I've long given up on trusting the terms cryptocurrency and blockchain in media, or even at events.
A few months ago I happened to walk by some start-up-themed blockchain event and I stopped to listen to the talk that was going on, and later also listened to part of the next talk. It was fabulous. They must have read "blockchain is just a sequence of blocks with info in them" and went wild from there.
A terminally ill 20-something-year-old is struggling to come to terms with the impending end of his life. He's down and depressed and pretty much given up. A childhood friend visits on personal request of the mother, who wants to cheer him up somehow. They reminisce and talk about their goal of one day visiting every BBQ restaurant in the country.
But the cocktail of drugs keeping the disease suppressed has caused him to lose all sense of taste, so he has to rely on his friend to describe all the flavours to him. Through this adventure our two protagonists struggle with what it means to grow up, grow apart, face their mortality. We have some laughs, some tears, and by the end we're all richer for the experience.
Where are you based out of? There is an independent place a couple blocks from me that only sells bagels and bagel sandwiches (bagels and bagel accessories?). Unless you're outside the known centre of the universe (GTA) or one of it's satellites (whatever the other big metro areas are called) I'm sure you can find a similar spot.
> However, in a later conversation, he warned that they could be used for money laundering and ransomware payments.
Maybe I just don't get it but I found this article unintentionally hilarious.
First, the idea of running a distributed ledger to keep track of burger points. This is the tech equivalent of using a bazooka to address an ant problem.
Second, the idea of money laundering and ransom ware...imagining Colombian drug lords cleaning narco dollars into Russian burger points, and my hard drive ending up infected...you can have your files back in exchange for 100 Whoppers in St. Petersburg.
The latter point isn't necessarily as crazy as it sounds. I remember there was something about money laundering through Second Life currency. In the end, does it really matter how you do it, if it works?
Your first point is a little funny, until you remember all those people who also kept saying that BTC isn't the only thing and replacing fiat currency isn't the only goal. I don't see a problem with it, other than being somewhat wasteful.
Both WOW Gold and Second Life "linden dollars" were and are major black market currency tools online. A cursory google search would prove your statement quite false but here's some sources anyway:
Neither of those articles contains anything even hinting towards my statement being false. Their contents are merely speculation.
I've got a decent amount of experience with this, and I'm certain there's never been any large scale money laundering activity using Linden dollars. The idea is simply ridiculous, the economy isn't large enough to support it.
Sorry, was the arxiv paper[0] linked in the Wired article not sufficient? I'm not regional expert on this subject myself so if you've got contrary information I'd be interested in reading it. It's my assumption Wow's economy is much larger than SL's, and I'd also assume that in aggregate these different digital economies are more than large enough to hide transactions. That's speculation on my own part, though, and if you have any actual evidence other than claiming "decent experience" I'm interested.
I'm not sure what the definition of "large scale money laundering" is in this situation.
Did you actually look at the paper? The primary sources are videogame cheating forums like Ownedcore, not really where I'd go for money laundering advice. The posts seem to be mostly related to laundering stolen ingame money, not funds acquired elsewhere.
There's also one entirely speculative post (again from a videogame cheating forum) proposing a completely unrealistic, and ridiculously expensive approach to money laundering by buying and reselling videogame money.
The paper seems to have been written by mostly clueless people with little understanding of these communities or money laundering.
You've sufficiently attacked the source, but I'll reiterate that I'm not looking to pick a fight here, I'm asking for actual evidence or even a supportive argument for what you're saying. I've heard for many years that money laundering is common with online currencies, but as I've said I'm not an expert. If you're that much less clueless and have more understanding please share it. There's a lot of discussion in crypto threads that assumes the opposite of what you're saying so it'd be nice to have the tools to disprove incorrect assumptions.
Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative.
>I'm asking for actual evidence or even a supportive argument for what you're saying
It's hard to prove a negative, there's simply no evidence at all that anyone has ever used videogame money to launder the proceeds of unrelated crimes.
The idea also sounds fundamentally unlikely as videogame currency markets are pretty small¹ and actually getting the currency sold is a long and risky process.
>I've heard for many years that money laundering is common with online currencies
It is. But when people have purpose built solutions like Liberty Reserve and Perfect Money, nobody chooses to waste their time and money on messing with videogame currencies.
>Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative.
Bitcoin mixing has historically been very cheap, right now it still is below 1% cost if you're mixing more than a couple of coins at a time.
The Heinlein prediction of Crazy Years and "barter-only hamburgers" is a bit later to come around than originally projected, but the curve does not seem totally wrong ...
No kidding. I can't decide whether this is more techno-culturally weird in the Gibsonian way, or more iconoclastically post-modern in the Stephensonian way.
Waves is a proof of stake platform, there are several large pools staking.
I mean maybe thats marketing speak if you don't understand it.
The cool thing about waves is that its fun, and that you can lease to people that want to be pools and earn fun stuff. The questionable thing is if the leasing has resulted (or will result) in consolidation making it not distributed.
It reminds me of those stories from the 90s bubble, when companies would just add ".com" to their name to inflate their value.
Are Russians really curious enough about blockchains for this to be effective, or did Burger King's marketing team just decide a $10,000 bitcoin proof-of-concept is more effective than spending an equal amount on traditional advertising?
If it cost them 10,000$. I bet they'll make it back just on the devs/geeks who want to get in on the silliness of it, id say minimum 2000 devs in Russia would buy a whopper to get some whoppercoin, 2000x5$ = 10,000. Make money back and get exposure haha
Whopper coins being tied to whoppers is a one-way street. You can't just take some two week old whoppers to an ATM and feed the bread and patty into the machine to get whopper coins.
BK will allow you to redeem for Whopper's at their ATM/mobile Kiosk.
The level of ignorance is juvenile.
Would you rather implement, at non trivial expense, your own loyalty points. Or copy paste 50 lines of Solidity and call it a day and automatically be compatible with all ERC20 wallets?
Cash being tied to goldbars is a one-way street. You can't just take some two week old goldbars to an ATM and feed the goldbars into the machine to get cash.
True, but at least the WhopperCoins are backed by food (on-demand food at that) which will always have value to the human race, thus be in demand and have some market value. Not sure if the same can be said for the ruble. As long as WhopperCoin can't hyperinflate, they may have something here. Haven't looked at WhopperCoin's issuance algorithm yet so no idea if that's the case.
You see this for every skill though. I remember jobs requiring 5 years of Rails experience before Rails was that old and DHH commenting somewhere that he wouldn't qualify.
I like looking at the shitload of server racks and cables in the side room of the Burger King joint in my mall, it's like they have a cyborg or some monster plugged into a liquid nutrient bath back there. Yum, gonna order some chicken fries.
Between this and that famous KFC pop-up[0], I'm starting to think that fast food restaurants are at the forefront of abusing new technology for dumb purposes.
...you use a computer to look at pictures of cats.
That computer would be the greatest Wonder of the Ancient World, if it could be transported back in time, and powered (solar?) The computational power we all waste each day is almost beyond comprehension.
I read a novel where it was illegal to not spend your spare CPU cycles modelling hurricanes.
I recently signed up for a Starbucks Rewards card in Argentina. I had to state that I was not a "Politically Exposed Person (PEP)", and I had to provide my full name, passport number, date of birth, profession, civil status (married, divorced, widowed, single), and street address. Do they think I'm going to launder money by buying lattes?
US Starbucks Cards can be used in certain other countries[1], and international money transfer would be a plausible excuse for requiring such information. However, that doesn't seem to be the case for Argentine Starbucks cards[2].
[1] "Most Starbucks, Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores in North America including Puerto Rico accept your Starbucks Card. Certain Starbucks-branded locations may not permit you to use the Starbucks Card for payment, including some airport, grocery and bookstore locations, or stores in Guam and others located outside continental North America." https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/onlin...
[2] "La Starbucks Card activada en Argentina no podrá ser utilizada en tiendas Starbucks ubicadas fuera de Argentina. La Starbucks Card activada fuera de Argentina no será válida en Argentina.", which Google translates as "The Starbucks Card activated in Argentina can not be used in Starbucks stores located outside Argentina. The Starbucks Card activated outside Argentina will not be valid in Argentina." https://starbucksrewards.com.ar/tos/card
> Do they think I'm going to launder money by buying lattes?
That is exactly what happens. Prepaid debit cards and gift cards were and maybe still are both major tools for cross-border money laundering of drug proceeds because they have not been treated with the same scrutiny by customs and border guards as cash. With gift cards, you would buy them in one country, take them to another (typically US), and sell them (on Craigslist, eBay, etc) for $0.98 on the dollar. So it is a very inexpensive and low risk way of international money laundering.
My guess is that you are more likely to see a bitcoin-rich Russian teenage hacker than a Colombian drug lord. I think it's smart to try to get a cut of the ransomware business.
> First, the idea of running a distributed ledger to keep track of burger points. This is the tech equivalent of using a bazooka to address an ant problem.
They aren't running it. They are using the Waves platform, which has very easy 1-click asset creation. Waves is also Proof of Stake, so there's no mining involved.
This gives the transparency benefits and distribution benefits, without any of the overhead.
Regarding distribution, waves platform has a culture of airdrops in it.
I find Waves fun. Between leasing, the decentralized exchanges, the airdrops, the dividends, and finding out about the assets that got airdropped or dividended to you, I find myself in the app quite often unintentionally. The airdropped assets are mostly worthless, but the descriptions of the assets are interesting. I would say the fun aspect is different than other cryptocurrencies. Its like finding random stuff in Skyrim, keeps me coming back.
For reference, I buy Waves and purchase Waves Community Tokens (WCT) on the decentralized exchange. Most airdrops go to WCT holders, they just take a record of the blockchain and send to all address with WCT balances.
I lease my remaining Waves to the pools FountainPerpetua and WavesGo. There are plenty of other pools to lease to.
Pools give payments in the form of Waves, because thats what they earn, but they also have the option of giving payments in other assets too, they just need to remain competitive.
So I typically earn Waves, Waves Community Tokens and Miners Rewards tokens.
The WavesGo pool gives WavesGo tokens which are actual shares and actual securities.
WavesGo pools distributes more of its own earnings to all WavesGo holders. You can buy and sell more WavesGo shares on the decentralized exchange.
Thanks for this comment -- it was very high quality and led me to spend 2 hours reading about this stuff. It looks pretty cool and I'm going to give it a shot. Reading about the fountains and several other community aspects really does make this seem unique and fun
Haven't people been laundering money via in-game virtual items in different MMO games before? This is just another seemingly "frivolous" channel that humans can do unofficial exchange in.
Organized crime has used xbox multiplayer to communicate with each other to evade wiretaps[0], criminals have used tide as a currency[1], why not Burger King, too?
The best form of communication to circumvent surveillance is not Signal, it's some Japanese MMORPG that no one has ever heard of or ever think of monitoring.
>Russians will be able to buy a Whopper with the virtual cash, once they have amassed 1,700 whoppercoins.
>The tech company will run the blockchain ledger for the coin to keep track of who has coins and what has been done with them.
>Customers will be able to claim their coins by scanning a receipt with a smartphone.
>[...]the company would be able to shut the system down if it found it was being abused.
So... BK has a database tracking loyalty rewards and they decided to brand it "crypto-cash" for marketing? I mean, if they effectively own the ledger, the coin supply and fix the conversion rate, what's the point?
If I was an kid and had to choose between McDonald / a & w / Harvey's / bk, and bk was offering something with 'cryptocurrency' I would go there cause it's ---cool---
"""The crypto-currency is a stand-alone system that has some technical similarities to Bitcoin but is distinct from it.
This means the company would be able to shut the system down if it found it was being abused."""
Sounds like it's some kind of centrally controlled ledger where no technical purpose is served by a blockchain (if there is even one). So not a "cryptocurrency", then.
It might be that different franchises are getting together to form the ledger, or maybe different marketing zones.
They may think this is easier or more fun (probably just more fun) to setup than all reporting to corporate, and no one getting to redeem or trade if their internet to corporate goes down.
Nah, this is wrong. BK has no influence over the WAVES blockchain. If they say, lost the private key with the ~1B whopper coins not in circulation, there isn't a person who can stop it. (baring ethereum style hard fork, and this wont happen in Waves).
This is being launched on the WAVES platform. It's pretty much colored coins with a built-in decentralized exchange. I guess that means you'll be able to trade your WhopperCoins for Bitcoin/Ethereum/Coinye West.
I don't own any WAVES: this isn't an endorsement, just figured you guys might want to know how this works "under the hood". Honestly, it seems pretty sketchy. The whitepaper doesn't cite anything other than some github repos and the ethereum whitepaper. There's so many platforms out there that promise they're the best thing since sliced bread: I'd stay away if I were you...
I wish you were right and you could generate burgers with your GPU, but there's no such thing as a free lunch!
In super simplified (edit: and inaccurate) terms, a bunch of WAVES have been specially flagged as WhopperCoins. Any client that receives these specially marked WAVES know that they are WhopperCoins. Even if you could mine WAVES with your GPU (they're PoS not PoW) you wouldn't generate WhopperCoins, because your WAVES won't be specially marked.
This is the basis for how colored coins work [1] and a lot of other token platforms work on similar principles.
Burger King initially controls all 1 billion of the tokens, and is distributing them as part of a rewards program. The only way to get them is to buy food at BK, or to buy it from someone who has some.
Edit: the user below me says that WAVES doesn't work like colored coins, but you still aren't able to mine them. I'd delete my post but I made a slick pun and I can't bear to take it down.
No this isn't colored coins; Its a first class asset on the WAVES network. The protocol itself supports user issued assets (aka cryptoassets). Colored coins is a hack for bitcoin-like protocols that don't support native assets.
I based my assumption on the FAQ, but I haven't looked into this network too much and it sounds like you have.
Thanks for the clarification, I guess I shouldn't trust wikis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> What is Waves’ advantage over traditional crowdfunding platforms? Waves is a coloured coins blockchain platform with an integrated decentralised exchange. Our unique selling point...
So, could this be used for an app game creator, to create an 'app arcade' for a collection of apps, using only the colored coins as 'app arcade' specific tokens?
Sounds like the plot line to a dystopian science fiction where loyalty program memberships have morphed into mandatory dining requirements. In a few generations families fracture and split as they become generational fast food chain supporters along with their football (soccer) clubs...
Against this backdrop we have poor Teddy who only ever wanted Nandos but his family are die hard Maccabies to the end. And then his favorite player is traded to Liverpool and the dreaded Chippy Skipper's fry up fish and chips chain.
> "Reward points are actually a good use case for blockchains," he said.
This doesn't make sense to me. The whole "innovation" of cryptocurrency is that you don't centralize trust in one party. In this case you already need to trust BK to redeem the coin, so what does an untrusted mechanism of exchange actually give you?
A that they are having a lot of success i'd say, we are all talking about their little rewards program and discussing whoppers. Brilliant. Bloomberg going to give them a bunch of free advertising with this.
Of course it is. This is a publicity stunt (and hilarious I might add), as Burger King has been known to do in the past. They've had a brilliant marketing team for a long time.
Sure, but the quote I extracted is from a cryptocurrency authority, not Burger King. I'm confused by the viability of this sort of loyalty program being on the blockchain in general.
Actually, it's actually a great use of blockchain.
That way, your customers can transfer points with eachother, etc -- then spend them at your restaurant. It does in fact decentralize trust -- the key here is that it's the restaurant trusting the customer, not the other way around.
Each point only gets spent once, and there's a built-in automated mechanism for "cashing in" those points.
I mean, I agree it's probably dumb for hamburger loyalty points. But it makes a ton of sense for hotel/airline points if you build the wallet into your mobile app and allow consumers to transfer points with each other offline. If it's transparent to the user, there's no reason it couldn't work.
You can do that via blockchain as well; I imagine BK will own all the transaction processors, so for any transaction to an external wallet, you add on a fee. Ethereum and Bitcoin also do this; only the mechanism for determining the transaction fee is algorithmic rather than a fixed % of the transaction value.
All that said, loyalty points have a lot in common with crypto currencies simply from a functional perspective. It's a pretty natural application. You just merge the points back into the blockchain via an app or something. But this way it's secure, auditable and likely costs the company less to operate.
Is it even legal in Russia? From what I could find:
> "There are at present no legal acts that specifically regulate the use of bitcoins in the Russian Federation," but a Russian law firm thinks that using it to buy things there could be illegal given that the Russian ruble is the exclusive means of payment in the Russian Federation per the law. [1]
There is a law prohibiting what those dogs call "money surrogates".
Well, if somebody gets wind of somebody having 1m+ of what is effectively cash, that person will likely get raided by somebody anyways. Happens all the time
I don't really see the point of a block chain in this situation.
Why not implement it on a centralised Burger King server ? Why bother with a distributed p2p network, mining, apps, when a simple mysql database plus a php file can achieve the same thing ?
Am I missing something ? If they want crypto so much, just let people withdraw their points in bitcoin..
I can see the point of a generic "FoodCoin", where each restaurant is a miner and the coins can be used to buy food in any other restaurant in the network.. Or is that their ultimate purpose ?
But then it's not truly decentralised, I guess the model would be BurgerKing and a bunch of satellite restaurants using the same coin somehow...
Anyway, don't really see the point of a block chain, beyond hype..
Lots of hype and for all the wrong usages of crypto.
There is exactly 0 reasons why BK needs a coin of their own. It's all about generating hype and trying to cash in on a fad. The worst part is this is the story that will make headlines and will drive up other bullcrap alt-coins and ICOs because "if BK is doing it then surely there are riches to be made!".
In Burgerking's case HYPE is more important than anything else. Thus this is probably the right choice for them even though from a pure technology standpoint it is wrong. Unlike most alt-coins, this one isn't pure hype unlikely to ever make it: BK backs it.
On the other hand I expect BK will drop this sometime between 3 months and 5 years from now, and your BK coins will be worthless. 3 months is all the longer they can sustain the hype, 5 years is longest before the costs of maintaining all their mining machines will budget cut. I won't speculate on if there will be a transition plan for whatever replaces it: if you get these coins turn them in quickly.
I don't see a particularly good reason to ever have a balance over 1 burger anyway. It's unlikely you went to burger king and spent money and didn't want to eat a burger.
On the one hand from the article its not clear that this has anything to do with cryptocurrency despite being branded as such.
On the other hand if it is real its interesting because it has a value pegged to a physical good... though it seems unlikely that BK understands cryptocurrency well enough to deal with "unauthorized miners".
They're using the blockchain to essentially track the authenticity and proper ownership of your "burger points." I'm with other comments that it's complete overkill but your post misunderstands both blockchain and BK's implementation. To start with, there's no mining involved since it's proof of stake. There's so many other identity/trust/authorization opportunities for blockchain so I could see this being a low-risk test case for something more significant one of BK's partners has in mind.
I'm thinking that someone (maybe me) should start a 'shark coin' to just be blunt about the excitement and interest in crypto-currency officially having jumped the shark.
I predict the price of whoppers goes up 1000% in Russia and you have to be in the Russian Mafia to even afford one. And even if you can afford one, don't let them catch you buying one. They will take over the supply.
Drive-through: I'll take a Whopper with... BOOM. Sniper takes out the civilian for ordering the wrong menu item.
159 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadA few months ago I happened to walk by some start-up-themed blockchain event and I stopped to listen to the talk that was going on, and later also listened to part of the next talk. It was fabulous. They must have read "blockchain is just a sequence of blocks with info in them" and went wild from there.
They have the right to do anything they want with their corporation and I have the right never to spend another dime in their restaurant.
A terminally ill 20-something-year-old is struggling to come to terms with the impending end of his life. He's down and depressed and pretty much given up. A childhood friend visits on personal request of the mother, who wants to cheer him up somehow. They reminisce and talk about their goal of one day visiting every BBQ restaurant in the country.
But the cocktail of drugs keeping the disease suppressed has caused him to lose all sense of taste, so he has to rely on his friend to describe all the flavours to him. Through this adventure our two protagonists struggle with what it means to grow up, grow apart, face their mortality. We have some laughs, some tears, and by the end we're all richer for the experience.
Tastebuds.
Maybe I just don't get it but I found this article unintentionally hilarious.
First, the idea of running a distributed ledger to keep track of burger points. This is the tech equivalent of using a bazooka to address an ant problem.
Second, the idea of money laundering and ransom ware...imagining Colombian drug lords cleaning narco dollars into Russian burger points, and my hard drive ending up infected...you can have your files back in exchange for 100 Whoppers in St. Petersburg.
is this what a block chain bubble looks like?
Your first point is a little funny, until you remember all those people who also kept saying that BTC isn't the only thing and replacing fiat currency isn't the only goal. I don't see a problem with it, other than being somewhat wasteful.
http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
I don't think this was ever actually a thing, some people just speculated about the possibility.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2014/03/26/bitcoin...
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/money-laundering-online
I've got a decent amount of experience with this, and I'm certain there's never been any large scale money laundering activity using Linden dollars. The idea is simply ridiculous, the economy isn't large enough to support it.
I'm not sure what the definition of "large scale money laundering" is in this situation.
[0][https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1310/1310.2368.pdf
There's also one entirely speculative post (again from a videogame cheating forum) proposing a completely unrealistic, and ridiculously expensive approach to money laundering by buying and reselling videogame money.
The paper seems to have been written by mostly clueless people with little understanding of these communities or money laundering.
Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative.
It's hard to prove a negative, there's simply no evidence at all that anyone has ever used videogame money to launder the proceeds of unrelated crimes.
The idea also sounds fundamentally unlikely as videogame currency markets are pretty small¹ and actually getting the currency sold is a long and risky process.
>I've heard for many years that money laundering is common with online currencies
It is. But when people have purpose built solutions like Liberty Reserve and Perfect Money, nobody chooses to waste their time and money on messing with videogame currencies.
>Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative.
Bitcoin mixing has historically been very cheap, right now it still is below 1% cost if you're mixing more than a couple of coins at a time.
¹even for WoW, I used to sell gold
I read everything I could find on the platform though and couldn't find anything but marketing speak.
https://wavesplatform.com/
They do link to their github, but that's a bit deeper dive than I have interest for at the moment.
I mean maybe thats marketing speak if you don't understand it.
The cool thing about waves is that its fun, and that you can lease to people that want to be pools and earn fun stuff. The questionable thing is if the leasing has resulted (or will result) in consolidation making it not distributed.
Are Russians really curious enough about blockchains for this to be effective, or did Burger King's marketing team just decide a $10,000 bitcoin proof-of-concept is more effective than spending an equal amount on traditional advertising?
BK will allow you to redeem for Whopper's at their ATM/mobile Kiosk.
The level of ignorance is juvenile.
Would you rather implement, at non trivial expense, your own loyalty points. Or copy paste 50 lines of Solidity and call it a day and automatically be compatible with all ERC20 wallets?
The devs get to put down on their resume "real" block chain experience.
I write this, because, if you look up block chain on indeed, you'll see some insane requirements.
5 years+ "blockchain experience."
Ok, yeah, that's going to be real common. Five years ago most people weren't aware of block chain.
Now, distributed database, "maybe."
BK is a very sophisticated logistics operation - they probably employ some smart techs. This is just them having some fun, and why not?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/6mevf4/kfc_g...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3PJQ_E7Se0
https://www.vrroom.buzz/vr-news/games/kfcs-training-game-sic...
https://www.vrroom.buzz/vr-news/games/kfcs-training-game-sic...
That computer would be the greatest Wonder of the Ancient World, if it could be transported back in time, and powered (solar?) The computational power we all waste each day is almost beyond comprehension.
I read a novel where it was illegal to not spend your spare CPU cycles modelling hurricanes.
https://starbucksrewards.com.ar/register
[1] "Most Starbucks, Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores in North America including Puerto Rico accept your Starbucks Card. Certain Starbucks-branded locations may not permit you to use the Starbucks Card for payment, including some airport, grocery and bookstore locations, or stores in Guam and others located outside continental North America." https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/onlin...
[2] "La Starbucks Card activada en Argentina no podrá ser utilizada en tiendas Starbucks ubicadas fuera de Argentina. La Starbucks Card activada fuera de Argentina no será válida en Argentina.", which Google translates as "The Starbucks Card activated in Argentina can not be used in Starbucks stores located outside Argentina. The Starbucks Card activated outside Argentina will not be valid in Argentina." https://starbucksrewards.com.ar/tos/card
That is exactly what happens. Prepaid debit cards and gift cards were and maybe still are both major tools for cross-border money laundering of drug proceeds because they have not been treated with the same scrutiny by customs and border guards as cash. With gift cards, you would buy them in one country, take them to another (typically US), and sell them (on Craigslist, eBay, etc) for $0.98 on the dollar. So it is a very inexpensive and low risk way of international money laundering.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-regulations-moneylaun...
They aren't running it. They are using the Waves platform, which has very easy 1-click asset creation. Waves is also Proof of Stake, so there's no mining involved.
This gives the transparency benefits and distribution benefits, without any of the overhead.
Regarding distribution, waves platform has a culture of airdrops in it.
I find Waves fun. Between leasing, the decentralized exchanges, the airdrops, the dividends, and finding out about the assets that got airdropped or dividended to you, I find myself in the app quite often unintentionally. The airdropped assets are mostly worthless, but the descriptions of the assets are interesting. I would say the fun aspect is different than other cryptocurrencies. Its like finding random stuff in Skyrim, keeps me coming back.
For reference, I buy Waves and purchase Waves Community Tokens (WCT) on the decentralized exchange. Most airdrops go to WCT holders, they just take a record of the blockchain and send to all address with WCT balances.
I lease my remaining Waves to the pools FountainPerpetua and WavesGo. There are plenty of other pools to lease to.
Pools give payments in the form of Waves, because thats what they earn, but they also have the option of giving payments in other assets too, they just need to remain competitive.
So I typically earn Waves, Waves Community Tokens and Miners Rewards tokens.
The WavesGo pool gives WavesGo tokens which are actual shares and actual securities.
WavesGo pools distributes more of its own earnings to all WavesGo holders. You can buy and sell more WavesGo shares on the decentralized exchange.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2470702/cybercrime-hac...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-are...
Maybe, but if it was a "tulip coin" then definitely
>The tech company will run the blockchain ledger for the coin to keep track of who has coins and what has been done with them.
>Customers will be able to claim their coins by scanning a receipt with a smartphone.
>[...]the company would be able to shut the system down if it found it was being abused.
So... BK has a database tracking loyalty rewards and they decided to brand it "crypto-cash" for marketing? I mean, if they effectively own the ledger, the coin supply and fix the conversion rate, what's the point?
"I keep hearing about all this Blockchain hype, how do we leverage that?"
This means the company would be able to shut the system down if it found it was being abused."""
Sounds like it's some kind of centrally controlled ledger where no technical purpose is served by a blockchain (if there is even one). So not a "cryptocurrency", then.
They may think this is easier or more fun (probably just more fun) to setup than all reporting to corporate, and no one getting to redeem or trade if their internet to corporate goes down.
Some high-level details: http://www.waveswiki.org/index.php?title=Features#Custom_App...
Whitepaper: https://blog.wavesplatform.com/waves-whitepaper-164dd6ca6a23
I don't own any WAVES: this isn't an endorsement, just figured you guys might want to know how this works "under the hood". Honestly, it seems pretty sketchy. The whitepaper doesn't cite anything other than some github repos and the ethereum whitepaper. There's so many platforms out there that promise they're the best thing since sliced bread: I'd stay away if I were you...
Who could have seen that coming?
In super simplified (edit: and inaccurate) terms, a bunch of WAVES have been specially flagged as WhopperCoins. Any client that receives these specially marked WAVES know that they are WhopperCoins. Even if you could mine WAVES with your GPU (they're PoS not PoW) you wouldn't generate WhopperCoins, because your WAVES won't be specially marked.
This is the basis for how colored coins work [1] and a lot of other token platforms work on similar principles.
Burger King initially controls all 1 billion of the tokens, and is distributing them as part of a rewards program. The only way to get them is to buy food at BK, or to buy it from someone who has some.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins
Edit: the user below me says that WAVES doesn't work like colored coins, but you still aren't able to mine them. I'd delete my post but I made a slick pun and I can't bear to take it down.
Thanks for the clarification, I guess I shouldn't trust wikis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> What is Waves’ advantage over traditional crowdfunding platforms? Waves is a coloured coins blockchain platform with an integrated decentralised exchange. Our unique selling point...
http://www.waveswiki.org/index.php?title=FAQ
Someone needs to consolidate data about these cryptocurrencies in a wiki with the same standards/format as Wikipedia...
Against this backdrop we have poor Teddy who only ever wanted Nandos but his family are die hard Maccabies to the end. And then his favorite player is traded to Liverpool and the dreaded Chippy Skipper's fry up fish and chips chain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government
This doesn't make sense to me. The whole "innovation" of cryptocurrency is that you don't centralize trust in one party. In this case you already need to trust BK to redeem the coin, so what does an untrusted mechanism of exchange actually give you?
This just seems like cashing in on crypto hype.
A that they are having a lot of success i'd say, we are all talking about their little rewards program and discussing whoppers. Brilliant. Bloomberg going to give them a bunch of free advertising with this.
Of course it is. This is a publicity stunt (and hilarious I might add), as Burger King has been known to do in the past. They've had a brilliant marketing team for a long time.
That way, your customers can transfer points with eachother, etc -- then spend them at your restaurant. It does in fact decentralize trust -- the key here is that it's the restaurant trusting the customer, not the other way around.
Each point only gets spent once, and there's a built-in automated mechanism for "cashing in" those points.
I mean, I agree it's probably dumb for hamburger loyalty points. But it makes a ton of sense for hotel/airline points if you build the wallet into your mobile app and allow consumers to transfer points with each other offline. If it's transparent to the user, there's no reason it couldn't work.
All that said, loyalty points have a lot in common with crypto currencies simply from a functional perspective. It's a pretty natural application. You just merge the points back into the blockchain via an app or something. But this way it's secure, auditable and likely costs the company less to operate.
How many other reward systems allow you to transfer points to other people?
It would be fun if you could mine WhopperCoins and such too.
> "There are at present no legal acts that specifically regulate the use of bitcoins in the Russian Federation," but a Russian law firm thinks that using it to buy things there could be illegal given that the Russian ruble is the exclusive means of payment in the Russian Federation per the law. [1]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/31/bitcoins...
Well, if somebody gets wind of somebody having 1m+ of what is effectively cash, that person will likely get raided by somebody anyways. Happens all the time
Why not implement it on a centralised Burger King server ? Why bother with a distributed p2p network, mining, apps, when a simple mysql database plus a php file can achieve the same thing ?
Am I missing something ? If they want crypto so much, just let people withdraw their points in bitcoin..
I can see the point of a generic "FoodCoin", where each restaurant is a miner and the coins can be used to buy food in any other restaurant in the network.. Or is that their ultimate purpose ?
But then it's not truly decentralised, I guess the model would be BurgerKing and a bunch of satellite restaurants using the same coin somehow...
Anyway, don't really see the point of a block chain, beyond hype..
There is exactly 0 reasons why BK needs a coin of their own. It's all about generating hype and trying to cash in on a fad. The worst part is this is the story that will make headlines and will drive up other bullcrap alt-coins and ICOs because "if BK is doing it then surely there are riches to be made!".
It's gross.
On the other hand I expect BK will drop this sometime between 3 months and 5 years from now, and your BK coins will be worthless. 3 months is all the longer they can sustain the hype, 5 years is longest before the costs of maintaining all their mining machines will budget cut. I won't speculate on if there will be a transition plan for whatever replaces it: if you get these coins turn them in quickly.
On the other hand if it is real its interesting because it has a value pegged to a physical good... though it seems unlikely that BK understands cryptocurrency well enough to deal with "unauthorized miners".
Drive-through: I'll take a Whopper with... BOOM. Sniper takes out the civilian for ordering the wrong menu item.
Of course, this gets started in Russia. Next, we'll see Western Union start a 419 coin in Nigeria.