Points, rewards and Bitcoiners …

Have you ever driven 2 miles further for groceries to get those Mastercard airline miles at Safeway?

Have you ever purchased more than you need to get the points in order to purchase more of what you don’t need?

Have you ever run out of gas driving past 4 gas stations to the one which gives you those gas miles?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions then you, my friend, are part of this article’s captive audience. Welcome, and we empathize with you — as humans, the feeling of ‘getting something’ has become such a powerful drug that it’s become consumerist culture. Most retail consumers today ask “what do I get in return? … besides the product or service I am purchasing of course!” That’s not meant as a tongue-in-cheek question either! Consumers may easily fall ill to a bout of ‘FOMO’ and have a hard time ensuring they have a finger in every pie the market has to offer. Retailers and merchants on the other side are having a hard time pacifying the average 21st-century consumer needs, let alone focus on the competition and their product of course.

While “loyalty and rewards” remains a science of its own, we’ve been asking the question, “why not issue points, cash-backs, vouchers, discounts etc. in the form of bitcoin payouts instead?” The art of ‘gamification’ is centered around some mechanism for ensuring customer loyalty and retention hence why so many schemes replace a ‘cash-back’ with a ‘product discount.’

Bitcoiners have a track record of backing things they really care about.

Bitcoiners love bitcoin and are very responsive to initiatives that promote the values of bitcoin. This poses the question, “Could you (as a retailer) catch the wave of a growing and highly enthusiastic community of bitcoin loyalists?” Further to that, the question is, “…exactly how fanatic are Bitcoiners?” Here are four examples of bitcoin donations where the community got behind a cause they cared about:

Pineapple Fund — $55 million donated to charities.

We Are All Hodlonaught — Raised over $30k to pay lawyers for fighting a legal case.

Andreas Antonopoulos — Community donated around $1.5 million in bitcoin to inspirational bitcoin speaker.

Defend Crypto — Kik is raising $5m from the crypto community to take on the SEC.

We think Bitcoiners might be persuaded to change to a service provider that offers bitcoin rewards, instead of being constrained by a traditional loyalty and rewards program. To test our curiosity we did a quick 24h poll to see what the community has to say:

This is the first article in a 3-part series in which we unpack what bitcoin payouts at scale would look like, both from a merchant and consumer perspective.