Wired has a story on how our city’s homeless have figured out how to us bitcoins, the world’s most popular digital currency, to survive.
Jesse Angle lives on the streets of Pensacola. He is a regular around Martin Luther King Plaza, which offers free wireless access.
According to the article, Angle watches YouTube videos on his laptop in exchange for bitcoins.
This is how it works. BitcoinGet wants to generate traffic of its clients’ videos. The company pays Angle 0.0004 bitcoins, or about 5 cents, for every video he watches. He told Wired that he can watch up to 12 videos a day, which gets him to about 60 cents.
Since setting up a bitcoin wallet about three or four months ago, he has earned somewhere between four or five bitcoins — about $500 to $630 today — through YouTube videos, Bitcoin Tapper, and the occasional donation