Siddhartha Gautama — LessWrong

LESSWRONG
LW

Replying toOpen and Welcome Thread - May 2021

Open and Welcome Thread - May 2021

I'm Brian. I'm 27 years of age. I work as a lawyer in Ireland but am looking to pivot into a career that is: 1) higher impact from an EA perspective; and 2) more intellectually engaging through proactive and longer-term, bigger picture thinking vis a vis the reactive, short-term nature of life as a lawyer.

I'm interested in a relatively disparate range of areas: epistemology, philosophy, blockchain technology, Bitcoin, animal rights, longtermism, and FinTech in third world countries (I have worked in India and South Africa and seen the need for better access to capital). I think temperamentally I'd be more suited to a researcher/academic type role since I enjoy studying and breaking... (read more)

Replying toDonating Bitcoin to Crisis Zones - Is there a platform collating and verifying public key address for individuals in conflict zones which allows donors to send Bitcoin directly to them?

Siddhartha Gautama5y

Donating Bitcoin to Crisis Zones - Is there a platform collating and verifying public key address for individuals in conflict zones which allows donors to send Bitcoin directly to them?

I wasn't aware that GiveDirectly accepted crypto (despite donating to GD on a regular basis). Brilliant to see. Thanks for sharing, Zac.

Donating Bitcoin to Crisis Zones - Is there a platform collating and verifying public key address for individuals in conflict zones which allows donors to send Bitcoin directly to them?

Siddhartha Gautama

Siddhartha Gautama, Zac Hatfield-Dodds

I have been doing a lot of research on the human rights potential of peer to peer transactions and examining recent use cases in the likes of Nigeria, Belarus, Iran, Palestine, and Argentina. Considering the decreasing marginal utility of fiat currency donations to established aid organisations (e.g. bottlenecks, bureaucratic inefficiencies) the idea of donating directly to people in need is very attractive, especially where they may be the subject of capital controls or frozen bank accounts due to political/monetary tyranny.

I'm wondering if there is a mechanism or an organisation verifying the identities behind public key addresses on the blockchain in order to provide comfort to donors that their direct peer to peer transaction is going to worthy recipients. The identification process would only need to verify the needful legitimacy of the recipient, rather than reveal personal details that may compromise their safety/security.

It's a project I would like to work on and contribute to.

Riffing here but as a lawyer I see my role as exploring the boundaries of all possible extrapolations of the law. This translates quite well into other areas (philosophy, psychology etc) because your default position is to identify the outliers and anomalies within domains in the first instance. From there, you can reverse engineer by finding the mean ground and the generalisations. But I think lawyers are well placed to imagine both the worst-case scenarios - and, something which is less emphasised, the best-case scenarios.