Junk food meets junk money: KFC starts selling Bitcoin Bucket KFC’s Canadian wing has started selling chicken for Bitcoin. The artery-clogging Bitcoin Bucket “Includes 10 Original Recipe Tenders, Waffle Fries, Med Side, Med Gravy and 2 Dips,” at a cost of however many Bitcoin equates to CA$20. KFC Canada’s page for the promotion helpfully includes live updates of that sum in Bitcoin. …
"On the other hand, I learned something : it costs $50 to make a Bitcoin transaction. "
While I appreciate the point the author is making, that statement is pretty much bollocks.
https://bitcoinfees.info/ will give you a rough estimate, which is about $20 for a rapid transaction. Maybe $10-12 for a slow one. You can make it effectively less if you have multiple transactions to complete at once, since you can do multiple input/output for a single transaction fee.
In general I assume that paying for anything less than a tenner with bitcoin would be a bit bonkers. There's (quite literally) thousands of other crypto currencies that are much better suited to micro transactions, both on speed and cost. Plus services that allow you to pay in one coin and have the receiver get their desired coin.
Why the hell KFC can't offer a payment provider that accepts that, which would actually be useful, rather than a pointless headline grabbing.... oh wait, that's why.
"about $20 for a rapid transaction. Maybe $10-12 for a slow one."
Is that supposed to be better? People are generally used to having transaction fees of $0. Even when using cards which technically have a fee, that's usually eaten by the retailer and not actually passed on to the customer (at least not directly). Complaining that a fee of $50 is "bollocks" because it really only costs $20 is rather missing the point that it costs $20 extra just to order a takeaway.
"There's (quite literally) thousands of other crypto currencies that are much better suited to micro transactions, both on speed and cost... Why the hell KFC can't offer a payment provider that accepts that"
Cash, Visa, Mastercard, probably a variety of other payment providers depending on location. They accept all kinds of payments that process essentially instantly and don't cost significantly more than the transaction itself in additional fees. What they don't offer is options for all the thousands of fake moneys, because they're not complete idiots.
So only 20$ in order to "cut out the 3rd party middleman".
I still haven't figured out why it isn't easier to stick with the middleman. And pay instantly and without any additional costs using my traditional bank payment card and traditional money.
Maybe I am moronic. But I still haven't seen the point in bitcoins as "money".
On the other hand, I learned something : it costs $50 to make a Bitcoin transaction. Well if it cost me that much to use my Visa I'd be using cash all the time.
KFC could switch to only accepting payment in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin transaction fee could rise to £1,000,000 and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to the amount of KFC I consume.
It seems KFC are getting desperate to make money....may be I'm not the only one that craves for their product to go back to the early days when you picked up a piece of chicken and grease ran down your arms and fell off of your elbow. mmmmmm food.
They were the days :)
"... one can fry their own. Easily. And a hell of a lot cheaper. Probably healthier. And still have time to do the clean-up."
Whilst I agree with you, and also as someone who makes their own fried chicken, the point is it's not me doing it. This is the price we pay for convenience.
"100 minutes is enough time for the fire department to take your burnt out body to the morgue after you put too much chicken in the oil."
No, that's not how it works at all, as millions of home cooks world-wide prove every day. Suggestion: Learn to cook. It'll do you a world of good.
"You can't make your own KFC gravy"
I wouldn't if I could. Tasted it once. Once. Never again. Awful, awful stuff.
"as that is made from the drippings of thousands of fried chickens."
So make it yourself. After frying your bird, drain most of the grease, less about a tablespoon (15ml), out of the frying container. Leave the brown crunchy bits (BCBs, or "fond" if you're classically trained). Over medium heat, add about the same amount of flour[0] as there is grease. Stir it in for a couple minutes to remove the raw flavo(u)r from the flour. Add about a cup of milk[1] slowly, stirring constantly to dissolve the BCBs. Bring to a strong simmer/low boil and adjust consistency to suit yourself. Salt & pepper to taste. A little bit of your favo(u)rite herb from the garden at the end will impress your significant other; I usually go all traditional & add thyme with a hint of sage.
HTH.
[0] I use AP, my grandmother swore by Wondra, me DearOldMum uses pastry ...
[1] Can use any stock you have lying around instead of milk.
Bitcoin's utility these days is solely as a store of value or as a gateway crypto used for buying other alt coins.
It's strange to be saying this but the technology has moved on and as Satoshi Nakamoto has chosen to remain anonymous bitcoin has not moved with the times.
There are now a host of technologies which do everything bitcoin does, but faster and cheaper. Bitcoin Cash, Etherium, XRP and IOTA all bringing their own twist on blockchain or distributed ledger.
Bitcoins dominance of the crypto market cap is declining and it would be no surprise to see it knocked off its perch in 2018
I fully expect to see wide spread commercial adoption of these technologies in the coming months and years as they solve real world problems, the 'internet of value' is here to stay.
"He doesn't appear to be making a very good job of it."
Really, who is he then?
The Satoshi Nakamoto who really has that name and is a computer scientist isn't the creator of Bitcoin. The weird Australian guy who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto blatantly isn't.
I fully expect to see wide spread commercial adoption of these technologies in the coming months and years as they solve real world problems, the 'internet of value' is here to stay.
Personally, I don't. All of the financial advisers that I have heard talking about this speak of it as a bubble waiting to burst, and are steering people away from it. When financial professionals have that amount of scepticism then I can't see big corporates in too much a hurry to embrace it.
Most currencies have a government backing of some sort. Historically, the weaker the backing the higher the inflation rate of said currency. Bitcoin is backed by pretty much nothing. There is no government nor body that is behind the value. There are no hard assets behind the value. The fact that zillions of folks invested in a number created by an algorithm strikes me as slightly insane.
If the balloon goes up, I would be heavily invested in ammunition?, food, tools, metals, land, you know, hard assets that are useful for something. When people don't have enough to eat, or shelter from the elements, even paper currencies fall from grace. None the less paper currency with a government (Army, Navy, Infrastructure, etc, etc) behind it generlly still has some value.
Just not seeing bitcoin as other than a novelty. I truly expect to see it crash hard. I could be wrong, and plenty of folks will get rich off it either way . . .
Interesting analogy here.
Currency notes have some elaborate geometrical constructions printed onto them. The idea being that the method of independently constructing that curve is difficult to mimic. The design, and planned obsolescence of such notes by necessity takes into account the likelihood of a counterfeiter coming up with a plausible fake within that timeframe.
There must be a timeframe that would invalidate the value of Bitcoin through shortcuts in generation, or of exploiting vulnerabilties within the blockchain.
BTC will become more centralized the more the blockchain grows. Setting up a full node from scratch already takes a long time and requires more space than casual volunteers will easily commit.
That is a problem with most or all blockchain-based systems. In the end, only specialized banks and mining pools will have the storage and powert to maintain and reboot full nodes.
I was just at a bitcoin meetup where an ex-Princeton professor talked for 45 minutes on all of the structural problems that Bitcoin (and *all* the other crypto schemes) have.
Long story short: Visa processes about 4000 transactions per second with a capacity of 65000 tps. Paypal can do 130 tps or so. Bitcoin and its brethren can only do 7 - and there are *no* fixes for this on the horizon.
And note that this professor was pushing his own blockchain/crypto scheme, so it isn't like he's down on the technology.
It's just chicken, [mostly], not possible to sell out, not to even to the hipsters and the insane at those prices.
So it's Kentucky Fraud Chicken after all....
Damn, hungry now, and I've to shop first, probably end up buying those chicken stick pieces, 6 the size of cheetos in a bag for nearly £2.....
I have to confess to being perplexed by: "The company said it’s sold out of the buckets, and that’s not in the slightest surprising given that Bitcoin is currently rather less convenient than many other currencies"
If demand is low then surely selling out is unlikely? Unless the implication is they never had any to sell?
I am surprised that nobody has made much of the technical issues with Bitcoin. There does not seem to be a way around them except a fork and I don't know what that fork might be.
As of this moment, Bitcoin is still a pretty good store of value. It may continue to rise well beyond this point on that alone. However, it is hardly fit for online transactions at this point and there is no reason to expect that to get better. I was going to qualify that with 'barring a fork', but I have no idea how a fork would cure it. Bitcoin's strength is also its weakness and it may be that there is a fundamental tradeoff for which there is no workaround.
Bitcoin may well stay up there and rise. However, crypto-currencies offering better anonymity and transaction times are bound to rise too.
Long term I expect that Bitcoin will either become a rock-solid store of value like gold or will lose its value entirely. It is a close call, but if I had to bet right now I would bet on it losing its value and a competing currency with better features becoming the equivalent of cash due to predictable value, anonymity and better transaction features. Disclosure: somewhere in the TBs of information on my network there may be a wallet with .05 bitcoin.
Putting on my tin-foil hat I wonder if an unaccountable U.S. government agency with an essentially unlimited black budget has pumped money into Bitcoin to forestall the movement to a currency they can't control and track. Actually, the more you know about this stuff the more promising an investment in tinfoil looks :)
But - top tip here - anything sold by the bucket is probably not being "consumed in moderation', nor is it meant to be.
Most of the comments on this post show how little even the technical community know about this technology and it's practical application.
Bosch are massively into IOTA
XRP is actively being used by Money Gram and 2 other of the top 5 world money transfer businesses.
Tron is being used by the Chinese netflix
Etherium and NEO are piloting commercial applications
This is just the start.
As for all this bubble nonsense - these will be the same people who told you Facebook was overvalued at $38 a share.
If you hate Bitcoin, as many posters express (even the headline is a smear), you have my deepest sympathy for having missed the new worldwide gold rush. Better luck next time.
Memo to KFC: Bitcoin is worldwide. Bring this bucket to the U.S. and I'll treat the whole neighborhood to your deliciousness simply because I can.
Memo to BTC ignoramuses:
1. Write a check for your chicken, and the store has to wait three DAYS for the money to clear, and it could bounce.
2.Use a credit card, and the store has to wait one business day to get your money, and it could be contested up to a month later by just claiming the chicken was bad.
3. Accept BTC and it's irreversible in ten minutes, the moment it goes into "pending" mode. If you want access to the funds quickly, bid high. If you're not in a hurry, bid low. If you don't mind waiting as long as a check would take to clear, bid zero. Again, once it's in "pending" mode, it can't be undone.
Transaction fees are not fixed. Anyone who's ever traded in crypto would know that. I know why you're all angry. You hate feeling stupid. It'll pass.
"Write a check for your chicken, and the store has to wait three DAYS for the money to clear, and it could bounce"
Do people still use cheques in the US?
"Accept BTC and it's irreversible in ten minutes,"
Oh, so no consumer protection then, good to know.
If you want access to the funds quickly, bid high.
Im not going to enter a bidding war to get my chicken faster.
You missed the two more common *existing* and *free* options - Use a debit card or cash.
From the consumers point of view, none of these are actually compelling reasons why he/she should pay by bitcoin.
I believe that in Weimar Germany people became much more numerically literate because of the need to juggle figures at every visit to the shops in order to get the best value for money.
(I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the relevance of the above two sentences to each other).
"hater", Prop. Noun, often used by the under-educated (usually teenagers) in order to attempt to put down actual educated people (usually adults).
Translation of 'hater' into English: "Everybody who doesn't agree with what I have faith in, despite the fact that I (me, personally) actually have faith in the belief of the given faith, and can't actually offer up a real, honest scientific argument confirming it's existence."
Alternative translation: "I hate adults. They don't know anything!".
HTH, HAND.
They aren't accepting bitcoin for anything, just a special product with a limited number available (so they don't get killed by the transaction cost)
I'm sure the bitcoin nuts will try to claim "look regular companies are starting to accept it" but they are not and will not. They just wanted to get some free publicity they wouldn't have got if they did an ordinary cut price special.
The bitcoin conference didn't accept bitcoin, that tells you all you need to know about how useless it is for normal transactions now. Cryptocurrencies may eventually succeed (I think a good use would be micropayments to web sites for viewing so they don't have to fight ad blockers) but bitcoin will not be the one that wins. It has too many problems inherent to its design that make it terrible for being anything but the tulip of the 2010s.
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