12 ms·
Burger King launches WhopperCoin crypto-cash in Russia
- rlpb 9y ago"""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.
- jrs95 9y agoFound the Pythonista ;)
- true_religion 9y agoIt 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.
- rlpb 9y agoSounds like this could be solved with git and a list of approved public keys. No blockchain required.
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y agoNah, 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).
- rlpb 9y agoPerhaps, but the linked article says the exact opposite - as I quoted.
- duxup 9y agoJust from an insane marketing ploy aspect I kinda like this. It would be fun if you could mine WhopperCoins and such too.
- koolba 9y agoI wonder how long until this gets forked.
- dagenleg 9y agoRussian Burger King division has the wildest marketing department.
- castratikron 9y agoHow can I mine WhopperCoin?
- TremendousJudge 9y agoEat burgers I guess? We're seeing the death of the term cryptocurrency being used somewhat seriously. A new buzzword will have to be invented
- lucb1e 9y agoI'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.
- british_india 9y agoI personally have boycotted Burger King since the day they announced their tax inversion with Tim Horton's. 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.
- odammit 9y agoI personally have boycotted Burger King since tastebuds.
- Waterluvian 9y ago"Tastebuds" sounds like a movie. 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.
- chrisallenlane 9y agoI'd probably watch this. I wouldn't _drive to a theater_ to watch it, but I'd watch it on Netflix.
- DKnoll 9y agoOf all the things you could hate 3G Capital for, relocating Burger King to Canada is the least of them. I don't go to Tim's anymore though either.
- abledon 9y agoI'm reading this as I eat tim Hortons, what other fast food chain offers breakfast eats !?
- moxious 9y ago> 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. is this what a block chain bubble looks like?
- IgorPartola 9y agoThe 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.
- colechristensen 9y agoTide laundry detergent is a popular black market currency http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/ http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
- nwatson 9y agoPrisoners use >> cans of mackerel << as currency: https://www.wired.com/2011/01/st_prisoncurrencies/ https://www.wired.com/2011/01/st_prisoncurrencies/ .
- ryanlol 9y ago>I remember there was something about money laundering through Second Life currency. I don't think this was ever actually a thing, some people just speculated about the possibility.
- odammit 9y agoThis is definitely more efficient than loyalty punch cards. Bravo.
- simias 9y ago>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?
- eterm 9y agoI imagine the conversation went something like this: "I keep hearing about all this Blockchain hype, how do we leverage that?"
- abledon 9y agoIf 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---
- mixedbit 9y agoOr like in this remake of the classic Dilbert about sql database: http://www.sytaylor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dilbert-chain.jpg http://www.sytaylor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dilbert-c...
- corysama 9y agoSome context makes it even funnier. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins
- aqme28 9y agoMaybe they can leverage existing crypto currency software so people can transfer coins.
- ender89 9y agoforget the gold standard, I want the burger standard.
- didsomeonesay 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
- flashdance 9y agoThis 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. Some high-level details: http://www.waveswiki.org/index.php?title=Features#Custom_Application_Tokens_.28CATs.29 http://www.waveswiki.org/index.php?title=Features#Custom_App... Whitepaper: https://blog.wavesplatform.com/waves-whitepaper-164dd6ca6a23 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...
- shepardrtc 9y agoI haven't heard Coinye West in years. Biggest competitor to Dogecoin back in the day, if I remember correctly.
- flashdance 9y ago...until all the developers dumped their coins after they got hit with a lawsuit from Kanye West's lawyers. Who could have seen that coming?
- jnbiche 9y agoCan these be GPU-mined? I really want to mine some WhopperCoins and then go redeem them for a Russian burger.
- flashdance 9y agoI 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. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins 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.
- technofiend 9y agoSounds 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.
- ohyes 9y agoIt's been done! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government
- technofiend 9y agoSure enough and they took it a bit farther with corporate surnames. Nice.
- 659087 9y agoJust when I thought I could escape the endless ads on Reddit by visiting HN for a bit.
- paulgb 9y ago> "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? This just seems like cashing in on crypto hype.
- nkassis 9y ago"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.
- aphextron 9y ago>This just seems like cashing in on crypto hype. 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.
- paulgb 9y agoSure, 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.
- exelius 9y agoActually, 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.
- rokhayakebe 9y agoCrypto-cash or Crypto-loyalty points?
- SurrealSoul 9y agoIs this a Mr. Robot episode?
- crescentfresh 9y agoSo... this is just another loyalty/rewards/points system. That everyone does already. But using "cryptocash". That you can only use at BK. Wow.
- sdiepend 9y agoAren't most loyalty/rewards/points systems tied to one chain/vendor/... ?
- l5870uoo9y 9y agoIs 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] [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/31/bitcoins-legality-around-the-world/#3333af3f3ccd https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/31/bitcoins...
- baybal2 9y agoThere 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
- delegate 9y agoI 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..
- nxsynonym 9y agoLots 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!". It's gross.
- bluGill 9y agoIn 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.
- spiznnx 9y agoI 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.
- avs733 9y agoI'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.
- Keeeeeeeks 9y agoIs this just a vehicle for oligarchs to convert their money into crypto?
- CPLX 9y agoFor the love of god can someone create a FuckedCompany.com 2.0 version for this cryptocurrency insanity? The world needs it.
- patrickmay 9y agoGood idea! We can keep the comments in a blockchain.
- gexla 9y agoI 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.
- gexla 9y agoWhopper: a gross or blatant lie. Of course, this gets started in Russia. Next, we'll see Western Union start a 419 coin in Nigeria.
- matthew349hall 9y agoCould be used in a survival situation
- moomin 9y ago2025 and half of the clientele at Burger King aren't talking to the other half over the future of Whoopercoin, leading to the first time in history "Burger King" appears in the same sentence as "fork".
- jefe_ 9y agoWondering why they structured it the way they did: 1 Ruble spent generates 1 WhopperCoin 1700 WhopperCoin may be redeemed for 1 Whopper It seems the 1700 will need to change with currency / pricing fluctuations. Why not structure it as: 1 Whopper purchased generates .25 WhopperCoin 1 Order of Fries purchased is equivalent to purchasing .3 Whopper (.075 Whopper Coin) etc. 1 WhopperCoin may be redeemed for 1 Whopper They would need to adjust the reward generation rates of non-Whopper items occasionally to accommodate price disparities between various menu options in relation to the Whopper, but they would not need to alter the redeemable value of the WhopperCoin. This would essentially create a currency backed by food, which is interesting.
- flashdance 9y agoIf they implemented it that way, people might hoard WhopperCoins as a hedge against inflation / currency collapse.
- spiznnx 9y agoPlus, as soon as you have 1 coin = 1 burger, you can't ever reduce the value of a coin without upsetting people. People still get mad when you devalue rewards points, but they are less likely to noticed.
- jandrese 9y agoIn order to have proper inflation, 1 coin is now worth one Whopper Jr...
- jmull 9y agoThis article is a perfect fit for reading HN at lunch time.
- quoquoquo 9y agoIf you read the Red Notice by Bill Browder, you will know this to be true about Russia: It's a lost cause. It's a lost cause because the good people in Russia are killed and eliminated with impunity by thugocracy. You can't have a future when everyone in power is stealing from their own people. рыба гниет с головы
- depsypher 9y agoThis is either a sign we've reached peak cryptobubble or a smart way to invest in beef futures. Who can even tell anymore?
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y agoFor clarity -- this is not cryptocash or cryptocurrency. Its is a User Issued Asset (aka token) on the WAVES cryptocurrency blockchain. We typically call these 'cryptoassets' or 'tokens'. You cannot mine these. They are purchased via the WAVES network, in 'BTC' (which is another 'pegged' asset on the WAVES chain). Edit; I bought one whopper coin 3 days ago via WAVES. I paid $0.50USD (majorly overpaid for it!)
- jargon_hater 9y agoWait, so does that mean a whopper's market price is $850 usd on the exchange?
- cgb223 9y agoAnd now we wait for the next version of Cryptowall or Wannacry which will demand payment in tasty, tasty Whoppercoin What a time to be alive
- lemonycracket 9y agoMoney laundering is doublespeak for Financial Surveillance and Censorship (my labour and money is not your business to restrict or control how I spend it). This is the end of government monopoly on currency and breathetaking. HSBC was caught laundering billions of dollars in one of the largest scale terrorist laundering operations ever. Their punishment? Nothing... because it would "shake confidence in banks". Well the people have spoken and blockchain is an unstoppable force. With 0x and liquidity pools for tokens, we will have a centralized barter system that bypasses fiat entirely. THE BLOCKCHAIN INTERPRETS FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE AS DAMAGE AND ROUTES AROUND IT
- elif 9y agoI bet the russia part is to avoid US taxation policies on crypto, which, if i'm not mistaken, would make BK liable for paying taxes on "income" for the dollar-value of their own coins "created" at the time of pre-mine, or require them to know the financial details of someone using them to buy a whopper in NY due to bitlicense anti-laundering laws. corporations have been doing equivalent gift card/promo "pseudo-currency" stuff for a long time, and a bad court decision over this could upend that entire practice. maybe this is a harbinger of the US being left behind in an economic paradigm shift.
- jimjimjim 9y agoShark. Jumped.
- acjohnson55 9y agoSounds like we're only a couple steps away from companies paying their employees in scrip. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
- ransom1538 9y agoMy favorite Burger King stunt was: Delete 10 Of Your Facebook Friends For A Free Whopper It did so well that the FB team actually got involved. I always wondered why apps don't do this to each other. "Delete UBER get 1 Free Lyft Ride!" http://geekologie.com/2009/01/the-burger-king-whopper-sacrif.php http://geekologie.com/2009/01/the-burger-king-whopper-sacrif...
- No1 9y agoE