Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins

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...

I think he was saying that the laptop is what would be stolen... Not the .0004 bitcoins.

I had read that Tim Cook is an early riser, but didn't know about being up that late regularly. I think the super early riser is a cultural in south Alabama. My mother's parents grew up within an hour of Robertsdale, Alabama. My grandfather, in particular, was always up at 4:30 AM. Even into his older years when he had not lived on a farm for decades.

"Why don't these people get jobs?"

Because: THERE. ARE. NOT. ENOUGH. JOBS.

* The economy crashed a while ago. We still haven't recovered all the jobs we lost, by either absolute or percentage.

* Increased automation and efficiency is slowly removing those jobs you just described. Exec, a YCombinator app, makes a more efficient and automated solution to craigslist cleaning jobs. This is happening in every sector in this country. These changes ELIMINATE JOBS, these jobs will never come back. And the jobs they create do not replace the ones they removed, not in quantity, or in aggregate tax quality (i.e. one well paid programmer does not replace the amount of tax revenue from 4 people splitting the same salary. Let alone the fact that executives often take a cut of that increased productivity for themselves. Let alone the fact that it puts more load on welfare for the 3 lost jobs).

* Every single one of those jobs you just listed likely requires a number of things in today's saturated jobs market: High-school or college education (too many people, not enough jobs, means overqualified hiring requirements), a permanent address (hard when you are homeless), a certain appearance (hard when you are poor, without a place to live or bathe), some sort of experience (hard to get in this job market, especially when under educated, in poor health [mental or physical], and every other reason here), transport to and from work (or even for the work), ect.

I think you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's a dire one.

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.