Cryptocurrencies are popular for donations for many reasons, ranging from anonymity (sort of) through ease of use. This has been stepped up a notch by hard-wiring donations into one cryptocurrency, described here.
Education in a suitcase is a non-profit, which raises funds for purchasing tablets and servers. Free educational material is loaded onto the computers and they are then donated to students in low-income regions, particularly Kenya. The main point is not the hardware or software, but the educational opportunities which come with having access to educational material.
The tutor-web provides free educational material, including math drills and this forms a part of the EIAS platform. In the case of remote regions, the math-drills are set up to work off-line.
The Smileycoin is a cryptocurrency which is used inside the tutor-web to reward students. Preliminary analyses indicate that SMLY rewards do indeed get students to work a bit harder on their studies.
Changes made to the SMLY in summer of 2017 included changes to the mining fee. Normally, when a miner finds a new block, the entire coinbase becomes the miner's reward. For the SMLY, however, the coinbase is split into three parts, 1000 SMLY for the miner's fee, 4500 for dividends and 4500 for donations. The dividends are paid in rotation to SMLY addresses which hold at least 25 million SMLY and this is done to encourage Smileycoin investment. The donations are paid in rotation to 10 SMLY addresses which are owned by Education in a Suitcase.
Since this is now hardwired into the SMLY mining algorithm, EIAS gets 4500 SMLY for every single block which is mined by any miner. The addresses are hard-coded into the wallets and every wallet tests that this donation is enforced.
If one looks up any block generated after August 2017, the coinbase transaction of the block demonstrates how this works. Consider block 268193. Here one sees the 1000+4500+4500 structure in the first transaction:
The last part here is the donation, to SMLY address BPVuYwyeJiXExEmEXHfCwPtRXDRqxBxTNW and clicking on the link will show how this particular address has received millions of SMLY (23 million when this note was written in November 2017).
The utility of the donations will depend on the future development of the SMLY. The Smileycoin value has varied in the range 0.2-2 Satoshi and the donation valuation varies accordingly. The markets for SMLY have been fairly shallow, easily affected by anyone wanting to buy or sell a large number of SMLY. Needless to say, the non-profit will not simply dump their SMLY since that will dramatically affect the market price and thus affect future EIAS prospects.
The methodology of hard-wired donations implies that anyone wanting to support Education in a Suitcase has one more option: Purchasing SMLY on any market will both be an investment and help EIAS to sell their SMLY. Interestingly, purchasing 25 M SMLY and storing them under a single address will also give dividends. Thus it is possible to make an investment, fund a non-profit and obtain dividend, all in one swoop.
