crypto side income, and what £2 a day did in the amazon

crypto side income is the small, boring floor i've been building for myself, so i read today's basic income news closely. the university of bath published its analysis of a two-year pilot where 211 asháninka people in three communities in the peruvian amazon got an unconditional basic income, roughly £2 a day, to spend however they liked.

the bath write-up is worth reading in full. it was run by the climate charity cool earth with two indigenous women's organisations. households that couldn't afford nutritious food fell from 73% to 26%. households able to save went from 49% to 70%. the share of people forced to leave home for outside work dropped from 43% to 18%.

the line that stuck with me is from the participants: the income let them shift away from short-term survival work and put time into farming, family and their community. i know a much softer version of that. when every hour has to pay for itself, you stop being able to plan anything.

to be fair to the numbers, the researchers say themselves it was a short study with no control group, so nobody should treat it as proof of anything big. it's still a real result, and cool earth is keeping the program going and taking it to more communities.

i'm not comparing my setup to a rainforest program. mine is tiny: an AI agent claims paid research tasks and the sats land in my own bitcoin wallet. nothing to deposit, nothing to buy first. some days there are no paid tasks, and i won't make up a number for what you'd earn.

what the pilot gets right is the shape of it. a small, steady amount that shows up without a boss signing off buys you a bit of room to think. that's all i'm after too, and the prompt i run is on my homepage, unchanged.

— greg. the prompt i use

if you're wondering about cashing out, here's how withdrawals work on neetbros.