Altrui.st wants to give web sites a way to use their visitors’ unused processing power for good.
“Poverty is the most pressing issues we face as a species, so we came up with an idea… we are going to give money away,” said Atltrui.st co-developer Dani Guardiola onstage at our Disrupt Berlin Hackathon.
If the hack sounds slightly similar to the CoinHive hack that rocked the Internet earlier this year, that’s because it is.
But instead of being a way for nefarious, mustache twirling bad-guys, these crypto-robin (robbin?) hoods want to give websites a tool to let users opt in to opening up their processing power for crypto-mining. The fruits of that processing labor would be distributed to people who meet certain requirements, according to the hack’s creators Dani Guardiola and Carlos Jeurissen.
The 20 year old Guardiola, who hails from Madrid, and 23 year-old Jeurissen, from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, have known each other for the past six years, but only met in person three months ago.
Their first interactions were online, when Guardiola offered to help Jeuressen translate a chrome extension he had developed into Spanish.
That connection blossomed into a friendship and when Guardiola said he was heading to Berlin to participate in his second Disrupt hackathon (he first pitched in London), Jeuressen went along.
The Altrui.st hack wasn’t the first idea that the two would-be crypto-consciousness raising entrepreneurs had. That would have been a video player that would only play Nickelback songs — thankfully they went to the second option. In part because Guardiola has a lifetime interest in social justice.
“Basic income is a really big step. There’s a lot of people that have been thinking about how to connect cryptocurrency with basic income,”says Guardiola. “[So] why not make a plug in that can just create money and give it directly to the poor?”
For the purposes of the hackathon (and to be honest, pretty much only for the purpose of the hackathon), the hack uses the Deutsche Bank api to connect with bank accounts. More cleverly they’re using geography and the ESRI api as one of the gating agents to determine who would receive the money coming off of the mining operations from that websites allow.
Would-be beneficiaries would apply for the basic minimum income using an application process on the Altrui.st site.
Here’s how they describe the process: The applicant heads to the application portal and clicks the ‘Apply with Deutsche Bank’ button. Then they introduce their personal data to log in on Deutsche Bank. They then pull the data from DBapi, and they pull demographic data from Esri based on the DBapi provided address. Finally, they calculate a score and save the user data on a database.
It’s something that both Guardiola and Jeurissen would like to continue and it’s a clever use of crypto. Or, as Guardiola put it in his presentation… “Altrui.st we fight poverty.”