UNICEF wants you to mine cryptocurrency for charity

UNICEF has launched a page that allows you to donate to your branch in Australia without giving money at all. All you have to do is give up some of your computing power to let it be a cryptocurrency.

More than 2,600 people have already donated through what UNICEF calls The Hopepage. Users can set what percentage of processing power they are willing to offer to the website in a maximum of 80 percent. (Be careful not to set the percentage too high). The longer they stay on the site, the more cryptocurrencies they will help exploit on behalf of UNICEF. The site says that the cryptocurrency will be used to provide children with lifesaving supplies such as drinking water, therapeutic foods and vaccines.

Once you click on Start Donation, a pop-up window will appear in the browser indicating that "www.thehopepage.org wants to use your computing power," assuring you that the algorithms work through your testing zone. browser so you do not need downloads. (It seems that the site may not work on everyone's computer). The notification says that it is powered by Coinhive's Javascript-based mining tool. That is the same tool used by Salon as an experimental alternative to generate advertising revenue, and strangely for the Showtime websites for a short period of time. The tool extracts Monero, an alternative to bitcoin that is said to be more private because it mixes user identification information. Although Monero can rarely be used to buy goods directly, it can easily be converted into fiat currency to buy supplies.

Hopepage shows the hash rate, the rate at which you extract cryptocurrencies, in the upper right corner. For me, it said six hashes per second when I gave the site 20 percent of the computing power of my MacBook Air 2015, a small but admirable effort. Once you are donating, the page also tells you that you are giving the Rohingya refugee children from Myanmar who have faced extreme danger and violence because they are Muslims.

If you are on a laptop, you will notice that the battery begins to run out after a few minutes of using the site, if it is not plugged into a power source. Be very careful because the more computing power you give to TheHopePage.org, the faster your battery will drain and your processor will wear out. It is best to do it while it is plugged in.

It's a creative way of getting people to donate to charities, and it's actually the second instance that UNICEF has used cryptocurrency to fund charities. Last February, he launched a site called Chaingers.io asking visitors to extract Ethereum that would later become funds for Syrian children. The effort has not been very successful, as it only raised a little more than 996 euros (approximately $ 1,200) in the months he has been live.

Still, we started seeing more donations online quickly and painlessly. Facebook users start asking their friends to donate to charities as a birthday present. The New Inquiry also launched a similar mining service last November called Bail Bloc, which donates Monero generated by the users' computing power to the Bronx Freedom Fund to help pay the bail. By default, Bail Bloc uses 10 percent of a user's computing power and can manually configure it to obtain larger amounts if your computer can handle the additional load.

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