Companies and Brands

Bacon: Is This Warren Buffet's Cryptocurrency Play?

5second / iStock

Mining for cryptocurrency is getting tastier and paying off with a lot less electricity use. Kraft Heinz Co. (NASDAQ: KHC) last week launched a promotion that gives consumers an instant chance to win a “bacoin” currently valued at three slices of the company’s Oscar Mayer bacon.

After all the nasty things that Kraft Heinz’s main shareholder had to say this past weekend about cryptocurrencies, maybe Warren Buffett’s attitude will change if bacoins turn into a productive asset. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-B) owns a stake of about 27% in Kraft Heinz.

As much as the 87-year old Buffett doesn’t like digital currencies, Berkshire Vice-Chair Charlie Munger, who is 94, likes them even less:

To me, it’s just dementia. It’s like somebody else is trading turds and you decide you can’t be left out.

If you happen to win a bacoin, you get a chance to raise the value of the bacoin either by sharing a pre-set message to your Twitter followers or by providing the email addresses of three friends. There are some limitations, so read the rules for yourself.

Sharing more or less replaces crypto-mining with the main difference being that sharing increases the value of the bacoin where mining another crypto-coins may have the opposite effect.

While cleverly packaged, the promotion did not think through the email sharing requirement. Given the recent troubles Facebook has had over sharing not only its users’ data but the data of its users’ friends without permission, asking for friends’ email addresses seems more than a little out of step with consumers’ current expectations of privacy.

Kraft Heinz stock traded up more than 1% Monday morning, at $59.03 in a 52-week range of $54.11 to $93.88. The stock’s 12-month price target is $73.82.

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