Feeding animals using elaborate contraptions, that are activated by people sending cryptocurrencies are nothing new. We’ve seen many of these constructions come and go during the last years and the only thing that changed are the animals being fed. Sometimes it’s fish or birds and sometimes it’s even larger animals like sheep.

They all basically work the same way: To feed the animals, one sends a certain amount of crypto to an account which is monitored by a software. Whenever the software detects an incoming transaction with sufficient funds, it will activate the feeder mechanism. This mechanism provides a ration of food to the animals, which are being live-streamed on the internet.

So what’s special about this new bird feeder?

The peculiarity of this new bird feeder, which is located in Slovakia, is that it also operates with NANO and that it is a perfect showcase of the advantages of NANO over other transfer of value cryptocurrencies. It also accepts BTC, LTC and DOGE, but only when using NANO you will be able to witness a near instant reaction on the live-stream.

I’ve tried it myself and it worked like a charm. Just a few seconds after I hit send in my Natrium wallet, the dispenser mechanism released a handful of seeds and I could watch a dozen sparrows start trying to pick them, like there’s no tomorrow. Using BTC or LTC I would have had to wait many minutes until the transaction gets confirmed and the feeder would have been activated. This is not the responsiveness I expect from modern applications. DOGE might be a lot faster than the other two, but still no comparison to the average sub 0.5 second transaction times of NANO.

But speed/responsiveness is not the only advantage that is being showcased by this bird feeder. Besides being much faster than the other cryptocurrencies, NANO transaction are also completely fee-less. This is not a big deal when you transact big amounts of money, but for microtransactions, fees can quickly turn out to be a deal-breaker.

To feed the sparrows, I sent the equivalent of 0.5 USD in NANO. This is minimum amount to activate the seed dispenser. Using BTC would have cost me the 0.5 USD equivalent in BTC plus the fees. Current transaction fees at the time of writing are 0.53 USD to have the transaction mined on the next block (10 minutes). To have the transaction mined within six blocks (1 hour), the fee would still be 0.05 USD. So that’s a 10% fee and one hour of waiting until you can see the seeds fall out of the dispenser on the live-stream - or an incredibly high 106% fee and still 10 minutes of waiting.

Again LTC and DOGE would beat BTC by far. Especially DOGE sports a very low transaction fee of less than 0.01 USD. But no fee at all is still better than even a very small fee.

It is also worth mentioning that Yahoo Finance published an article on the bird feeder and it mentions, that NANO is proving to be far more popular among the bird feeders than the other cryptocurrencies.

Link to the bird feeder live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otpqipL3H8Q

Yahoo Finance Article: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anonymous-youtuber-sets-bitcoin-bird-163244324.html