North American homeless survives with bitcoins

If you're a bit more web-savvy and you shop online, you may have heard of Bitcoin, which roughly can be defined as the currency in the virtual world - having the advantage of not going through banks and be exchanged without intermediaries.

Many of us do not even get in touch with this "money" and for most people it is used as an alternative form of monetization. However, some people have adopted this currency as a means of sustaining themselves.

This is the case of Jesse Angle, a homeless man living among churches, shelters and buildings in Pensacola, Florida. Every day, the 42-year-old man wakes up and, after looking for something to eat, heads for Martin Luther King Square in the center of the township.

There, he opens his laptop and connects to the free WiFi network available to passersby. Then start watching YouTube videos in exchange for bitcoins. With each recording played, Angle is rewarded with 0.0004 bitcoins - equivalent to 5 cents.

This is possible thanks to a service, also free, called BitcoinGet. The homeless person, like anyone else who has an account on this site, can see up to 12 videos a day - that is, 60 cents.

Jesse further strengthens his daily earnings with the Bitcoin Tapper app, available for Android, which even yields up to 0.00133 bitcoins (almost $ 2) every day. In addition, by making "spouts" for the other inhabitants of Pensacola, he asks to be paid with the currency of the internet.

And this is how Angle manages to feed himself minimally without having to beg for alms. In the last three months, since he created his "virtual wallet," the homeless raised from $ 500 ($ 1,106) to $ 630 ($ 1,395).