8 ms·

Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins

153 points by sk2code 13y ago

toisanji 13y ago
there should be a service that combines amazon turk with bitcoins.
shocks 13y ago
> He doesn’t have to worry as much about getting robbed. Er, laptop?
- Romoku 13y ago
  He could have an online wallet or have his wallet.dat file synchronized to SpiderOak, DropBox, et al.
  - SolarNet 13y ago
    I think the idea is that his laptop could be stolen/robbed. They are often worth a bit of money. But I bet there is a performance/age/fencing/cost point where it isn't worth it to rob someone for it.
    - rjwebb 13y ago
      Do thieves understand this?
      - ameoba 13y ago
        Crackheads trying to get their next fix just take any sort of electronics and get $10-20 for it. It doesn't generally matter what it is - they'll take it if they can get their hands on it & want to unload it ASAP. If they've been strung out & off the grid long enough, they might not know the difference between a walkman and a iPhone. A professional thief, OTOH, probably does know what's worth taking and what's worth keeping. The problem is that, while committing a robbery, you don't exactly have the time or resources to go on eBay and price check everything you see. It's more practical to take everything that might be valuable & then figure out what's worth trying to sell after the fact.
  - ZoF 13y ago
    I think he was saying that the laptop is what would be stolen... Not the .0004 bitcoins.
techtalsky 13y ago
Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.
- seansoutpost 13y ago
  I agree you can make more. But, one thing to consider is, you have to have a bank account to deposit turk money into or buy things from Amazon. Neither of those has the immediacy of Bitcoin. Also, a lot of homeless have issues getting a bank account. We have millions of "unbanked" people in the US alone.
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    Eventually, you would expect that a Bitcoin-based crowdsourcing platform should come into being.
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    You can withdraw the Amazon Payments balance in the form of $5 Amazon gift cards. Then you can sell those to people for $5. A homeless person will have trouble with that, but people with homes and no bank account seem to be more common. Since it's relevant: scam requesters are abundant on Mechanical Turk, and they can kill your earning potential if you don't avoid them. I wrote a thing on how to do that: http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mechanical-turk-without-being-scammed/ http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mecha...
- 300bps 13y ago
  watching commercials every day I don't think the YouTube clips that he watches are commercials. From TFA: thanks to a service, called BitcoinGet, that shamelessly drives artificial traffic to certain online clips Seems more like aspiring YouTube stars paying for traffic to their videos so that they rank higher on YouTube's site. The other app he uses - Bitcoin Tapper - does seem like straight up being paid to click on ads though.
- runj__ 13y ago
  cmd-F Mechani Oh, there you are. Exactly. You can easily make ~10cents a minute, that's 6 dollars an hour. It's probably pretty hard work but the premise of this is just so... If you're homeless in america, sign up for mechanical turk. You'll make more than enough for food.
rorrr2 13y ago
The math doesn't add up. At "0.000133 bitcoins a day" it would take 7518 days (more than 20 years) to make one bitcoin. At "0.0004 bitcoins" per video it would take 2500 videos to watch to make one bitcoin. The amount of wasted human capital is insane. Why don't these people get jobs? There are tons of posts on Craigslist for jobs that don't require any education - delivery, waiters, busboys, cleaning, etc.
- 300bps 13y ago
  Why don't these people get jobs? You're asking a rational question of irrational people. When someone has a fundamental problem - depression, addiction, anxiety, etc. they often don't make rational decisions.
  - seansoutpost 13y ago
    Being in an extremely economically depressed area of the country doesn't help either.
    - iSnow 13y ago
      Hey Sean, learned about your project on reddit and was very impressed. Keep up the good work :)
- ctrl_freak 13y ago
  > The math doesn't add up. I would imagine they pay less (in bitcoins) now than they did, say, a year ago.
- jupiterjaz 13y ago
  Often those jobs require a physical address.
- zanny 13y ago
  But for the tons of unskilled craigslist jobs, in these depressed areas, they will get hundreds of resumes. In most places around the US, the reality is multipointed: * Nobody who would want to hire someone has the capital to do so, or the resources to handle the absurd regulation surrounding hiring an employee. * The economic cycles in a lot of these areas are not producer ones, so they don't see job growth even when people need basic necessities. The kinds of work in most areas of the US is dwindling, and often specialized and requiring either a degree, or no need to be self sustaining (ie, walmart clerks or mcdonalds staff, because you don't earn a living wage on minimum wage). * Anyone with money has better, less risky options (usually created through law and false economics) that investing in small town startups that would hire the millions of unemployed as service workers. Because we already know they will never be hired as producers, because we already optimized production into factory farms and automated warehouses. The capital holders get plenty of returns on their investments by operating in an economic cycle outside most of the US, and they do so not for missed opportunity - everyone understands not utilizing the human capital of some 60 million people is wasteful - but because it is much safer to keep playing wal-street with federal bailouts than to try entrepreneurship.
Lewton 13y ago
Some of the comments on that article are surprisingly nasty
- _delirium 13y ago
  Comments on general news sites tend to be cesspools in general. Oddly, the same people posting weird vitriol about how America is being ruined by freeloading parasites seem to be: 1) not highly educated; and 2) able to spend hours and hours a day posting angry comments on news websites. I wonder where they're getting their own income from. Are they all retirees and students? People on SS disability? Stay-at-home parents whose spouse works? Survivalists in an internet-equipped cabin in Montana?
  - total__C 13y ago
    Conservative political groups in the USA pay people to basically troll on major news sites/message boards/blogs: http://www.alternet.org/story/149197/are_right-wing_libertarian_internet_trolls_getting_paid_to_dumb_down_online_conversations?page=0%2C1 http://www.alternet.org/story/149197/are_right-wing_libertar...
    - JackFr 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines "This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.' The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
    - joshuahedlund 13y ago
      That's a great conspiracy but I'm not sure those folks have that much market share in the grand scheme of things (and it's possible liberal groups are doing the same thing). I don't know how many news site comment sections you tend to frequent, but I feel like I've seen just as much "dumbed down" liberal "trolling" as the reverse.
knowaveragejoe 13y ago
It seems to me that it is not a property of bitcoin or cryptocurrency itself that is allowing these folks to supplement their income with "manual" labor. Instead it feels like the fact that it's a new, relatively unexploited market that is enabling these ventures to scrape together the people and resources necessary by using extremely thin margins. I can't imagine this will be viable for long as more people get into it. Sure, you can provide clicks in exchange for bitcoin, and that might help some homeless people right now. But what happens when that becomes over-saturated and/or youtube et. al. get better at preventing that? Amazon Turk + BTC could be viable. > This is the only property for which Dale is currently accepting digital currency, but so far, he says, “it’s been a good experience because bitcoins have gone up in value, so it’s more than I would have gotten in regular dollars.” I bet he won't be so happy when the price swings in the other direction. Therein lies the eternal problem with BTC for trade on a scale even beginning to approach that of what goes on in the world today.
- seansoutpost 13y ago
  Im really surprised that doesn't exist yet. YC applications still open? :)
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    There are already microtask sites similar to Mechanical Turk that pay in bitcoin.
shn 13y ago
I don't know, it just sounds a sensational story to draw readership. Yeah, maybe he did it for couple of days/weeks, but doing this in a disciplined manner for a long time to earn measly couple of dollars does not make sense all.
- diydsp 13y ago
  Yes, certainly a tech-meets-social-issues story like this is shining fodder for Wired which is certainly an occasion to ask yourself "why does someone want me to believe this"... Meanwhile, I, too, have been considering the longer-term effects of this article. Without making judgments on anyone, it seems the larger effect of these men is to "soft-launder" bitcoins back into cash. They (aided by brokers like Gyft) are on the bitcoin -> cash side, while in parallel, there is a large world (substantially underground) of cash -> bitcoin people. If this model is true, the sustainability of the operation will continue and vary/grow as long as the parallel, (somewhat underground) world of BTC does. If this is true, the food these gentlemen eat is the result of a mild additional transaction fee for sustaining the complementary shadow world, which shows zero signs of folding.
oleganza 13y ago
Funny. Photo on the second page has a subtitle "Angle mines bitcoins on a park bench." http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Bitcoin-Homeless-13-660x440.jpg http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013...
hooande 13y ago
There were a few points that the article didn't bring up. I was surprised that they didn't discuss the speculative value of bitcoins. There's no way that the value of a dollar in your pocket will suddenly double, but the value of a bitcoin has and will again. Obviously volatility isn't all fun...would you want your salary paid in bitcions? In the current market you might actually come out ahead over the next few years. The second thing is that these bitcoin payment systems only work because they dodge the minimum wage. There are a lot of things that homeless people could do if it was legal to pay $.60/day. The minimum wage does a lot of good, but the people in this article didn't seem to mind the situation. I think it's because a lot of people don't think of working online as "real work" and are ok with low paying tasks. All in all this article was a feel good hit. Bitcoin allows homeless people to avoid the shame of begging and the risk of robbery. They receive support from their community to earn legitimate money by doing real work. Of course fake youtube views and button pushing aren't very beneficial to society, but I think there will be more useful work for them and others in the near future. A functioning human brain is a very rare thing in the universe. The way we get ahead is by utilizing everyone of them that we can find. We often write homeless people off as a drain on society, but there's something to be said for everybody pitching in, even if just a little bit.
- VMG 13y ago
  The minimum wage does a lot of good Interesting you say then when you can clearly see that actually hurts those people.
  - rubikscube 13y ago
    Yep. All in all, minimum wage is a feel good hit. :)
  - kaonashi 13y ago
    It's not the minimum wage that hurts those people, but a lack of aggregate demand.
    - sixtypoundhound 13y ago
usaphp 13y ago
Ok, so I am paying around 30k of my hard earned money as taxes from working 10+ hours every day, just so this guy can do nothing all day long and get free food stamps...I would rather spend this money on my kids and family...
- reginaldjcooper 13y ago
  I know, right? Let's take back all these entitlements from these lazy poors. If they really want to eat they should get a job like the rest of us. And let's have a word with the inefficient government bureaucrats. How do they start with your hard-earned 30k and end up with just enough to give this guy food stamps? Totally inefficient if you ask me.
  - jebblue 13y ago
    >> How do they start with your hard-earned 30k and end up with just enough to give this guy food stamps? Totally inefficient if you ask me. They started it with the welfare system, good idea but then let the majority of its users abuse it rather than finding work. They started it, they keep it going because their users vote for them which keeps them in power.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
Taylorious 13y ago
Love the picture of the "homeless" guy using a laptop newer than mine, with his pet, nice bike, playing a video game while he smokes a cig. He also has an energy drink... as if he needs it to get through his day of sitting around. It's people like him who are hurting the homeless people that are actually in need.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  Yes, because homeless people should have nothing and suffer as much as possible because they can't afford rent.
  - igreulich 13y ago
    Seems like rent would be more important than a fancy laptop, cigarettes, and energy drinks...
    - crazypyro 13y ago
      300 dollar laptop =! Fancy laptop. There's 0 chance of the added cost of all these products being equal to rent. Even assuming its a fancy laptop, are you suggesting he sell his only means of income to MAYBE afford a month of rent? How bout the next month? Judging a homeless person based on their small amount of possessions in a single picture shows a complete ignorance to the situation most homeless people are in...
      - igreulich 13y ago
        Any laptop = fancy laptop, in my opinion. But it doesn't change my original point.
        dwaltrip 13y ago
        You should have read the rest of his post. Oh wait, can't do that, might have to change your opinion.
  - 13y ago
cinquemb 13y ago
From some of these comments, it amazes me that people want to dictate how others should live their lives while doing nothing to improve the situation or to solve the systemic forces that faces the individuals mentioned… unless some of you happen to be on the Federal Reserve board or a CEO at a TBTF bank that owns shares in it, because obviously they are very, very good at allocating capital and resources to us all, while we tell more people to participate the in bread and circuses in order to be useful in this society… "What you eat don't make me shit, and who you fuck don't make me come"
sidko 13y ago
Just so everyone knows, the calculation with watching videos at BitcoinGet is wrong. They would be making 6 cents for watching 12 videos and not 60 cents. This makes it even less of an incentive to go there. I am surprised they do. The site pays 40uBTC/video, which converts to 40*10^-6BTC = 0.00004BTC = $0.005(assuming 125USD/BTC) = 0.5 cents/video = 6 cents/12 videos. Also, it is a Silicon Valley startup Virool that offers these videos, not BitcoinGet per se.
- abuda 13y ago
  If true, seems like a pretty big oversight by the author and editor. They claim 0.0004 BTC per view, when in reality it's 0.00004? Your math checks out, but I'm not familiar with what the site actually pays. While it was a good read about the other merits of bitcoin, there's a pretty huge difference between earning 60 cents a day vs 6 cents a day...
  - sidko 13y ago
    I am pretty sure that the payout per video is 40 micro bitcoin (it was recently dropped from 50 micro bitcoin). Unfortunately to see this number, you need to register. It's a common amount for watching one Virool video (e.g. another site ABitBack pays only 30 micro Bitcoin per Virool video). I am surprised too that the error hasn't been corrected yet. The difference is 10 times, which isn't insignificant.

153 points by sk2code 13y ago

toisanji 13y ago

there should be a service that combines amazon turk with bitcoins.

shocks 13y ago

> He doesn’t have to worry as much about getting robbed. Er, laptop?

Romoku 13y ago
He could have an online wallet or have his wallet.dat file synchronized to SpiderOak, DropBox, et al.
- SolarNet 13y ago
  I think the idea is that his laptop could be stolen/robbed. They are often worth a bit of money. But I bet there is a performance/age/fencing/cost point where it isn't worth it to rob someone for it.
  - rjwebb 13y ago
    Do thieves understand this?
    - ameoba 13y ago
      Crackheads trying to get their next fix just take any sort of electronics and get $10-20 for it. It doesn't generally matter what it is - they'll take it if they can get their hands on it & want to unload it ASAP. If they've been strung out & off the grid long enough, they might not know the difference between a walkman and a iPhone. A professional thief, OTOH, probably does know what's worth taking and what's worth keeping. The problem is that, while committing a robbery, you don't exactly have the time or resources to go on eBay and price check everything you see. It's more practical to take everything that might be valuable & then figure out what's worth trying to sell after the fact.
- ZoF 13y ago
  I think he was saying that the laptop is what would be stolen... Not the .0004 bitcoins.

techtalsky 13y ago

Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.

seansoutpost 13y ago
I agree you can make more. But, one thing to consider is, you have to have a bank account to deposit turk money into or buy things from Amazon. Neither of those has the immediacy of Bitcoin. Also, a lot of homeless have issues getting a bank account. We have millions of "unbanked" people in the US alone.
- a3_nm 13y ago
  Eventually, you would expect that a Bitcoin-based crowdsourcing platform should come into being.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  You can withdraw the Amazon Payments balance in the form of $5 Amazon gift cards. Then you can sell those to people for $5. A homeless person will have trouble with that, but people with homes and no bank account seem to be more common. Since it's relevant: scam requesters are abundant on Mechanical Turk, and they can kill your earning potential if you don't avoid them. I wrote a thing on how to do that: http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mechanical-turk-without-being-scammed/ http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mecha...
300bps 13y ago
watching commercials every day I don't think the YouTube clips that he watches are commercials. From TFA: thanks to a service, called BitcoinGet, that shamelessly drives artificial traffic to certain online clips Seems more like aspiring YouTube stars paying for traffic to their videos so that they rank higher on YouTube's site. The other app he uses - Bitcoin Tapper - does seem like straight up being paid to click on ads though.
runj__ 13y ago
cmd-F Mechani Oh, there you are. Exactly. You can easily make ~10cents a minute, that's 6 dollars an hour. It's probably pretty hard work but the premise of this is just so... If you're homeless in america, sign up for mechanical turk. You'll make more than enough for food.

rorrr2 13y ago

The math doesn't add up. At "0.000133 bitcoins a day" it would take 7518 days (more than 20 years) to make one bitcoin. At "0.0004 bitcoins" per video it would take 2500 videos to watch to make one bitcoin. The amount of wasted human capital is insane. Why don't these people get jobs? There are tons of posts on Craigslist for jobs that don't require any education - delivery, waiters, busboys, cleaning, etc.

300bps 13y ago
Why don't these people get jobs? You're asking a rational question of irrational people. When someone has a fundamental problem - depression, addiction, anxiety, etc. they often don't make rational decisions.
- seansoutpost 13y ago
  Being in an extremely economically depressed area of the country doesn't help either.
  - iSnow 13y ago
    Hey Sean, learned about your project on reddit and was very impressed. Keep up the good work :)
ctrl_freak 13y ago
> The math doesn't add up. I would imagine they pay less (in bitcoins) now than they did, say, a year ago.
jupiterjaz 13y ago
Often those jobs require a physical address.
zanny 13y ago
But for the tons of unskilled craigslist jobs, in these depressed areas, they will get hundreds of resumes. In most places around the US, the reality is multipointed: * Nobody who would want to hire someone has the capital to do so, or the resources to handle the absurd regulation surrounding hiring an employee. * The economic cycles in a lot of these areas are not producer ones, so they don't see job growth even when people need basic necessities. The kinds of work in most areas of the US is dwindling, and often specialized and requiring either a degree, or no need to be self sustaining (ie, walmart clerks or mcdonalds staff, because you don't earn a living wage on minimum wage). * Anyone with money has better, less risky options (usually created through law and false economics) that investing in small town startups that would hire the millions of unemployed as service workers. Because we already know they will never be hired as producers, because we already optimized production into factory farms and automated warehouses. The capital holders get plenty of returns on their investments by operating in an economic cycle outside most of the US, and they do so not for missed opportunity - everyone understands not utilizing the human capital of some 60 million people is wasteful - but because it is much safer to keep playing wal-street with federal bailouts than to try entrepreneurship.

Lewton 13y ago

Some of the comments on that article are surprisingly nasty

_delirium 13y ago
Comments on general news sites tend to be cesspools in general. Oddly, the same people posting weird vitriol about how America is being ruined by freeloading parasites seem to be: 1) not highly educated; and 2) able to spend hours and hours a day posting angry comments on news websites. I wonder where they're getting their own income from. Are they all retirees and students? People on SS disability? Stay-at-home parents whose spouse works? Survivalists in an internet-equipped cabin in Montana?
- total__C 13y ago
  Conservative political groups in the USA pay people to basically troll on major news sites/message boards/blogs: http://www.alternet.org/story/149197/are_right-wing_libertarian_internet_trolls_getting_paid_to_dumb_down_online_conversations?page=0%2C1 http://www.alternet.org/story/149197/are_right-wing_libertar...
  - JackFr 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines "This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.' The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
  - joshuahedlund 13y ago
    That's a great conspiracy but I'm not sure those folks have that much market share in the grand scheme of things (and it's possible liberal groups are doing the same thing). I don't know how many news site comment sections you tend to frequent, but I feel like I've seen just as much "dumbed down" liberal "trolling" as the reverse.

knowaveragejoe 13y ago

It seems to me that it is not a property of bitcoin or cryptocurrency itself that is allowing these folks to supplement their income with "manual" labor. Instead it feels like the fact that it's a new, relatively unexploited market that is enabling these ventures to scrape together the people and resources necessary by using extremely thin margins. I can't imagine this will be viable for long as more people get into it. Sure, you can provide clicks in exchange for bitcoin, and that might help some homeless people right now. But what happens when that becomes over-saturated and/or youtube et. al. get better at preventing that? Amazon Turk + BTC could be viable. > This is the only property for which Dale is currently accepting digital currency, but so far, he says, “it’s been a good experience because bitcoins have gone up in value, so it’s more than I would have gotten in regular dollars.” I bet he won't be so happy when the price swings in the other direction. Therein lies the eternal problem with BTC for trade on a scale even beginning to approach that of what goes on in the world today.

seansoutpost 13y ago
Im really surprised that doesn't exist yet. YC applications still open? :)
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  There are already microtask sites similar to Mechanical Turk that pay in bitcoin.

shn 13y ago

I don't know, it just sounds a sensational story to draw readership. Yeah, maybe he did it for couple of days/weeks, but doing this in a disciplined manner for a long time to earn measly couple of dollars does not make sense all.

diydsp 13y ago
Yes, certainly a tech-meets-social-issues story like this is shining fodder for Wired which is certainly an occasion to ask yourself "why does someone want me to believe this"... Meanwhile, I, too, have been considering the longer-term effects of this article. Without making judgments on anyone, it seems the larger effect of these men is to "soft-launder" bitcoins back into cash. They (aided by brokers like Gyft) are on the bitcoin -> cash side, while in parallel, there is a large world (substantially underground) of cash -> bitcoin people. If this model is true, the sustainability of the operation will continue and vary/grow as long as the parallel, (somewhat underground) world of BTC does. If this is true, the food these gentlemen eat is the result of a mild additional transaction fee for sustaining the complementary shadow world, which shows zero signs of folding.

oleganza 13y ago

Funny. Photo on the second page has a subtitle "Angle mines bitcoins on a park bench." http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Bitcoin-Homeless-13-660x440.jpg http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013...

hooande 13y ago

There were a few points that the article didn't bring up. I was surprised that they didn't discuss the speculative value of bitcoins. There's no way that the value of a dollar in your pocket will suddenly double, but the value of a bitcoin has and will again. Obviously volatility isn't all fun...would you want your salary paid in bitcions? In the current market you might actually come out ahead over the next few years. The second thing is that these bitcoin payment systems only work because they dodge the minimum wage. There are a lot of things that homeless people could do if it was legal to pay $.60/day. The minimum wage does a lot of good, but the people in this article didn't seem to mind the situation. I think it's because a lot of people don't think of working online as "real work" and are ok with low paying tasks. All in all this article was a feel good hit. Bitcoin allows homeless people to avoid the shame of begging and the risk of robbery. They receive support from their community to earn legitimate money by doing real work. Of course fake youtube views and button pushing aren't very beneficial to society, but I think there will be more useful work for them and others in the near future. A functioning human brain is a very rare thing in the universe. The way we get ahead is by utilizing everyone of them that we can find. We often write homeless people off as a drain on society, but there's something to be said for everybody pitching in, even if just a little bit.

VMG 13y ago
The minimum wage does a lot of good Interesting you say then when you can clearly see that actually hurts those people.
- rubikscube 13y ago
  Yep. All in all, minimum wage is a feel good hit. :)
- kaonashi 13y ago
  It's not the minimum wage that hurts those people, but a lack of aggregate demand.
  - sixtypoundhound 13y ago

usaphp 13y ago

Ok, so I am paying around 30k of my hard earned money as taxes from working 10+ hours every day, just so this guy can do nothing all day long and get free food stamps...I would rather spend this money on my kids and family...

reginaldjcooper 13y ago
I know, right? Let's take back all these entitlements from these lazy poors. If they really want to eat they should get a job like the rest of us. And let's have a word with the inefficient government bureaucrats. How do they start with your hard-earned 30k and end up with just enough to give this guy food stamps? Totally inefficient if you ask me.
- jebblue 13y ago
  >> How do they start with your hard-earned 30k and end up with just enough to give this guy food stamps? Totally inefficient if you ask me. They started it with the welfare system, good idea but then let the majority of its users abuse it rather than finding work. They started it, they keep it going because their users vote for them which keeps them in power.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

Taylorious 13y ago

Love the picture of the "homeless" guy using a laptop newer than mine, with his pet, nice bike, playing a video game while he smokes a cig. He also has an energy drink... as if he needs it to get through his day of sitting around. It's people like him who are hurting the homeless people that are actually in need.

michaelwww 13y ago
Yes, because homeless people should have nothing and suffer as much as possible because they can't afford rent.
- igreulich 13y ago
  Seems like rent would be more important than a fancy laptop, cigarettes, and energy drinks...
  - crazypyro 13y ago
    300 dollar laptop =! Fancy laptop. There's 0 chance of the added cost of all these products being equal to rent. Even assuming its a fancy laptop, are you suggesting he sell his only means of income to MAYBE afford a month of rent? How bout the next month? Judging a homeless person based on their small amount of possessions in a single picture shows a complete ignorance to the situation most homeless people are in...
    - igreulich 13y ago
      Any laptop = fancy laptop, in my opinion. But it doesn't change my original point.
      - dwaltrip 13y ago
        You should have read the rest of his post. Oh wait, can't do that, might have to change your opinion.
- 13y ago

cinquemb 13y ago

From some of these comments, it amazes me that people want to dictate how others should live their lives while doing nothing to improve the situation or to solve the systemic forces that faces the individuals mentioned… unless some of you happen to be on the Federal Reserve board or a CEO at a TBTF bank that owns shares in it, because obviously they are very, very good at allocating capital and resources to us all, while we tell more people to participate the in bread and circuses in order to be useful in this society… "What you eat don't make me shit, and who you fuck don't make me come"

sidko 13y ago

Just so everyone knows, the calculation with watching videos at BitcoinGet is wrong. They would be making 6 cents for watching 12 videos and not 60 cents. This makes it even less of an incentive to go there. I am surprised they do. The site pays 40uBTC/video, which converts to 40*10^-6BTC = 0.00004BTC = $0.005(assuming 125USD/BTC) = 0.5 cents/video = 6 cents/12 videos. Also, it is a Silicon Valley startup Virool that offers these videos, not BitcoinGet per se.

abuda 13y ago
If true, seems like a pretty big oversight by the author and editor. They claim 0.0004 BTC per view, when in reality it's 0.00004? Your math checks out, but I'm not familiar with what the site actually pays. While it was a good read about the other merits of bitcoin, there's a pretty huge difference between earning 60 cents a day vs 6 cents a day...
- sidko 13y ago
  I am pretty sure that the payout per video is 40 micro bitcoin (it was recently dropped from 50 micro bitcoin). Unfortunately to see this number, you need to register. It's a common amount for watching one Virool video (e.g. another site ABitBack pays only 30 micro Bitcoin per Virool video). I am surprised too that the error hasn't been corrected yet. The difference is 10 times, which isn't insignificant.