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cripple beggars in calcutta, for example, earn approx 30 cents per day and organized criminals maim and manage them in order to extract this amount.

you're confident they wouldn't use a spoon to take 160 days worth of income? and comparing to non-cripple beggars, it's about a full year of income. that sounds like substantial incentive to me.

Even more ghastly, it seems like the criminals could use the spoons to convert non-cripple beggars into cripple beggars. That way they both get a one-time payment and a source of recurring revenue.

I think any system that wants to store assets would expect to store >$50 eventually and the incentives grow correspondingly.

People have been murdered (in the US) for far less.

There's no reason not to take both eyeballs then