Cryptomiles
 

How is this any different from the way it works now, other than the addition of the "crypto" buzzword?

Blockchain and loyalty programs?

Stay tuned......

If I can actually redeem DL miles for drugs or guns in this future utopia, that might be an improvement from Skymiles today. @:-)

It is 2018 after all.... amazing to see what happened to Kodak's share price from their Cyrpto announcement this week

My new retirement plan. CPRichCoin IPO next month.

The joke/parody Dogecoin is now valued at >$1B. (I can't say "worth" that).

I’m actually surprised there isn’t more overlap between the miles community and the crypto community. Or is there? How many bitcoin millionaires have been lurking on here for years???

Either way, I did actually find a few alt coins that are marketed as decentralized loyalty programs but real mainstream adoption will only come from either a big airline, hotel, bank, or ecommerce co adoption their own or partnering with one of them...

Mostly among a (very small?) subset of the MSing crowd. See these recent threads in the Manufactured Spending forum:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manu...urrencies.html

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manu...-cc-churn.html

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manu...s-bitcoin.html

But relatively few users participating in each of these threads (the "busiest" thread of those got 34 posts in about half a year), and not all positive to the concept.

And keep in mind that MSing itself is but a subset of the miles/points game. (Many churners, for example, don't bother with "true" MSing, because they are too "busy" churning. And then there are the many others who didn't get into either MSing or churning, because they're just too busy flying or staying in hotels or whatever.)

Hmm... I suspect crypto and FT miles are not exactly compatible, or at least, you wouldn't want that. The beauty of miles and points is that there are inherent inefficiencies in different programs, which is great for those looking to maximize redemption.

If it is all decentralized, and information is perfect, we'll essentially get all the Deltas/United/WN/Accor redemptions. Is that what you truly want?

I MS by buying crypto with my CCs, and have gotten into crypto-trading. Crypto-trading doesn't sleep, so very little FT time these days.

Some hotels have started taking crypto currency as payments. Who know, maybe airlines will too.

This is one of the most hyped ICOs right now -> https://www.beetoken.com/

Basically decentralized AirBnB with no fees.

How would cryptomiles work? How do you know how many you earn, or how many it costs to redeem, when prices change constantly for bitcoin?
Would it take a day to make a booking using these cryptomiles?

FWIW, the trades shows/conferences around loyalty that I've attended in the past 18 months have all talked about it. None of them know what they're doing with it or why, but they're all talking about it.

As for what to use it for or why, the idea is a decentralized ledger, not that the points vary in value or such. But it is also an incredibly inefficient way to run a system that, by its very nature, is centralized. Putting the account balance ledger onto a blockchain doesn't deliver any value to the consumer nor the company.

EZToken (https://ico.ezpos.io/) tries to solve that problem...

Very poor marking IMHO. It says it's "the crypto equivalent to skymiles". Well, isn't that like saying it's a useless currency? :confused: :D

Goodbye CC thread :D

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

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.

Crypto/blockchain inherently a bad setup
 

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.

How timely.

Singapore Airlines to Launch Blockchain-Based Loyalty Wallet

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

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.)

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.

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.

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? :confused: What's in it for them? :confused:

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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?

Far more than we have fingers and toes to count them on. :rolleyes:

A couple notes:

1) A bank account breach for a personal/consumer account is protected - your actual out of pocket loss should have been zero/minimal. Protections for cryptocurrency = zero.
2) A bitcoin transaction actually costs more like $3000 - that's how much bitcoin is being "fiat created" to compensate the miners. The $20-$70 is closer to what the electricity cost per transaction is. Interestingly, the crypto supply has increased roughly 15% in the past year due to mining - which is a far greater increase, on an annualized basis, than almost any fiat currency.

1) Your bank accounts are not protected from the IRS and/or other Governmental Agencies. They can freeze and seize your assets on the flip of a dime.

2) Most cryptos will be out of biz in the future. You're better off looking at the pioneers which will still be around in 5 years. How much did BTC's supply increase in 2018?

I would trust more any mileage program that is related to blockchain.

For example United Miles but then actually not miles but actually to be coins.

Blockchain is only a technology. It is not related to currency except in certain specific implementations like its most famous implementation, Bitcoin. But in that case it's only the implementation of blockchain, not blockchain itself, which makes it be about coins. So ti would still be miles, not coins, if United Mileage Plus changed nothing other than the technology to blockchain.