Initial Venezuela aid / relief

So this is a quick follow-on from my last Medium post about the situation in Venezuela, and how I felt DigiByte would be the ideal blockchain to be used in such a situation.

I’ve had a quick call with David Hay behind the project, and expressed interest in how DigiByte can help. Not just in how we can be the blockchain-of-choice, but in any way possible.

So let’s start this off being totally clear: David has not chosen DigiByte for this project, nor do I think anything like that would happen any time soon.

However, on our call he mentioned he’s heading down there next week. I then asked if we could send some sort of small “emergency aid / relief” fund with him, that he could give out to wherever he saw in need on the ground when he’s there. This could be anything from a local hospital, church, orphanage, or whatever he can find while he’s there sorting out some other things, at what will basically be ground-zero.

My proposal is this:

Let’s send him down there with 80,000 DigiByte, to help out the people of Venezuela, in any way that he sees fit!

I’ll be the first to donate 2000 DigiByte, and you too can donate here:

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Once we’ve got 80,000 DigiByte (Approx USD$2,000) then we’ll send it over to David to take it with him to Venezuela next week.

There’s two catches:

First of all, the timing. Because he’s going next week, we have approx 48–72 hours realistically to get this all completed and sent to him. Shouldn’t be a problem, because I know how enthusiastic the community response has been already to help out!

Second, we want to cap it off at 80,000 DigiByte total. At his request, we don’t want to send too much money to cause there to be any kind of issue with his physical safety while he’s over there in Venezuela.

For comparison, if an average wage is USD$3–4 per-month, that means we’ll be sending roughly the wages of 8-people working for a decade.

What’s to stop him spending it on hotels?

Nothing, we’re trusting that he’ll do what’s best with the donations. David has even offered to do a short video while he’s there, as he gives away the funds!

One last thing

We’re not going to be tweeting this from the DigiByte twitter account etc, this is just something nice for the community to get involved with, through a little bit of ‘word of mouth’.

This is cryptocurrency in-action, doing something good to help people less fortunate than you.

I’ll update you once we’ve sent the funds to David.