The burner wallet trials are back at ETHDenver 2020. A radical experiment at the recently concluded ETHDenver showed how cryptocurrency’s mainstream potential still isn’t fully realized. This year’s ETHDenver was focused on how to generate revenues from decentralized finance applications. But exploring the use of cryptocurrency in everyday errands was another hot topic on the table.
This year too, the attendees were given the quintessential conference token called ‘BuffaloDai’ for buying meals at designated food trucks. ‘BuffaloDai’ were loaded on to ‘Burner Wallets’, which the participants can use at their favorite eating joint. QR codes are used to both load money into the wallet and also for making purchases. The burner wallet trials yielded mixed results.
ETHDenver 2020 burner wallet trials yield mixed results
The idea of using ‘burner wallets’ for payment at food trucks was conceived to showcase the everyday potential of cryptocurrencies. When people can use digital tokens for the simplest of daily tasks, that’s when cryptocurrencies become truly useful. A miniature pop-up economy in the form of food trucks on the ETHDenver event can help bring more small merchants on board.
The same experiment performed decently last year. However, this year’s ‘BuffaloDai’ experiment was tuned to perform more functions and was rather complex. Unlike last year when private keys were stored locally, security quotient was high this year. The experiment also studied the security vulnerabilities of tiny pop-up economies.
ETHDenver 2020 burner wallet trials featured two tokens. The BuffaloDai was meant for purchases at food trucks while XP was meant for interacting with sponsors. The same wallet acts as a DAO gateway that determines the hackathon winner. This year the burner wallet became a vital part of the whole event tying together various elements and binding the thirteen hundred plus attendees.
Can you buy lunch with cryptocurrencies?
The questions remain – are cryptocurrencies mature enough to be used in daily activities? The experiment showed how it was very easy to load the burner wallets, but users faced hassles during the actual payment. Many vendors complained about how many transactions took excessive time to process, while many were rejected altogether.
Some food truck vendors wrote down transaction numbers to account for the lost transactions. Technically, there was a delay in the remote procedure calls that led to failure in transaction processing. Finally, the results of the burner wallet trials are a key takeaway for crypto enthusiasts who wish to set up small payment systems.
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