A look at two tech efforts helping people make bail: Appolition for donating spare change from purchases and Bail Bloc for mining Monero with spare PC resources
Thousands of people charged with nonviolent misdemeanors are often jailed because they cannot afford bail.
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2017, two volunteer projects attacked the same problem from opposite ends of the tech stack: Appolition routes spare change from everyday purchases to bail funds, while Bail Bloc converts idle PC cycles into mined Monero for the same purpose — both aimed at people jailed on nonviolent misdemeanor charges they cannot afford to pay their way out of.
The arc since then has tested both models' plumbing: payment platforms became chokepoints when [[a:954654|PayPal and Venmo transfer limits and security freezes stalled bailout efforts during the pandemic]], and states began attacking cash bail itself, with California replacing it with an algorithmic risk-assessment system. The tools are now data points in a larger fight over who controls the money moving toward defendants.
First-order effects
- Bail funds gain two low-friction donation channels — round-up purchases and background mining — that let people contribute without writing a check, directly expanding the pool of money available to post bail for nonviolent misdemeanor defendants.
Second-order effects
- Both channels sit on infrastructure the projects don't control: the later PayPal and Venmo freezes showed that payment-processor policy can halt bailouts mid-crisis, pushing organizers toward direct crypto transfers despite the complexity and traceability problems activists later hit with blockchain fundraising.
Third-order effects
- If jurisdictions follow California's move to replace cash bail with algorithmic risk scoring, demand for charitable bail funds could shrink structurally — while the burden shifts to contesting the accuracy and bias of the algorithms that decide who goes free.
The trend: Criminal-justice tech is splitting into two tracks — grassroots funding tools that route money around gatekeepers, and state-run algorithmic systems that replace the gatekeeper itself.