While long-time customers have been following our progress on this feature for some time, I wanted to introduce the wider community to this new offering. Charity mining allows customers to donate all or a portion of their profits from mining to charitable causes. By mining for charity, you can use your mining equipment to make a difference in the world. All that you have to do is to change your payout proportions so that a few percent of your earnings are directed to charity, and the system automatically donates the money with no additional effort on your part. We have modified the "payout proportions" page so that it is now possible to set fractions of a percent to a coin or charity, making it possible to donate small amounts.
To set up charity mining, visit the "payout proportions" section of the "Settings" page, and scroll down to the bottom of the list of coins, and select the charity to which you would like to donate. Then, click "Add new coin," slide the sliders to the percentage of your revenue you would like to donate, and click "Save."
Currently, we have a limited number of charities, taken from the list supported by the Pineapple Fund (http://pineapplefund.org.) We have contacted 20 charities, and these are the ones who have replied. If you would like to suggest a charity, feel free to reply to this post. Our simple three-step criteria for charities are:
- They must have low percentages of their contributions spent on administrative costs
- They must reply to our E-Mails asking for a donation address (this has proven to be the biggest hurdle, with a surprisingly high number of disorganized charities)
- They must accept coins - we do not have bank accounts from which to donate dollars
An earlier poll indicated that about 0.96% of miners' revenue would be donated to charity. Last year's revenue was $33m. Based upon the "most likely case" projection of bitcoins worth $2,500 at the bottom of this cycle, miners can expect to earn $10m and donate $100,000 to charity over the next year. But that's only existing miners - there are undoubtedly miners who were not present to answer the poll because they would only have joined for the purpose of donating most of their money to charity. Let's triple this projection!
Over the next month, Constance will be continually improving the website to enhance the charity mining features. Here are the tasks on her to-do list:
- She will create a table of the most prolific givers
- She will add links and information about the charities and what causes they support
- She will continue to add more charities as they reply to our E-Mails