Culture

The device comes with Bitcoin. Real Bitcoin.

If you found your way here, you're probably the kind of person who treats picking a dispensary the way other people treat picking a natural wine. Good. You're the audience. There's one thing worth knowing before anything else, and then we can talk about everything around it.

The device comes with real Bitcoin. In a wallet that's yours, handed over upfront, the second you become a customer. Not points. Not a punch card. Not "earn it back over six months of good behavior." Yours, day one — whether you come back every week or completely ghost us.

That's the whole idea. Everything else — the where, the how, the food near the shops — is the rest of this series. Today, just sit with the part where a loyalty program pays you instead of expiring on you.

Impatient? Here's where we sell it, or read how the whole thing works.

"Upfront" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

Every loyalty pitch you've ever heard has a delay built into it. Buy nine coffees, the tenth is free. Spend $200, get 400 points, redeem them for a $4 credit, watch them expire in March. The reward always sits on the far side of more spending, and the brand holds it the entire way there.

Upfront means before. Before your first session. Before we know anything about you beyond an email address. The Bitcoin lands when you join, and from that moment it's structurally out of our hands — we don't custody it, we can't revoke it, and there's no button in our office labeled "take it back." That's not a promise we're making. It's a capability we deliberately don't have.

Which changes the relationship in a way that took even us a minute to fully absorb: once the reward is yours, the only thing keeping you around is whether the device and the brand keep deserving you. No leash. Just the work.

Why doesn't every brand do this?

Honest answer: because the leash is profitable. Points that expire unused are a quiet revenue line — the industry even has a cheerful word for it, and we wrote a whole piece about it (Why your points expire) because once you see it you can't unsee it.

Giving the reward upfront, in an asset we don't control, means giving up every retention lever the loyalty playbook offers. No expiration nudges. No "your points are about to reset" emails. No devaluation when the finance team needs a good quarter. We kept none of it, on purpose, because the customers we built this for read terms and conditions and would have clocked the trick anyway.

The fine print, in plain English

Since we're the brand that keeps saying "read the fine print," here's ours, unhidden:

• The device is a smart one — Bluetooth and NFC. The NFC is how you claim (tap, open, sign in); the app is where your Bitcoin and session history show up.
• The reward is one-time. Same upfront amount for every customer at the same tier. Using the device more doesn't earn more, and shelving it doesn't lose you anything.
• The app logs your sessions so you can see them. We don't sell that data, and we don't price your reward off it — the reward already happened before there was any data to look at.
• Sold at licensed shops in New York and California. Real shelves, real budtenders, real receipts.

That's the whole document. No asterisks hiding in the footer, because the footer is right here.

Frequently asked questions

Is it actually Bitcoin, or "Bitcoin points"?

Actual Bitcoin, in a wallet tied to your account. Not an internal balance wearing a costume.

What if I never use the device again after buying it?

Then you own a device you didn't use and Bitcoin you fully keep. The reward doesn't care about your attendance.

Do I need to understand crypto to claim it?

No. Email or phone number, one signup, done. The claim guide covers it in about a minute of reading.

Where's the catch?

The catch is on us: we gave up every mechanism brands use to hold customers hostage, so now we have to be good instead. Genuinely, that's the trade.