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Oscar Mayer bacoin cryptocurrency is way tastier than bitcoin

Meat the only cryptocurrency that really lets you bring home the bacon. But watch out for pigpockets and ham-burglars.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
2 min read

Thinking you should really jump into bitcoin, but find it so complicated it fries your brain cells? Turn to a tastier alternative: bacoin.

On Monday (which was April 30, and not, we should note, April Fools' Day), meat company Oscar Mayer released a statement announcing bacoin, a "currency" that can be redeemed for packs of bacon. You may or may not win any. Like many things about cryptocurrency , it's a gamble.

I signed up for the promotion on Oscar Mayer's website, and was told the current value of Bacoin is one Bacoin to 11 strips of real bacon. The bacoins supposedly go up in value as awareness of them increases, so social-media sharing increases its value. (This is kind of a brilliant promotional move on OM's part.) 

More digital dollars

It's free to sign up, but apparently I didn't win, because I was taken to a screen that said "Bummer! No luck on the yield today. Try again tomorrow."

I honestly don't understand bacoin any better than I do bitcoin, but apparently you can enter every day through May 14 for a chance to win. If you do, you then monitor the value of bacoin via the site (in the time it took me to write this, it jumped from 11 slices to 14) and decide when to cash out. Then I guess they email you a coupon for free bacon? Or if it went up a lot, maybe they'll just send you a whole pig in the mail? (Probably not that last one.)

If you'd like to bring home the bacoin yourself, hoof it on over to OscarMayerBacoin.com.