Madone59

Goodbye CC thread

Catweazle

Well if DL miles are worth the equivalent of QFF points when it comes to non-flight redemptions in the online store, then it won't be much of an improvement. A toaster can be 30k to redeem, so imagine how much an M16 would be, let alone a pack of boutique 'cookies'... :-P

kimikoftokyo

I just bought my week's hotel stay in Japan with bitcoin via Expedia. I will be honest, a tier move has no worries for me at the moment. I bet there will be a whole bunch of blackout dates and such, but hey let's go for a ride and see what happens.

c1ue

The bitcoin bubble is just that.
A few data points to consider:
1) bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are bruited as better because supposedly the middlemen are disintermediated. Yet a bitcoin transaction costs $20 to $70. This very effectively makes normal transactions too expensive.
2) bitcoin has a transaction per second (tps) worldwide of 7. To put this in perspective, visa processes around 4000 tps with a maximum capacity of around 65000 tps. Paypal has 130+ tps. The notion that any crypto currency can handle real world, worldwide everyday use is...very unclear.
3) 1 in 3 major cryptocurrency exchanges has been hacked, the latest last week to the tune of $500m. It is far from clear any of these organizations have the expertise to manage and secure any significant store of value.
4) I saw a report not long ago that 1 in 7 cryptocurrency ever existent has been stolen. I'm not sure that's correct, but the absolute dollar value is unquestionably enormous. More importantly, in such cases, the victims have no recourse. It is difficult to even prove theft since the transactions are not legally documented or regulated in any way. The flip side of freedom.

oopl

How timely.

Singapore Airlines to Launch Blockchain-Based Loyalty Wallet

https://www.coindesk.com/singapore-a...oyalty-wallet/

sbm12

Yes, SQ announced yesterday that it would pilot a private blockchain based "digital wallet" for the KrisFlyer program. What it failed to identify was any justification for choosing to believe that:
1) The program is not already digital today (hint: it is);
2) The integration of specific vendors and customers is somehow eased by a technology platform designed for anonymity and broadly distributed participation rather than a centralized solution;
3) The operating costs of the new solution will be lower than existing technologies or that the development costs will be earned back in any manner.

This is buzzword BS, not a legit play to deliver value to either the program nor its members.

(Link to a story I wrote; you've been warned.)

aidano

mflat

The current state of Cryptocurrencies is that of a technology that is still immature, due to un-user friendly tooling and a high knowledge barrier of entry. Think of the dial-up internet pre-AOL.

This industry will mature. I think frequent flyer miles as a crypto-token makes absolute sense. This will intersect with the greater cryptocurrency world once concepts like decentralised exchanges and atomic swaps take hold. Imagine having a free-market exchange system for flying-tokens that doesn't rely on a central body or broker. Anyone want to trade 10 Avios for my 5 Starwood points? This could happen in the future for free, anonymously, and without any fear of hacking as it becomes purely peer-to-peer.

Or does anyone want to cash-in their flying-token for a cryptocurrency? Being able to freely swap flying-tokens for cryptocurrencies will completely change the value and market demands for each program.

thefareguru

I've traded stocks and commodities since 1963.

Many of these remind me of 'penny stocks' that were selling moose pasture. Their trading patterns suggest this. Lots of scummy people are now involved. When you see the price of one of these double in price with a total trading volume of say $10,000 dollars, that tells you that the market is too thin and that there would be no support when it should fall. And there is no stock exchange regulator to halt the trading.

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?

mflat

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.

mflat

Completely agree. The whole crypto market is full of froth, similar to the dotcom environment where yahoo was worth more than Google, and Pets.com was the IPO that was all the rage. Just don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a lot in this space that's revolutionary and will stick for decades/centuries to come.

sdsearch

I've never seen an airline devalue as much as quickly as Bitcoin sank from its highs a month or so ago. So there is big devaluation possible in the cryptocurrenices market also, it's just that the cryptocurrencies devaluations are due to market forces (which are not at all easier to predict that what an airline will do!), as opposed to someone making a decision to devalue a currency they have complete control over (ie, one which is not traded on an open market at all0.

So while the typical airline miles have close to zero chance of steadily accumulating in value like the S&P 500 does (based on history), they also tend to devaluate at gradual pace, while unstable currencies can "crash" in a way that typical airline miles rarely do (unless the airline goes out of business with no buyers). Of course, as with all investments, if you can diversify, that's safer. (In the case of airline programs, diversification -- especially across multiple alliances -- may also make it easier to find availability more often, compared to only holding one airline's miles.)

Catweazle

A news article on this subject published just the other day. Is Qantas' frequent flyer program a cryptocurrency in the making?

I'm still not taken lol Perhaps I'm just too old fashioned at this point in time!

sdsearch

That article gets its facts wrong, so I question its assumptions and predictions too.

It claims that KrsiFlyer is becoming a cryptocurrecny, but the article that it links to (when saying that) says only that KrisFlyer has a private blockchain and it's only used for redeeming KrisFlyer miles on the ground at retail merchants, it's not used overall for earning and redeeming for airline flights. So it's not all of KrisFlyer that become a cryptocurrency, it's a block-chain (the same technology used in cryptocurrency) being used in a different way for a new purpose.

Just because something uses blockchain technology for one aspect, that doesn't mean the whole thing is cryptocurrency! Blockchains are used in way more than cryptocurrencies, and it's silly to assume that just because a miles or points program uses blockchains for something that it's turned into a cyrptoccurrecy, in the sense that the term "cryptocurrency" is typically used to describe openly-traded currencies using blockchains.

So miles and points programs perhaps using blockchains more in the future for something? Sure! It's basically a more-secure technology for certain things. But airlines and hotels giving up control of them to make them openly-traded cryptocurrenices? I doubt it.

Of course, since no one stopped Capital One for calling their cashback points "miles", someone independent of airlines and hotels may someday claim to create an independent cyrptocurrency they'll call "miles". But they wouldn't be "miles" any more than Capital One "miles" are.

How many more silly articles are we going have that assume that anything using a blockchain is a cryptocurrency?