From Ars Technica:
Press release: “Eating a burger is now a way to mine for cryptocoins.”
The stock market loves blockchains. Last month, the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranded itself as Long Blockchain and saw its stock price triple. On Tuesday, Chanticleer Holdings, the parent company of Hooters, saw its stock soar by 50 percent after the company announced that it would be moving its reward programs to the blockchain.
"Eating a burger is now a way to mine for cryptocoins," said Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity, the company that's helping Chanticleer jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. "Every meal enjoyed at any Chanticleer Holdings brand will accrue currency for the consumer that can be used for future meals or traded with other consumers."
Chanticleer Holdings owns a number of different brands, most of them burger-related. These include Little Big Burger in the Northwest, American Burger Co. on the East Coast, and the national BGR chain. Also Hooters, whose rewards program is called HootClub.
Evidently, the stock market believes that putting these restaurants' reward programs on the blockchain raises their value by around 50 percent.
What's the advantage of blockchain-based rewards?
"Mobivity Merit is real cryptocurrency, leveraging the same infrastructure and principles of bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, litecoin," Chanticleer CEO Michael Pruitt says in the company's press release. Rather than being locked into one specific rewards program, customers will be able to transfer their reward points across multiple restaurants. Meanwhile, the Mobivity blockchain will help companies track their customers' preferences, allowing them to provide more personalized service.
"Each brand owns the data about [its] interactions with a consumer, but the consumer owns the data about ALL of their transactions across all brands, stored in the distributed ledger of blockchain technology," according to the company statement.Attractive as HootClub membership sounds, I'm not really much of a joiner.
Chanticleer expects to roll out the technology across all of its restaurant brands before the end of 2018....MORE
I am however, reminded of this post from 2008:
Bill Gate's and the Retirement Planning Team
I'm not sure who the guy in the red sweater is, probably an actuary
or something.
Last reprised in 2011's "Bill Gates’ Children Mock Him With ‘Billionaire’ Song".