
Desperate Venezuelans Turn to Video Games to Survive - tpatke
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/desperate-venezuelans-turn-to-video-games-to-survive
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bob_theslob646
> They start arriving even before the security shutters at the west Caracas
> storefront roll up at about 8:30 a.m. For 11 hours a day, they’ll hunch over
> old-fashioned cathode-ray tube monitors and bang on greasy keyboards in a
> dim space with a boarded-up window and a blanket of dust. They pause just
> long enough to smoke cigarettes in the stairwell. And if someone lingers too
> long, another eager person claims their seat and starts hunting make-believe
> monsters.

> Crisis-wracked Venezuela has become fertile ground for what’s known as gold
> farming. People spend hours a day playing dated online games such as Tibia
> and RuneScape to acquire virtual gold, game points or special characters
> that they can sell to other players for real money or crypto-currencies such
> as bitcoin.

> We’ve never made this much before,” says Efrain Peña, 29, who plays seven
> days a week at the Mona Pizza cybercafe to support his wife and child. Most
> Venezuelan gold farmers make the equivalent of a couple of dollars a day,
> but in many ways they’re better off than salaried workers, because their
> earnings are indexed to Venezuela’s black-market dollar exchange rate. “What
> job can match what we’re making now?” says the onetime graphic designer.

This is insane.People's will to survive never ceases to amaze me.

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XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Surely they can't be using bitcoin at the moment, if you're only making a
couple USD a day then the tx fees would eat it all.

Lowest tx fee I successfully sent recently was 0.07mBTC.

