the cryptocurrency revolution/bubble (depending on whom you ask) now has the power to do something besides making us all unimaginably rich/soon to be broke. A few enterprising individuals are using cryptocurrency to make a dent in the inequities of the American cash bail system. Bail Bloc is a joint project of The New Inquiry and Bronx Freedom Fund and is pretty cool.
Visitors to the Bail Bloc website can download a program which then runs in the background and uses their computer’s spare computing power to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. The profits are used to provide bail money to low income individuals who would otherwise remain in custody. It’s slacktivism, only with some impact.
For those looking to make the criminal law a little more just, there is perhaps no lower hanging fruit than pretrial detention. The Prison Policy Initiative estimates that 70% of people in jail on a given day in the United States are in pretrial detention. These people have not been convicted of any crime. Most are in custody not because they are particularly dangerous, but because they are poor and cannot afford to post bail. For many facing less serious charges, pretrial detention effectively forces them to plead guilty. Imagine being told that the punishment for the crime you are accused of committing is 90 days in jail, but that you might have to stay in jail for a year awaiting trial if you plead not guilty. These kinds of impossible choices are the reality for many poor and marginalized people, and donating your spare computer power is about as easy a way as there could be to make a difference in their lives.