Read until the end and you’ll find out how, without having to spend any money, you can help scientific research in your own country.

Crypto For Science (https://cryptoforscience.com) is an open-source crowdfunding platform that uses the spirit of cryptocurrency in order to fund scientific research: no fees and no intermediaries — all the funds go directly to the researchers.

We just put it live. We’ll do a bit more coding and pentesting for a few days, then we’ll start approving real campaigns.

ForSEH, the collaborative anyone-can-join group that manages this has the purpose of creating open-source unmonetized projects in order to help science, education and healthcare around the world. Our impact will be massive.

How does Crypto For Science work? Individuals or teams of researchers add:

details on the scientific research that they want to raise funds for

contact information

any previously raised funds

methods of collecting contributions: Bitcoin and ETH addresses

For any other method of payment, they’d have to be contacted personally, and, after receiving the funds, they’d add the contribution manually.

Afterwards, we do our best to help them raise the funds through donations.

An interesting feature is funds recycling. If they don’t manage to raise the minimum funds that they need (each project must have a soft cap), it’s their own responsibility to choose other projects from the website, and donate to them everything that they’ve received so far. Afterwards, they’re allowed to restart the campaign while disclosing that this has happened in the description. Similarly, if they receive more money (for example, because some cryptocurrency that they received went up a lot in value)… it’s their own responsibility to donate the surplus to other projects.

And now to get to the title… I had the most amazing idea today. I googled “countries sorted by scientific research budget per capita”, and I found this as the first result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending

If you sort by “% of GDP PPP”, the “poorest” 10 countries when it comes to that are Algeria, Indonesia, Macau, Peru, Bahrain, Philippines, Iran, Georgia, Kazahstan and Mongolia. We need at least one volunteer in each of these 10 countries to go to universities and let them know that teachers/PhD students/etc. can request funding through our platform. These volunteers will be called “representatives”. Big countries like Indonesia and Philippines will hopefully attract more than 3 representatives each. In this way, we will start by supporting the countries that need it most (even though all are welcome).

Do you want to become a representative? Then please join our Slack group, in the #representatives channel, and we’ll go from there: https://join.slack.com/t/forseh/shared_invite/enQtMzQ5MzI1Mjc2NTMwLWZkMzRmNmM5NzRhNzM0OWE2MzlmNTZlMWJjYzViNmU0NjFmMjM3MTAyYzJiOWQ0NTVhMWZjMGNiYmJiMWI0NDg