Thin Mints vs. bitcoins

[mount_oregano]

Little-known fact: Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies can be used as currency among American expatriates. Technically, these Thin Mints are a community currency, an alternative form of exchange among a group with a common bond: in this case, Americans without a Girl Scout troop nearby. Cookie sales begin in one week — without us. Our hearts will ache.


Contrast these cookies with bitcoins, a cryptocurrency, a peer-to-peer payment system using Bitcoin software exchanges on the internet. The facts demonstrate Thin Mints’ superior value:

Bitcoins are a form of public-key cryptography involving alphanumeric strings. Thin Mints are crispy chocolate wafers dipped in a mint chocolaty coating. Chocolate covered chocolate!

Bitcoins can be stolen. We have no Thin Mints, just sweet memories and sad longing, and they can’t take that away from us.

Bitcoins have been used on the black market for illegal drugs and gambling. Thin Mint profits build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.

Bitcoins suffer an extremely volatile exchange rate. Thin Mints, like all Girl Scout Cookies, continuously change and improve. In 2007, two 10-year-old Scouts, Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, began a campaign to make sure that the cookies use only sustainably produced GreenPalm-certified palm oil, protecting both human rights and rain forest habitat for the endangered orangutan; the girls won the United Nations Forest Heroes Award in 2011.

Cookies sold by brave, confident girls, real-life heroes: that’s what we miss. Keep your cryto-cash. Give us minty chocolate wafers! Please.

Comments

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

::snickers::

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This is an awesome entry ♥ I have my sourpuss doubts about the virtues selling Girl Scout cookies instills, but I do love me some thin mints, for sure, and I'll take them over bitcoins any day!

[lanalucy]

I love learning something new about GS. I did not know that about the cookies and the girls and the award. Such a fantastic thing for those girls to think about, and then follow up with doing.

I'd hazard a guess (from being an adult GS, mother of a GS and co-troop leader) that the adults do more work on selling cookies than the girls do. But with the right guidance, girls definitely learn things about themselves and about customer service.

Bring on the Thin Mints!

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

I can't eat Thin Mints anymore, but I know what you mean. I like to support the girls, though, and I often donate instead of buying a box. For a while, in VA, they were sending them to soldiers, so I would give money to that.

(The reason I can't eat Thin Mints anymore is that, to me, a single serving is an entire sleeve. Or maybe a box, with the shrinking size of packages these days...)

I'm wondering whether boxes can be Fed Ex'd to Spain?

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

I have some Thin Mints on order from my niece in Texas. We will hoard them carefully, or maybe use them to purchase goods and services from fellow Americans abroad.