COVID-19 reminded the world of the importance of information and the happiness of ignorance. Since the virus began to spread outside of mainland China, there has only been one question on everyone's mind: " Is there a positive case in my country?" “
In a country like India, which has 1.2 billion inhabitants, shares a 3,400 km border with the source of the virus, China, and is supported by a weak national health infrastructure, an underinsured population and the largest diaspora in the world, adults from the epicenter of the next coronavirus were predictable. In an era like this, being informed was important, if not essential.
In March, when the number of cases in the subcontinent began to increase, I remember browsing various news portals, websites of ministries of health, and Twitter handles of ministers of health to understand the size. and the extent of the spread. However, without a consolidated national tracker and most international trackers examining the global data and not at the country level, it is easy to fall into the "ignorance is happiness camp".
Some, instead of being ignorant and silent, have decided to keep the public informed about what is going on in the country. Sachin Yadav, better known as ze_rusty, a designer from Hyderabad, India, decided to build a local tracking system for national COVID-19 cases in the hopes of keeping people alert and informed. And you know what else is there? He funded all of this via Bitcoin .
Source: Coronavirus India
The first steps
During the first phase of the COVID-19 trial in India, when just over 100 cases were reported across the subcontinent, Rusty decided to fill the information gap. He didn't do it alone either, because behind him was a strong IndiaBits community of 6,000 members, made up of cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Bringing together like-minded people and citizens of the IndiaBits community, Rusty sent out a survey of the Telegram group. In the survey, Rusty was quite clear that it would be a tracker specifically for India, with all CAPS, providing useful information on the number of active cases, breakdown by state and other “guidelines and statistics base ”. An overwhelming majority of 73% were in favor of the website and thus began the creation of the COVID-19 tracker powered by Bitcoin in India.
IndiaBits Telegram Group Survey
Using the failover bot on the IndiaBits telegram chain, Rusty stated that he had received funds entirely in Bitcoin and not altcoins. In the first three hours of the crowdfunding campaign, 300,000 Satoshis were promised. He also posted his Bitcoin address on Twitter, contacting a man who knows a thing or two about COVID-19 and Bitcoin , Balaji Srinivasan.
On March 15, the website went live, and according to Rusty, it logged 2,000 to 3,000 visits per day for more than a month, until the official Indian government application was launched.
Rusty's simplistic design and essentials were features, not faults, he insisted. Instead of causing confusion and panic, this tracker was intended to improve the simplicity of the data and not to present a mixture of figures and graphs. He said, unequivocally,
"The reason I wanted to do this was because there was no simple data available anywhere ... anything there, people couldn't trust, and it was too complicated to cross. So I thought, people just want to see the numbers. Let's be honest, you came here to see the numbers. "
The website tracks the total number of cases, recovered patients, care and deaths at a glance. In order to prevent the spread of misinformation, the tracker also provides essential corollary information, not in its own words, but by connecting to official central government documents. In addition, it displays information such as the official lockout duration and home quarantine guidelines for returnees on the go.
Community creation and response
Man on a mission
Although he was in his early twenties, with a snapback citing “ Why not ” while a smoky air filled the room when we spoke, Rusty is a veteran of the Bitcoin world . He entered the world of cryptocurrency as early as 2012-2013 through one of Bitcoin's predecessor use cases , Liberty Reserve, a digital payment system closed by the United States government in 2013. For him, Bitcoin was obvious after being banned by PayPal.
Lamenting the crowd "at stake for the money" that entered the Bitcoin market after the bull race of 2017, Rusty's vision for Bitcoin extends far beyond what most people call "Lambo money" or " Bitcoin to the moon". He stated,
"I realized there was more to it [Bitcoin]. Of course, it will make me money in the long run, if I keep stacking. But aside from that, there are so many important things [in the Bitcoin ecosystem]. "
Rusty, a staunch supporter of Bitcoin, not blockchain, blames the anti-crypto narrative at the doorstep of traditional, national and international financial media, and the boom in ICO 2017-2018 that resulted in a multitude of scams.
India is no stranger to the ICO pit. In 2018, an ICO called Money Trade Coin [MTC] scammed investors totaling $ 75 million with the help of an assistant police inspector. As recently as February 2019, a $ 200,000 ICO scam with roots in India was announced on leading cryptocurrency websites.
Undoubtedly, infamous spirits have used the image of Bitcoin to support altcoin scams, eliminating millions of people by information asymmetry. However, this tracker, powered by a maligned IndiaBits community, harnessed the maligned power of Bitcoin , not only to show the masses the unifying power of a censorship-resistant, universal and ubiquitous cryptocurrency, but to bridge the asymmetry of information previously used.
This tracker is an example of the good that a community currency like Bitcoin can do.
follow the guide
A few weeks after the take-off of the COVID-19 tracker funded by Bitcoin from Rusty, India launched Aarogya Setu, an “open source multiplatform” application. India imposed the world's largest foreclosure on March 24 for an initial period of 21 days. However, on April 14, when there was only one week left for the lock to be lifted, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an extension until May 3 and urged citizens to download the Aarogya Setu app .
However, Aarogya Setu had some "problems". Robert Baptiste, a French hacker named Elliot Anderson, the protagonist of the television program Mr. Robot, hacked the application to reveal several security and confidentiality problems. In a May 6 blog article, the hacker claimed that malicious actors could access the application's internal files and know the number of people infected in any part of India.
His tweet [mentioned below] caught the eye of the Indian National Informatics Center [NIC], which issued an official statement on the subject. Anderson, however, summed up their response as follows: "Nothing to do here, move on."
Perhaps, the perfect analogy of fiat money and Bitcoin is this case tracking game. On the one hand, you have a government-controlled fatal disease monitoring system, with privacy and security concerns, sending sensitive health and geographic information to a centralized source. On the other hand, you have a database created by the community and financed by a decentralized currency. A reflection of time.
Rusty, who acknowledges Aarogya Setu's "privacy nightmare," admits that there is an animosity towards non-government money as a whole, and he believes it is deeper than government. Even with the tracker providing essential if not fatal information, Rusty agreed that aversion to cryptocurrency could have fueled people's claims about its use case in the form of the tracker.
Not one to buy the tale of centralized social media platforms, Rusty, with his COVID tracker funded by Bitcoin , faced the ironic ire of centrality, to the point that his website was reported as a “scam by phishing ”. Rusty claimed that some of the tracker's users told him that they received a warning when accessing the link via Twitter,
"There were a lot of people who came to tell me that every time they visit the website from my [Twitter] profile ... it gave them a warning that it could be a phishing [website] or a fraudulent website."
Twitter warning when accessing Covy's Rustid 19 tracker
Dive deeper into this Pandora's box, given the crackdown on what social media websites call "disinformation," a website that is not under government control will inevitably be a target. "They play together," said Rusty, acknowledging this monopoly of information by social media platforms as they dance to the rhythm of government.
Feed the beast
Most people enter Bitcoin when they realize the artificial nature of centralized money. The power that a government-controlled central bank simply has to print as much fiat money as it wants to temporarily balance the economy is something that is playing out right now.
This "silver rabbit hole", as Rusty describes it, led him to Bitcoin . He said,
“When I started making all this money hole-rabbit, that money is printed out of thin air and the real alternative [is] Bitcoin as a store of value, you can't inflate it, i was like WOW. No one is here to tell you the truth. So you have to find your own truth. ''
Interestingly, this "silver rabbit hole" also took him on a different path. Thanks to Bitcoin and the thesis of "controlling your own finances", Rusty was led on the path of "controlling your own food", dispelling the truth about nutrition. As his biography on Twitter says, he's here to "undo your nutrition," ended with a lightning symbol, the initiation of Twitter's deep Bitcoin worm .
Unlike the chicken and egg conundrum, which Rusty advocates eating both, he told me “I got into nutrition because of Bitcoin .” Sounds strange, right?
However, he supports the association and claims that there are "myths" in both money and food. No wonder he subscribes to the “cult” [his words, not mine] that believes in “healthy money and healthy nutrition”.
How do they do that, you ask? Simple - he recommends following a “Carnivore diet” with a Bitcoin underline which is summed up in “Stack SATS and Eat meat”.
More than numbers
Giving has always been part of the Bitcoin community , and this tracker is the start of the philanthropic will of the Indian cryptocurrency community.
While the numbers are a good start to keeping the public informed, the ambitions of Rusty and the Indian cryptocurrency community don't stop there. When India imposed its foreclosure, the most affected were also the poorest. Indian domestic migrants have been left in an economic vacuum. With no source of income and no way to return to their hometown, many remained hungry and homeless.
Looking at their state of destitution, Rusty said the community plans to raise an additional INR [~ $ 1,300] in Bitcoin to provide food and basic sanitation for migrants, but unfortunately due to logistical errors " we had to abandon the plan. " he lamented.
Bitcoin and philanthropy are a fairly common association. With the ease of setting up a wallet, the universal nature of crypto and the ease of use, many charities and foundations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Red Cross, Save the Children and United Way, among others, have received Bitcoin donations . In 2018, Fidelity Charitable said 69 million received in donations from cryptocurrency only 169 donors, representing an increase of 10 times since they have started to accept donations Bitcoin in 2015.
Rusty with an ironic smile and a glint in his eyes attested to the “philanthropic” nature of the Bitcoin community and claimed that although they cannot do their part this time, in the future there will be more opportunities to show the public the true nature of Bitcoiners in India. He concluded,
“We will always do it in different ways. Maybe corona [virus] won't be the reason, but things like that, in different ways. "
