Prerna Gupta and her husband Parag Chordia own a company that makes iPhone apps. Their most famous app is Songify, which made them very rich—so rich that they faced every rich person's nightmare: they began to struggle with the meaning of possessions and money.

Silicon Valley has some of the country's more dizzying gaps in income inequality. Wealthy enclaves are built besides some of the Valley's poorest neighborhoods, leaving family services underfunded and municipalities writing laws that punish the poor. Now their own congresswoman is calling out tech CEOs for not doing enough to help:

The last time a startup programmer taught a homeless man to code, the naive vanity project failed. A few engineering lessons failed to solve socioeconomic realities and the man was still sleeping in the streets eight months later. But Twitter has higher hopes for its new "learning center" where employees can "teach tech skills" to San Francisco's homeless.

Last year, the tech community was stunned by the realization that teaching a homeless man to code did not solve the larger issues of homelessness and American income inequality. Now, they've regrouped, and have a new myopic plan: let's strap GoPro cameras to the poor.

Silicon Alley during the morning commute. Photo submitted by anonymous Valleywag reader.

Bitcoin tends to bring out a sense of blind optimism in true believers. But of all the delirious visions about the "monetary miracles" that Bitcoin can bring to our wretched, fiat currency-based world, Wired calling "Bitcoin: The Great Equalizer" for the homeless has to be the most delusional.

We owe young Patrick McConlogue an apology. Yesterday, the boyish wantrepreneur startled us with his plan to help the poor: just teach them how to code. It seemed a little naive—even demeaning—to think teaching a homeless person Javascript would rescue them from the streets. Maybe we were wrong.

To you, the average homeless person might just be a nuisance—an uncomfortable sidewalk encounter. But to the enterprising entrepreneur of today, the homeless are an opportunity, a way to test out your app, or maybe—just maybe—the next great software engineer.