April Fool’s Day Bitcoin Pranks Round Up

Practical jokers typically plot crazy pranks for April Fool’s Day, which just so happened to be yesterday. As such, since Bitcoin is the new hot topic as of late, there happened to be some funny Bitcoin pranks this year.

It’s Bitcoin Bonanza Time

Bonanza’s Bitcoin prank

On a blog post, Bonanza, an online marketplace, told its users that it would soon be launching its own cryptocurrency. This would be known as “Boncoin” and would be quite similar to the ever popular Bitcoin. Seems like if you can’t go with the flow, create your own.

Adding on to the crazy, Bonanza said that its Boncoin market value would be set to a whopping $900 USD per coin. The company said that this would make Boncoin twice the value of Bitcoin which would give “it a key psychological edge.”

Users who have been part of Bonanza know that its founder has a good sense of humor. This is because Bonanza has been known to pull off April Fool’s Day jokes. Hence, longtime users quickly figured out that this might just be another one of the founder’s practical jokes.

Making it seem like a legit deal, Bonanza posed a question to its users,

“As we prepare our final launch, we’d like to get your feedback. Should we continue to offer Paypal and Amazon Payments for buyers after launching Boncoin, or should we make a clean break from the ‘ordinary’ options and move exclusively to processing transactions in Boncoin?”

Surprisingly, many Bonanza users answered the question, even those who knew that this was part of an April’s Fool Day joke. Some people commented that having different types of payment options was better for buyers, and some said that they wanted Amazon to be kept as a payment method.

At the end of the day, it seems that people would still like being offered different payment methods. Having only one option would limit the way buyers prefer to shop. They’d either be compelled to go with that one option, or choose another place to shop from.

Quartz Using Reader’s Computers to Mine for Bitcoin!

Quartz Bitcoin prank

News website Quartz also had its fun yesterday with a crazy Bitcoin prank. Quartz wrote in a post that it was unveiling a “Bitcoin-based business model” to help their business thrive. This new model would actually use their readers’ computer power to mine for Bitcoin.

Cheekily, Quartz wrote that with only a click of a new bitcoin button on the top of their site, readers could start mining Bitcoin for the news-site. In addition to this, Quartz said that instead of paying to read news on the website, all the viewers had to do was keep reading while their computers did the work for Quartz.

If no one was convinced that Quartz was really trying to get hashing power from their readers, the newsite took it a step further. It tried to justify why it would be better to use Bitcoin rather than other methods of advertising for money. It said on the website,

“We think bitcoin mining is a better model for the future of news than advertising or subscriptions. Instead of obsessing over page views, we’ll measure the hash rate of each article. And rather than lock our journalism behind a paywall, we’ll unlock its revenue potential with cryptography.”

Adding to this, Quartz hilariously said that to understand the details of mining, viewers should read their “By reading this article, you’re mining bitcoins” post which had garnered them one whole satoshi (0.00000001 bitcoin). Apparently it was this experiment that encouraged Quartz to stake its entire business on a Bitcoin mining scheme.

Ending the post, Quartz admits that this was “partially an April Fool’s Day joke.” They don’t really expect to get money out of this and if they do they’ll be donating to charity. Although, we at CoinReport think that this was the coolest prank!

April Fool’s Day Bitcoin Pranks

At the end of it all, both of these pranks turned out to be amusing jokes. But, they do bring up a few interesting points. From the Bonanza Bitcoin prank, it seems that users do not want to be limited to only one payment option. From the Quartz Bitcoin prank, it brings about the question of whether or not it would be okay for websites to ask users for computer hashing power instead of paying with cash. Another notable prank was pulled off by a Bitcoin exchange BTC-e, who had their entire website flipped upside down on April fool’s day!

We hope you had a fun and safe April fool’s day!

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