Blockchain for the Common Good: A Digital Currency for Citizen Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

We present a distributed ledger application for the world of citizen philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, with stakeholder incentives designed to increase social good through accountability, transparency, and flexibility. In this system, called Directed Cash, individual donors specify conditions (the “Directed” part) attached to their donation or investment (“Cash”), that are then efficiently paired with interested recipients or aggregators of recipients (charities, social entrepreneurs) using distributed consensus so that the intent and pairing are open while maintaining donor anonymity. Furthermore, Directed Cash flows both ways to promote accountability and transparency: after receipt, a validation flows backwards to return to the donor so that the donor receives a report of how their donation was spent. While some elements of the system borrow from existing cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, we propose alternative incentives for distributed consensus that are better aligned with the application and promote social good through the stakeholders. This paper describes the goals and concepts, and a system design to achieve these goals, a primary feature of which is a simple SQL-like language to enable specifying conditions, pairing, aggregation and publicly-verifiable reporting.