eatBCH – February Report

eatBCH: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash-to-Food System

What started as a $5 tip challenge has grown into a project funded by weekly donations to feed Venezuelan people. Initially, the challenge was this: we could keep a $5 tip with no strings attached, or we could use it to feed people and turn that $5 tip into a weekly donation. We chose the latter. It was not a difficult decision, since helping to feed people was something my family used to do. We only stopped because inflation forced us to. We could barely afford food for ourselves.

The only condition for the weekly donation to keep coming through was that we had to send pictures of what we gave away. After some technical difficulties with sending those pictures via email, and concerns of someone else taking credit for the photos if they were hosted somewhere generic like imgur, we settled on what has become our main media outlet: the eatBCH twitter page. And the rest is history!

Since the very first day the support has been overwhelming. Thank you all, without you we couldn’t have made it this far.

It's barely been a month since we started, and we have already given hundreds of meals to people in several cities. These numbers are only going to keep growing: we are already in touch we people in other cities and states so they can feed people there too.

We won't ramble on about Venezuela’s situation. Currently it seems like all news is bad news, and it gets worse by the day. But thanks to the amazing outpouring of support, and thanks to the news sites who are giving us a some of their time and space, we are working towards changing this.

Thank you again for your incredible love and support and we hope to see you next month!

-The eatBCH Team





Why Bitcoin Cash?

Our interest in cryptocurrencies began when my brother excitedly informed me that he received $2 of Bitcoin Cash on a crypto-unrelated subreddit. We had never heard of Bitcoin Cash before, and so we started reading everything we could find about it. How do we use it? What can we do with it? When we finally learned how to send it to our wallet we were surprised by how fast it appeared there. Somebody that never knew our identities, where we were from, or what our bank details were was able to send money to us, and fast. It was a Eureka moment for us: this can be actually useful.

This was in January, when Bitcoin BTC transaction fees were about $15, around 3 times the average monthly salary here in Venezuela. Other coins like Ethereum, Monero, and Litecoin had lower of fees than Bitcoin BTC, but they were still too high for us to be a real alternative. Fee-less coins like Raiblocks were not supported at exchanges that worked in Venezuela. Of the cryptocurrencies available to us, Bitcoin Cash was the fastest and the cheapest. It was a no-brainer.





Changes:

As March 10 marks our first month anniversary, we are making changes to secure the project and improve our transparency.

Firstly, we are adopting an auditable multsignature wallet, we distributed the keys to people we trust in multiple locations this will add a layer of security to your donations. This also means we have a new address!

bitcoincash:pp8skudq3x5hzw8ew7vzsw8tn4k8wxsqsv0lt0mf3g

Secondly, we'll be publishing an official monthly report, along our respective balance sheet, since we agreed in the beginning that we would be as transparent as we possible could.

Being transparent is difficult, not on, given the volatility of not only our national currency, the VEF, but also of Bitcoin Cash. Most prices in Venezuela go up weekly, and the price volatility of cryptocurrency in general is impossible predict. We also considered that it was prudent to not be too detailed, else we might help a malicious third party track us down.

In spite of all that, we still wanted to account for all your generous donations and be as transparent as we can. So we decided to prepare a special spreadsheet to make public, keeping it as simple and as detailed as possible, without exposing ourselves too much.

The spreadsheet will explain our reasons for exchanging the amount of BCH that we did. That doesn’t mean, however, that we used all of it during that week. There may be some left over for the next week. We appreciate any advice you may have that would make this process better. You can read our February spreadsheet here!