At tonight’s Surrey Golang meetup, former Professor of Mathematics Busiso Chisala demonstrated an early solution for distributed bitcoin mining, and the plan is to give all of the money to charity.

The idea is inspired by SETI – The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Many thousands of people around the world have volunteered their computing time in order to help the cause, proving that many people are willing to help a good cause.

Today there are millions of Raspberry Pis lying around which could be put to useful work.

If many of these they became bitcoin miners, a huge amount of money could be raised for charity.

I learned that £36,000 per hour is mined around the world. Winning just a small fraction of that every hour could add up to a lot of money.

If you are inspired by this idea there are various ways in which you can help, but at this stage the priority is getting the code production ready.

The code is available on Github at https://github.com/bpc2016/coin. If you are a Golang programmer with an understanding of Bitcoin and network programming, you can help with the coding for this project.

If you are new to Bitcoin, here’s a quick intro and some ways you can learn more:

Bitcoin is a digital currency established in 2008. It is independent of any authority with no trusted 3rd party. It is almost as anonymous as cash.
Trust is replaced with cryptographic proofs

The best introduction to Bitcoin remains Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper: Bitcoin a Peer-to-Peer electronic cash system

Busiso’s slides are here

If you have any questions about the project, please ask them at the Surrey Golang google group.