Ok I admit the title to this article may sound a bit “sanctimonious” but I hoped the humbly placed question mark after “save lives” toned it down a little. Nevertheless everything mentioned in the title is possible.

We all like to think of our selves as charitable people, but are often left with an uncomfortable feeling of guilt as we walk past the elderly lady holding the collection tin or change the tv channel when hungry africans come on. If your like me there is a nice feeling when dropping a few coins into a collection bucket but there’s also an after feeling of “This doesn't seem the best way to do this”, “I can’t do this every time does that make me bad?”, quickly followed by a “Damn I just lost $10, most of the money doesn’t reach the needy anyway”.

The problem with charity is it hasn’t really had much innovation since it started, people still drop cash into buckets and while it can make you feel good, if your struggling yourself to pay the rent it often leaves you feeling like you’ve sacrificed more then you should have, which then in turn makes you feel guilty as your better off then those you just donated to.

Allow me to change the topic slightly for a second to that of earning bitcoin.

Many of you may be familiar with my iOS application SaruTobi. SaruTobi is a simple 2D game that also lets the users earn bitcoin risk free. It does this by simply converting the total ad revenue the game has earned each month into bitcoin, dividing it amongst the players and sending it back to them. The idea is the players who played the most also would have contributed the most to the game’s ad revenue so they receive a large percentage of bitcoin back. The more the players play, the more ad revenue would be generated and the more bitcoin there is for everybody.

Now your not gonna earn mega bucks playing SaruTobi but we see players at the end of the month getting $15, $20 worth of bitcoin and all they had to do was swing a monkey whilst on the toilet or waiting for the bus etc. (The aim of the game is to swing a monkey, this is not euphemism)

As we all know Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology offering innovation in many areas, I have shown how it can be applied to gaming allowing users to reclaim some of the revenue they helped earn the game, but it can also now be applied to help innovate charity and how people donate.

In the latest version of SaruTobi we have added the option to donate a percentage of your earnings to charity, currently the charity we have chosen is the The Water Project a great charity that accept bitcoin and supply clean water to African communities.

It is difficult to write about this without “blowing ones own trumpet” but we think this is a very cool application of Bitcoin.

For the first time people can passively play a game and at the same time be supplying clean safe water to impoverished communities. They don’t need the money they just donated so it’s easier to give away and the gamification of this form of donation makes it an enjoyable experience.

What is better, a few thousand guilty people giving £10 a month, (which is money not spent in the economy) or millions of happy people donating all £1 which hasn’t cost them anything?

I really hope to see more game developers incorporate something similar into their applications, more and more people are playing games for longer times so there is a lot of potentially wasted value that could be better directed at no extra cost.

The app is free to download here on iOS and an Android version is in development.