Imagine being able to help refugee children from Rohingya procure food and shelter simply by sitting in front of a computer and surfing the internet. UNICEF’s latest creation, the Hopepage, allows internet users to do just that – by delegating a portion of your computer’s processing power, you enable the site to mine cryptocurrency and subsequently donate the funds accrued to UNICEF’s Australian Branch.
With Hopepage, UNICEF aims to make donating to those in need more accessible than they are today. Aside from the reluctance of parting with one’s hard-earned bucks, people tend to be dissuaded from donating to the poor because of the amount of trouble that they have to go through – whether it’s the types of accepted currencies, the trustworthiness of the website, or the transaction fees. UNICEF takes all of that out of the picture by providing a hassle-free solution for people to make an impact without having to worry about any loose ends.
How It Works
At press time, there has been over 3,000 people who has donated to the UNICEF via Hopepage. This method of donating to the UNICEF can be explained in 3 simple steps:
The mining process is facilitated by Coinhive’s Javascript-based mining tool plugin that performs all the algorithms through your browser’s sandbox, which means that there is no need for you to download any drivers/software for this to work.
Other Applications
UNICEF is not the first website to pool their visitor’s computing power to perform cloud mining. Back in February, Salon.com began providing readers with the option to remove all advertisements by simply leasing out their “unused computer power” for the website to mine the cryptocurrency Monero, an alternative to bitcoin that is said to be more private because it shuffles users’ identifying information.
In fact, this is not the first time UNICEF has done this either – a few months ago, they launched Chaingers.io, in hopes of using their website visitors’ computing power to mine Ethereum, which will then be converted to fiat currency to help Syrian refugees. However, the key difference between Chaingers.io and Hopepage, aside from the type of cryptocurrency mined, is the need to download a miner software to perform the mining task. Their effort recorded a modest amount of success, raising over $1,200 as of today.
