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.'"

Comments

Re:Oh my god

[digitalsolo]

For what? To sit at home and watch TV?

I have no problem with the concept that everyone needs (deserves?) a basic income provided by society. I have a huge problem with the concept that they do not, in turn, owe society for that.

Give them a basic salary and then choose what menial position the Bureau of Suggested (Forced) Labor deems is best for their skills. Maybe that is doing stupid shit on the internet, I don't know, nor care, but they damn well should be doing SOMETHING.

Giving everyone 25k a year (okay, 40k a year in some places) to live, with no expectation that they will do anything other than convert oxygen to CO2 and reproduce is rather short sighted insomuch as it ignores the vast laziness of so very, very many people.

Re:Oh my god

[Kjella]

No... the real left is thinking that a basic income guarantee is becoming very close to feasible. Perhaps not yet, but we are getting close to the point where the labor generated by people who work for either self fulfillment or access to luxury goods and services can produce enough wealth to provide every household with a basic income capable of covering rent, food and basic utilities.

Not even we here in Norway which is about commie-red by US standards goes that far, in fact we just took one baby step away from socialism in the last election. The problem is quite simply that if people don't feel it pays off to work they won't. If they put the "basic income" too low, the poor can't actually afford to use it. It'll only become a cheaper way for the middle class to take a year off as many people dream of doing to fulfill some sort of self-realization but find too expensive. If they raise it too close to a low-end job, who really want to struggle eight hours a day in a dead end, physically demanding job when they can bum around and play video games? Because obviously we'd have to tax the shit out of people to pay for all this, so it's not like your pay would become your current pay + your basic income, that'd require us to create tons of money from nothing.

Already we're seeing certain trends in welfare abuse, not directly fraud as such but people who try very hard to get disabilities claims or to keep their unemployment claims by not being very employable. Statistically we know these trends aren't real because we don't have the sickest population in Europe and our working conditions are very gentle compared to many other countries yet we have one of the highest disability ratios in the western world. It just doesn't add up. These are the kind of people who are already looking to get out of the job market, they'd all take basic income and never return. Recently we've had some changes to the pension system where you could elect to retire earlier for lower pensions and lots of people got out at 62 instead of 67. Really, all the signs point to that if people can get a living paycheck without working, damn many would get the hell out.

Of course, the naive say that for each one that takes a year off a position opens up for someone else. That's not how it works, businesses aren't going to hire a dropout who is also now on basic income and probably happy with it just because they lost someone, they're not that desperate to keep the headcount up. If we decrease the talent pool, the jobs are just likely to disappear or move overseas. I think such a system would belly flop miserably but I'd be the first one on it, I'd see it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take a year off at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking I'm not alone in that respect, good luck replacing all of us from the ranks of the currently unemployed.