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Comment by s5300 | Hacker News Reader

Poor people don’t have money to throw in crypto.

If you think they do, you seriously haven’t met genuinely poor people.

I've met quite a few less-than-well-off folks with significant portions of their net worth in cryptocurrencies. Like work 60 hours a week across multiple jobs but still qualify for food stamps poor. For a lot of them they see it as their only way to get out of poverty and the skill/knowledge level necessary to interact with those markets has dropped enough they're able to access them with their small amount of available capital. Depending on your perspective this is either because crypto projects are grassroots projects bringing financial freedom to everyone or because the scam has reached a size where it needs to bring those people in in order to continue running without collapsing.

I don't think it's mathematically possible to work 60 hours a week and still qualify for food stamps.

If you're the sole wage earner in a family of 4 and you make federal minimum wage or close to it, you'd still be within the qualifying income range at 60 hours a week: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility

I wonder why anyone would work for $7.25 when McDonalds, Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and basically everyone else these days pay double that at least.

Looking at the data it looks like almost no one earns minimum wage aside from waitstaff who get tips on top of it.

Got curious and did the math. Minimum federal wage is 7.25 in the US. 60 hours a week over 50 weeks is 3000 hours. Pretax that’s 21,750 a year.

Food stamps qualification depends on household size. I got different numbers when I googled but 21.75k a year qualified in all of them if there’s at least two people in your home.

I generally agree with this sentiment, then I saw a gas station in the middle-of-nowhere-Wisconsin was selling Bitcoin.

It was essentially a $5 lottery ticket

Which will never win.

You'll see a lot of get rich quick crypto schemes around Wisconsin. It's a little depressing. I hate to see people who I know are not so well off risking what little they have on something so precarious.

$5 of Bitcoin, if purchased five years ago, is worth like $80 now. Hardly a lotto ticket.

$5 of Bitcoin, if purchased a year ago, is worth like $3.50 now.

That's enough to buy some lottery tickets!

This was definitely not 5 years ago. This was 12 months ago.

And yes you can definitely win $80 from a $5 lotto ticket I promise you.

I'm a working class guy in North Dakota. I'm just telling you what I see in my community. Sorry you're out of touch with a chunk of America

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