Originally Posted by
sdsearch
Read the T&Cs of your miles programs carefully. They usually explain somewhere that the airline, not you, owns all of your miles. (That's why if they feel you've defrauded them, they can take away all of your miles, including ones you "bought"!)
Why should an airline take miles that they own and turn them into cryptocurrency that they don't own?
What's in it
for them?
I don't disagree with you from the airline's standpoint at all. All I'm saying is that eventually all value will end up being virtual, and by that very nature, all value will be freely exchangeable and transferable. Anything that does not make that migration will be deemed worthless. Clearly, this is a threat to centralized loyalty programs that can freely devalue a point/redemption value at their leisure, but the whole threat of cryptocurrency is that even sovereign governments/bodies no longer have the power to devalue fiat on a whim. From a market cap importance perspective, loyalty programs are further down the list of what has widespread impact, but it's still a vision of the future worth thinking about.