Bitcoin. You used to get it for free, back in the day. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did we throw out back when Bitcoin was just an expensive and slow way to buy mail-order beef jerky? These days nobody would ever just give it away.
Wait, we’re hearing some insane news. MyWhoosh has entered with a proposition: ride your bike, find a digital gate, and win actual Bitcoin. Does this make us like MyWhoosh less? Yes, actually. But maybe it makes YOU want to ride it?
MyWhoosh is the UAE’s free-to-use answer to Zwift, and its used its deep pockets to launch a new monthly event called the “MyWhoosh Treasure Hunt.”
The pitch is simple. Instead of smashing your lactate threshold to win a water bottle at your local masters crit series, you can now casually pedal around a virtual world looking for a “Treasure Gate.”
The Loot: 1/12th of a Coin
The prize pot for each monthly event is fixed at 1/12th of a Bitcoin. That doesn’t sound much. It’s probably like 20 million dollars or something though.
Let’s take a big sip of water and type it into a currency exchange. Oh, it’s only like $8,000. We’ll spray water all over our keyboard anyway, but it’s hardly a life changing sum is it.
The prize isn’t winner-takes-all. The 1/12th BTC is split equally among every single rider who finds the gate within the one-hour time limit.
If ten people find it? You just made a cool $800. If 2,000 people find it? Congratulations, you just earned $4.
The Rules of the Hunt
They aren’t just letting any bot with a glittery avatar roll up and collect satoshis. They have implemented a surprisingly strict set of anti-cheat verification rules for what is essentially an Easter Egg hunt:
- Smart Trainer
- Heart Rate Monitor
- You must have ridden at least 60km on the platform in the 7 days prior to the event
The “Infinite Money Glitch” Continues
This move is perfectly on-brand for MyWhoosh, a company that seems determined to bludgeon the virtual cycling market into submission with a sack of cash.
They have already hosted a $1 million prize pool championship and offer arguably the most lucrative weekly racing series in the world with the Sunday Race Club. Tossing a fraction of a Bitcoin at the casual userbase is just another way to get people to log in and look at the scenery.
The first hunt took place on January 10, but MyWhoosh says this will be a monthly occurrence. So, if you missed out on your $4 windfall this weekend, you can try again in February.
Just make sure you don’t spend it all on a single energy gel.