Crowd4Change was a project designed to finance social innovation through a democratic and widespread funding process based on the concept of cryptocurrency crowd-mining. The goal was to allow individuals and organizations to make micro-donations at no cost by leveraging energy-efficient crypto protocols with high growth potential.
In particular, we chose the Monero protocol, whose mining is not based on the exploitation of the GPUs but the CPUs – so as to be able to use even less modern hardware.
The Crowd4Change team set up a non-profit organization and in 2014 developed a software product, Mine4Good, to be installed on personal computers and servers of potential donors. This software was designed in order to allow the mining of Monero in the background while automatically transferring the mined cryptocurrencies to the organization.
The organization would then distribute the proceeds from the sale of the cryptocurrencies generated to projects selected by a board of social innovation experts.
The operation of Crowd4Change was interrupted in 2015 when the collapse in the value of cryptocurrencies, together with an increase in the cost of mining, made the project no longer sustainable in the short term (cryptocurrency donations would have had a cost of energy higher than the donations themselves).
