“Mining Beer” at Unchain in Hamburg

BY CRYSTAL STRANGER, CO-FOUNDER, PEACOUNTS ON MAY 31ST, 2018 AT 10:00 AM

Crystal Sangar at the Beercoin booth at Unchain in Hamburg, Germany/ Crystal Sangar

Germany is world renowned for beer. Now, it also will be known as the first place you can “mine” for beer.

I sat down today, over a beer, with founder Tobias Meyer and Co-Founder/Developer Christoph Niese to get the lowdown of what this is and how it works.

The token is based on the Ethereum blockchain and the term “mining” is used more in jest than anything else. But this seems to be an idea that will catch the eye of consumers.

This project should be no surprise for crypto enthusiasts, as there was a beer vending machine this year — at Consensus — built by blockchain identity verification company Civic that received a significant amount of media attention.

Although I was at Consensus I did not try out the machine as I was unsure about trading my personal information for a beer. However, it was certainly a clever way of verifying the age of drinkers. Additionally, there was a BEER coin launched last September as a joke. But this token did not catch on in the way other joke coins like Dogecoin and Jesuscoin have caught on. Actually BEER coin may have received the lowest ratings I have ever seen on a token.

So, what is different about this Beercoin that is being launched now?

On the plus side it is always nice to see tokens coming out that have real life consumer-focused use cases. Beercoin potentially could be one of these consumer applications because it is a concept easily understood by consumers. Actually, it reminds me a bit of the McDonalds Monopoly promotions in the past, or the under cap games that companies like Corona used to run. So the concept is not necessarily new, but the use of tokenization is.

QR codes granting recipients tokens that can be used for buying more beer. / Crystal Sangar

Under the beer cap is a QR code that when scanned grants the holder of the beer, in most cases, 3 tokens. However, one in ten thousand beer caps randomly issues 10,000 tokens. If you want to redeem one beer now, the redemption rate is set for 100 tokens, and as such, this would be the equivalent to 100 beers. So, open a beer and you might win enough to buy the whole bar a round.

Meyer and Niese brewed up this idea only six months ago, so this is still in it’s early stages, and today was the first time it was unveiled to the world. If you do not live in Germany you may have a chance to get beercoins early as they are launching an ICO.

Personally I’m not sure about the value of this token from an investment perspective, and I am not the target audience (this was actually my first beer in the four days I’ve been in Germany), so I will not comment further on this question of potential value. But I could see this as an idea that would catch on both with libation enthusiasts and with beer companies that are always looking for ways of engaging customers.

This idea seems like it has a long way to go. It could be expanded on with a more engaging website showing “mining” possibilities, as well as developing more ways of creating value for consumers with the various redemption avenues. And, the iPhone app was not active yet — for me personally — so I could try it out.

Thus, the concept of Beercoin is still just that, a concept, and has a long ways to go, but this is a clever idea that will certainly find a fan club with those beer enthusiasts.

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If you have any questions please feel free to reach out! I’ll be here to answer them.

Crystal Stranger, EA, author of The Small Business Tax Guide (Clear Advantage, 2014), wanted to help her tax clients who struggled when it came to bookkeeping. Looking to help entrepreneurs focus on business instead of finances, she co-founded PeaCounts, an automated accounting software using AI and blockchain. PeaCounts is tokenizing their payroll system using the token PEA with an ICO starting in July.