Slashdot Mirror
Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving On Bitcoins
An anonymous reader writes "Wired profiles a homeless man who's supporting himself primarily through Bitcoin. Jesse Angle, a former network engineer, earns small amounts throughout the day by visiting various websites that pay him to look at ads. He then converts it to gift certificates and uses the certificates to buy food. '"It's a lot less embarrassing," he says. "You don't have to put yourself out there." And unlike panhandling in Pensacola, using an app like Bitcoin Tapper won't put him on the wrong side of the law. This past May, Pensacola — where Angle has lived since April — passed an ordinance that bans not only panhandling but camping on city property.' Angle learned about Bitcoin from a charity organization called Sean's Outpost that wanted something better than PayPal for accepting donations over the internet. The organization has even opened an outreach center paid for solely with Bitcoins. Founder Jason King said, 'Bitcoin beats the s#!% out of regular money, We've resonated so well with people because it's direct action. There's no chaff between donation and helping people.'"
eHobo?
We've reached peak hipster.
is it a failure of the US social safety net that this man has to do this?
Just wait until the tax man tries and shut him down, enforced by overzealous cops and a few tasers
What exactly has bitcoin to do with getting paid for looking at ads? Why not in regular dollars?
Homeless guys drinking Monster energy drinks? That crap is very expensive.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I like the idea of bitcoins as currency, but to sit around clicking ads all day for pennies doesn't make sense to me. Why not just work a minimum wage job and make a couple hundred dollars a week if you're that desperate..
This whole thing reads like an Onion story. Is this what slashdot has come down to?
At some point the city library will want to save money by switching off the external sockets - or charging a nominal amount. This will close him down
They can pass all the laws they want, but until they do something about unemployment, mental illness, and drug abuse, people will continue begging for money and "camping" on city property. You can put them in jail (which, for some, would be a step up in living conditions), but then you'll spend a lot of money while doing nothing to address the actual problem.
My sister's husband's nephew is homeless but makes $4,500 a month just looking at Internet ads!!! You can too!!!
For more information go here:
http://www.makemoneywhilelivingunderthebridge.com
I saw large screen laptops, a smart phone, monster energy drink, bottled water, etc. in the articles photos. However, he was bummed out he lost power while playing a game on said large screen laptop. I guess it does suck being destitute in the US. Imagine your CoD game cut short. I will call BS on the poor homeless pity me routine.
Yet another reason that internet advertising isn't the great value it is said to be. Those of us who are targeted by the ads are using abp and the ads are being watched by people doing so only for the cash.
Have you compared the price of those energy drinks with a bag of apples or coffee?
It's a pretty sad situation in this country when shit food costs less than good food. A lot of that has to do with our fucked up agricultural subsidies that end up in the pockets of Monsanto and Cargill via the farmers. And people wonder why we have an obesity epidemic.
And it's also fucking sad that this guy who's resourceful, creative and talented is on the fucking streets but yet, we have assholes in Silicon Valley bitching about the "lack of talent". I would NEVER have thought of doing what he's doing. I bet if you gave this guy a programming/systems problem, he'd figure it out and come up with a unique solution. Remember that SV asshole when you're working on your next dipshit social networking or push advertising (disguised as showing folks "what they will be interested in") or some other lame-o app that offers no value to society.
Even though this guy is "old" at 42, he's using the cutting edge of not only technology of payment systems, but he is the cutting edge of what is going to happen to most of us. He's the on the edge of our spiral down to the bottom.
Just think of that when you see some CEO getting 60 million dollars just because she's a cute blond who happened to be at the right place at the right time or some asshole who fucked up a company and then talked a bigger one to buy it out.
Homophobe. Maybe he just thinks he's hot.
Well that escalated quickly
earns small amounts throughout the day by visiting various websites that pay him to look at ads.
He's not "surviving on bitcoins", he's surviving off ad viewing.
This has been around long before bitcoin, and will be around long after.
What currency he chooses to get paid in really isn't important, but hey, you need people to click your damn story.
Surely it would be even less embarrassing for him if he actually did something productive. What kind of homeless person walks around with a laptop and a smartphone anyway?
./ is plagiarizing headlines now. What, editors, can't think up your own?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"Go away or I will replace your very small click fraud shell script with a fat hobo."
This is stupid and makes no sense. If you have a laptop, internet access, and can deal with the dumb stuff you need to use bitcoin securely, you must have some skill that is worth more than fractions of a dollar a day.
And when he does odd jobs for people around Pensacola — here in the physical world — he still gets paid in bitcoin, just because it’s easier and safer.
What kind of people are these? If you're hard on cash, why limit yourself to the infinitesimal intersection of people who both have an odd job they want doing, and is willing to pay you in bitcoin?
Why not take cash, which is easier for all parties involved, and keep it where you keep your laptop and phone?
>he still gets paid in bitcoin, just because it’s easier and safer. He doesn’t have to worry as much about getting robbed.
Unless...someone steals his laptop.
>> Angle used to work as a network engineer and a computer repair technician — as well as a carpenter and a pool cleaning guy, among other jobs — but the work eventually petered out.
...and now I'm buying him food stamps and energy drinks so he can help marketing departments game search engines? Awesome.
It's quite possible that he could get such a job, though I don't know what the job market is like in Pensacola (I believe that's where the article indicated he was). That doesn't mean that he could afford rent somewhere - from the article, the main person being discussed became homeless initially after a multi-roommate apartment fell apart, and has bounced in and out of being able to afford a place since.
The more interesting part of the article is that some homeless are now starting to use Bitcoin as a way to get around not having a bank account (hard to do when you have no fixed address, I believe). This ties in well with many low-income folks having (disproportionally?) good smartphones - they can do it because that's the Internet access they can afford, and if they actually have a contract they may be getting decent phones because they can manage the installments.
fencepost
just a little off
Nope.
Not buying it.
He might be suplimenting his income by clicking on bitcoin ads all day long (or having a script do it), but he's not panhandling enough in just Bitcoins to do that. Getting paid in uBTC is tedious at best. You couldn't ge a single pack of the cigarette's he's smoking that way.
Anyone who thinks there is immigrant displacement of US workers is a neo-Nazi sympathizer at best.
Seastead this.
But with a laptop, smartphone and internet access? Seriously?
What this guy needs to do is get the hell out of Florida and into a state with an economy where he can get a job. Probably the only reason he's unemployed is Florida. Maybe he just wants to surf all day rather than spend time in the office. Somehow I'm doubting that a homeless man has all these digital toys, yet, didn't give those up to avoid being "homeless".
Someone's being scammed here, and it's us Slashdot readers for even believing ONE WORD in this story. What's next, this homeless man gets his own reality TV series?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I don't understand how bitcoin gets rid of the chaff. You still have to pay out bitcoin exchanges, of which there are fewer and fewer. Furthermore, you have to deal with the extreme fluctuation of value, fraudulent exchanges and other nefarious activity in the bitcoin market. I love bitcoin as a concept, but i don't think we should be banking our most extremely destitute on its success and integration into everyday use.
Generally to actually wind up without a place to live, one of those two things come in to play. With mental issues it is fairly easy to understand: The person is crazy, does not perceive reality, and makes choice most find very strange. Also, even if help is available (which it quite often isn't in the US), they don't want it since a sad part of many mental illnesses is to make you not think you are ill. After all they are a problem with the brain and your brain is what you use to tell if you have problems.
Drugs, including alcohol, are the much more common problem. You get addicts who are so deep in to their addiction that nothing else matters to them. Not only can they not hold down a job, but they end up alienating all their family and friends. People give them chances but they keep abusing it and finally they kick them out. Eventually, they are out of people to go to.
but I only got like 0.003 bitcoins in one month. Jesse Angle must've been lucky. sounds like the poor guy doesn't have any money in his savings account to rent an apartment or pay his bills. i guess he visits websites at a public internet cafe and uses blockchain wallet.
The free market (Bitcoin and all those ad companies) is able to provide for this guy. The alternative would be for him to sit on his ass collecting government (which as TFA noted food stamps wasn't enough for him)
Jobs don't fall off trees you know, it's not like government can just magically create a job for him, let alone one which utilize his skills.
The private sector has deemed that they only need him for small jobs like watching ads, and paid him accordingly. He gets paid, ad companies get a service they want. Everybody wins.
And it's such an easy job almost anybody can do it. It's not like the bad old days of working on the farm.
The libertarians are right, and this is just the beginning. In a libertarian paradise, almost everybody will do what these guys are doing. Imagine all the things you can afford at your job right now, but instead of having to do your job to afford all that, you go on youtube (or slashdot) all day and look at cat pictures
When I was younger - early teens to late teens, my father would volunteer with food banks, homeless shelters and with the handicapped (these would frequently overlap with the same people). This meant that I too would volunteer (whether I wanted to or not). Anyways, I would hear the same story a lot of the time about how through no fault of their own these people would lose their job, their house and cars and would have nowhere to go. They wanted help in the form of food, place to stay, etc..
In my experience maybe 1/10 of these people were genuinely down on their luck and looking for help to start over. They would do what it took to get back on their feet. The other 9 merely paid lip service to this. They actually preferred to live on the street and continue the lifestyle of not being a part of "normal" society. We'd help these people get into a program where they have food/shelter and a step by step system to start managing their lives and getting a job - they'd leave the next day because they cant' handle or don't want structure in their lives. They want to be "free" and "independent" but at the same time don't want to have to make an equal contribution to society to pay back these resources they use.
I look at this guy lounging outside a library with his laptop, drinking monster energy drinks and eating chicken pot pies. He's taking food stamps to support himself and yet he buys shitty unhealthy food that's way too expensive for someone on a restricted income. I got one thing to say to this guy and his friends, "Go fuck yourself!".
need to improve schooling as well. As alot of people with autism spectrum don't do well in a collage setting but do a lot better in a smaller tech / trade school setting or even learning of the job.
Worked in internet advertising between tech jobs.
they may not hire some with even 3 years IT to work min wage and even if they do get the job it may be 5-10-20 hours a week.
We all know he could have a job at Wal-Mart, 7-11, or McDonald's within a few hours.
You obviously don't know anyone who works in that segment of the economy. None of those places are "always hiring," and most have backlogs of resumes to go through. Worse, having a resume with a good job history on it is poison for low-end jobs, where people assume that you'll be jumping ship at first chance for a better job more in line with what you've done. Speaking from experience, no one wants someone with 7 years of development experience and a fresh law degree to deliver their pizzas.
Plus, my friend who does work for Wal-mart? He'd be homeless too if he couldn't live with him Mom based on what they pay him in his eternally part-time position.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A few bitcoin donations helped me make my mortgage payment last month, and I have a little left over. Things are picking up but it's still really tight. I had to have emergency dental surgery (blessed wisdom teeth) too... There is a point that you reach when you're desperate that you still feel the shame of begging, but the need overwhelms it.
I'll just leave this here: 17S6drtGpJXer6qA5V6XhP3snasGWANBjc
Before you crow the victory of frugility with your beans and rice, you might consider that those are "unprepared foods".
Same sort of problem that aid NGOs have: You can hand out 5 pounds of rice to a family to "feed them for a week" (or however long), but unless said family ALSO has the means to prepare that rice, you aren't FEEDING them.
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!" becomes "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a Bitcoin today!" or what?
see subject.
Shame on you for claiming that autism is an illness.
Addiction is an interesting thing, and it varies with different people. People don't always get addicted because they are unhappy. In fact, the drugs can be a lot of fun to use in the beginning. Initially, it is all good. However as you continue on it becomes more pain, less pleasure, a bigger problem. The thing is, quitting will cause a lot of pain at that point and you may have already messed up your life to a degree, so it is harder to quit.
Drugs with actual, physical, addictions can be real insidious in that way. That's also why you'll hear addicts talk about the need to "hit bottom". What that means is things have to get bad enough that you realize and accept what you need to do to try and recover, to deal with the difficulty of recovery. For some people, that bottom is pretty high. They'll stop the addiction early. For others, even death isn't the bottom.
Actually, this is more a conseqeunce of the US social safety net and well meaning regulation than a failure. Minimum wage laws, taxes, insurance, and numerous restrictions on hiring and firing mean that you can't just take a chance on this guy and hire him to do something. If you could, he'd probably make more in a couple of days than he is making now in a month. Zoning regulations, health and safety regulations, restrictions on rental housing and hotels, tennants rights, and all that means that there is no cheap housing at the low end. Between homelessness and a middle class apartment used to be a whole range of options, from flophouses to boarding houses, and residential hotels. By outlawing them, you don't magically convert the people living in them into middle class wage earners, you simply put them on the street.
Bitcoin and online work fortunately are doing an end run around all these regulations. There is still no magical solution for the onerous restrictions on housing, though.
This story is a lie, bitcoin is a fraud, just a ponzi scheme!! There's no way it can be useful for anything!
Some of that money comes straight from the marketing budget of the asshole execs who lobbied for cutting welfare and criminalizing poverty. It's beautiful.
the most absurd terms
The most ingenious terms, you mean. Create some ridiculous hoops to jump through, plenty of suckers try to make book, few make book, you profit from clicks _and_ not paying. Barnum & Bailey would be proud.
I come here for the love
A fraction of a cent a day?
It's been hours now I'm trying websites that give free bitcoins for watching videos and visiting websites. So far, I made 3 cents, USD. I think begging is more rentable.
If I was rich, I would be homeless. Traveling all around the country and sleeping in hotels, eating at restaurants, etc... Are you saying that if I don't have a home address, in Florida, it is illegal for a restaurant to serve a meal to me or someone to cook for me ?
Stupid laws are stupid.
From a few visits to friends and family out in Florida, I can certainly say we need to crush the Floridians first. What an incredible array of ignorant white trash in every color. You have dumbshit laws because you are the most dumbshit people in the country. Alabama and Mississippi might have lower IQs and SATs, but when it comes to life skills, Florida is a cesspool with intelligence metrics propped up by the senile senior population.
So you're advising that the homeless guy start walking to someplace he's not familiar with but where the employment prospects are better, right? Or are you offering to front him the money? I'm sure you can track this guy down and get him some money for travel - after all, all it requires is that you be able to send him some Bitcoins which you can do from wherever you happen to be.
If he's willing to relocate and can get some help paying for it, he might be able to do quite well up in Montana/Wyoming where energy extraction is booming and unemployment is low, and his homelessness experience might stand him in good stead since there's a major shortage of housing. Of course, I'm not so sure September is the right time to move to the northern plains to live outside.
fencepost
just a little off
If you think being poor and homeless is such a riot, why don't you try it yourself first before looking down your nose at other people. Like 9 out of 10 people choose to sleep under bridges, choose to carry shivs in case someone tries to beat/rob them, choose to deal with harassment from cops, and so on and so on.
A network admin that can't get a job? I call BS. Even if you're just doing desktop support for your local library you could be making some reasonable money.
Why there's a perfectly good reason for homeless people to have smartphones: job hunting. Especially in a shitty economy, having access to a phone and internet can be vital when searching for jobs. If Wal-Mart can't call you back for a second interview, they'll just shrug their shoulders and hire one of the other 200 applicants from that week. That decent paying job that fits in with your education and work experience that you just found out about? Filled last week by an applicant that responded the same day it was posted.
But aside from all that, it's truly disgusting how conservatives demand a certain level of misery of the poor before giving them an iota of "respect".
Today's job market is way too unpredictable. These unpredictable elements include things like employers hiring people only temporarily, laying them off at the end of their trial periods, hiring only part time while assigning practically full time hours (e.g. full time may qualify at 38 hours, but the employer may only want the worker to work 36-37) to dodge paying full time wages or benefits, extremely small contracts or nitpicking about job performance so they don't have to keep workers on.
This is worsened by the fact the job market is divided between a "public" and "hidden" job market. All of the jobs on the "public" side are very unstable for the above reasons. The "hidden" market is only accessible if you know people pretty high up AND are pretty much already within the industry — which I guarantee most "ground floor" do not and are not.
One significant aspect about the "public" job market is that it is one of service and manual jobs that are really only designed to be temporary, but many "uncertified" people are duped by the job market into ending up working these permanently.
Now, I know many who have stable office/skilled jobs with job security may be of the belief that all one needs is hard work and determination to get a good job — this may have been true 20+ years ago, but not today. One needs contacts (if you're in a skilled industry, you likely already have 30+ contacts at a minimum outside of your company) in today's day and age, those already "in the system" to "bring you in" essentially.
Now to talk on the whole element of education for a moment (which always tends to come up as an alleged silver bullet to solve any employment problem), given the state of the job market in how it has become a circle-jerk of self-gratification by those already in various industries, education is not a guarantee, in fact it is a truly unstable investment as there's far too many variables. Thinking of education in terms of a business deal, would you invest in something that 1) plunges you into debt; 2) you cannot guarantee that the product will be relevant any more by the time it is complete and 3) you cannot withdraw your funding and support from the project once it is committed and in progress to invest elsewhere... it is something that is a disaster waiting to happen from a business perspective. This doesn't even start to include the job market nonsense.
I do not blame people for seeking methods to create their own systems to sustain themselves, as frankly until these barriers are lowered (and they won't as long as that self-gratification is going on by industries and businessmen alike internally), nothing will ever change. The HR expectation of "experience" is code for "we only want someone already deep in the industry". Though of course eventually industry will see these new systems as threats to the status-quo and demand them shut down or made prohibitive (look at the financial industry's aversion to bitcoins).
Finally, look at how employment has shifted away from having managers having control over employment over to an HR model where HR has control over job postings, where hiring managers can only "suggest" people be hired. Often times HR doesn't even understand the jobs they are hiring for and as such just gets a list of keywords and if those keywords aren't in someone's resume, it is overlooked even if that person is the best in the industry. As such even application for most jobs is onerous and prohibitive.
To summarize, the job market and current system is way too unstable for people to have faith in it anymore, thus people have stopped trying to have faith in it. I speak to homeless and unemployed on a regular basis and most of them want jobs, but many have lost faith in employers to give them one that won't be taken away in less than a year due to "economics" and the aforementioned instabilities.
Of course he is a real homeless.
There is no fake and real homeless, there is "a person that legally doesn't live anywhere.", aka, someone that does not pay rent in any accommodation whatsoever.
If that means they are bouncing between houses without paying, they are still homeless.
ROOFless is what you mean, which is a term that doesn't seem to have gained much use.
It is similar to how people group everything of the anthropomorphic animal porn type under "furry" these days because "fuck it, who cares, they are all terrible, scalies, furries, whatever."
The same thing happened with homeless and roofless, they are 2 very distinct terms and they should be legally different as well.
Homelessness and Rooflessness are not at all the same and never should be.
People without a roof suffer far far worse than those that don't own a home, they are open to the weather which can be horrible in places up north towards the North Pole.
Also interesting thing, a lot of people are picking up being homelessness by choice.
Using public places like gyms to shower and exercise, sleeping with people friendly enough to take them in and as long as they pay their own way, they have no rent to pay.
Although there are some that would then be classed as "fake" homeless that do pay, but when you pick and pull at that difference, that is just nit-picking, renting from people not related or known to you is a bit different in all honesty.
Then just doing cash jobs here and there, bouncing around places.
Bitcoin is finally becoming more stable as it has exploded in use.
As more and more virtual currencies come about, it will gain even more stability as they bounce off each other like real currencies do.
No more will some silly twitter posts derail an entire currency, but usage and trade between will decide their fates.
It will be an interesting time in the coming decades.
Those that want to make a quick buck best get in on these new currencies to mine them in the early stages. The good part about that is it will also make them useful and gain momentum. It will then go through the same stages Bitcoin has, likely to a lesser extent now because people are smarter about these things, they won't jump the shark too early since with Bitcoin it was so unknown.
I just find it sad governments aren't taking advantage of it and are seemingly trying everything to want to smash it to bits. Talk about being driven by the banks...