Quote from: hardcore-fs on November 27, 2012, 12:52:16 AM

Stupid Idea.... spend $1200USD to fill their country with ewaste and consume their electricity and all the while promote a cruel hoax that they will become rich......

Better still why not just pay one of them to peddle a bicycle generator and post you charged batteries and you keep the hardware & bitcoins.

Don't know how serious you were with this response but it tickled me thanks.

I know BFL on their exchange programme count the purchase value of returned items against the new ones so I suppose whilst this continues (and people are upgrading rather than stopping mining) then it does equate to a donation of $1200. So yes, maybe this is a fundamental flaw in the plan.

Quote from: bruj0 on November 26, 2012, 09:11:13 PM

Would it not be a more philanthropic idea to develop a way to recoup all the fpga and reprogram them for say for example litecoin? Adoption of digital / crypto currency micro-payment systems is far more widespread in your target countries so exchange services etc are far more likely to flourish there as well.

Just my 2c

I don't know much about litecoin. And to a certain extent it doesn't matter which cryptocurrency is used nor what it is valued at outside of a community using it providing it serves its purpose of providing an easy means of payment. The fact that gpu mining for litecoin is a longer-term thing also means that there'll be some usable parts in all the e-waste currently landing in Africa.

But although as Hardcore-fs intimates mining hardware shouldn't be donated with any promise of riches the odds of Bitcoin disappearing entirely is in my opinion much less than that of litecoin - and is diminishing by the day so is more likely, if a practical way was found of bringing this about, that the additional benefits of having an increasingly internationally accepted value can play its role in protecting users against local-currency inflation and can be of value for exporting services too (such as paying someone to generate the electricity for my own mining operations Wink

)