Greetings dead-eyed Tesla people who are still working there for some reason,

Based on what I’m seeing in the news, it’s become painfully apparent that your CEO, Elon “Mush” Musk, has joined Gen Z in the so-called “quiet quitting” trend. Just like his whole career, he’s just gonna adopt something that’s already been happening for years and then tell people he invented it.

Rather than perform the job he’s not qualified to do at Tesla, he has appointed himself for a job he’s not qualified to do for the government – in an as yet nonexistent agency. Despite his baffling record of failing upward, considering the incoming administration, this will most likely work out for him. I know, I can’t believe it either.

Anyhoo, you’re clearly in need of a new CEO, so I am gallantly stepping in to take the job – and, no, you don’t have any say in the matter.

Why me? Where to start?

• I am sane and self-possessed – or at least as much as can be expected after all the shit I’ve been through.
• I routinely interact with ordinary humans and I know their ways. I’m aware that your market share of that demographic has plummeted, but I think I can dramatically turn that around by looking and behaving normally. Sure, “normal” behavior is subjective, but I think we can all agree that a 100% success rate in NOT performing public Nazi salutes qualifies as “normal.”
• I have never done ketamine, though, in fairness, I hear it’s quite fun.
• I will never tell crucial Tesla partners and stakeholders to go fuck themselves and then act surprised (and litigious) when they get offended.
• I promise to never completely abandon my core job duties as Tesla’s CEO to do shit like buy a thriving social media platform and then run it into the ground or destabilize European politics during breaks in 10-hour Diablo IV marathons.
• Did I mention that I’m sane? I cannot stress this enough. I realize you’ve likely forgotten what it’s like to have a sane person in charge, so you’ll just have to take my word that it slaps.
• I will literally work for half of Elon’s salary. Instead of $101 billion, I will humbly and reasonably accept a mere $50.5 billion.

Once you’ve deposited the $50.5 billion into my checking account, I suppose I should put on pants, get on the private jet you give me, and fly in for a tour of the Austin corporate headquarters. Maybe I’ll even meet a few people whose names I will instantly forget. But please keep the tour and meet-and-greets to three hours or less, because there’s no way in fuck I’m spending the night in Texas.

Also, my private jet MUST have single-origin chocolate onboard. This is nonnegotiable. Oh, and ginger ale.

You may be thinking to yourself, “This rando can’t just walk in here and take over,” but that’s some early-2010s thinking right there. The simulation we’re living in is so glitched out right now that stuff like this is increasingly normal. And before you embarrass yourselves by saying something hilarious like this is illegal, you should know that legality has nothing to do with it. As the news over the past decade has clearly communicated, crime is no longer illegal as long as you have the right PR spin.

Yes, Elon super-fans, A.K.A. “Mush Munchers,” might be pissy about me being named CEO for a few news cycles, but then they’ll just move on to the next thing and completely forget about it. Assuming a Friday afternoon news dump announcement, it’ll be a long weekend for the Tesla media folks, but everything should be business as usual by Tuesday at the latest. And by “business as usual,” I mean having a CEO that doesn’t do a damn thing, naturally.

That said, if you’d like to exercise the imaginary agency you think you still have and decide I’m not suitable for a job I’ve never done (like that’s ever stopped you before), I’ll just take a page out of Elon’s book and name myself CEO of a subsidiary that doesn’t exist and no one asked for. Is Telsa Unicycles taken? Either way, you should prepare an office for me. I’ll never come into the office, obviously, because again, Texas, but I like knowing it’s there.

In closing, you’re welcome. With the one-two combo of abandoning Elon and me binge-watching TV all day, I believe I can turn your revenue streams around and have the company thriving by summer.

Now that the UnitedHealthcare guy is in custody and the bizarre celebration of murder has died down, I’d like to talk about ERISA (long-term disability benefits) denials and the horrifying lengths insurance providers will go to deny people lifesaving care, while raking in billions in profit each year.

Over the past two years, while writing legal content for FindLaw, one of my monthly tasks was to find some of the most egregious court cases involving providers spending vast sums of money to avoid paying benefits to seriously sick and injured people.

In short, I’ve seen some shit, man. Here’s just a sampling:

Empathy does not compute

Some insurance providers, like Prudential and Cigna, are using AI to bulk-reject claim applications at a rate of five per second. A human eye never sees these. Any claim touched by AI should be regarded with maximum suspicion.

Claims are commonly denied for no discernible reason

Denying benefits for no reason is a common strategy in insurance provider playbooks. A KFF Health News study revealed only one person submits an appeal for every 500 claims rejected by ACA plan providers. (I went through this exact nightmare myself. I appealed, twice, and was still unsuccessful.) Since so few people bother to challenge benefits denials, arbitrary denials have proven to be a financially shrewd tactic.

UnitedHealthcare really does suck

This story is too long to quickly summarize here, but it’s worth a read just to get a sense of how coordinated insurance companies are, up to the highest levels, when it comes to denying their paying customers life-saving care.

You may be under surveillance

Insurance companies routinely investigate customers who have submitted claims to see if they do anything that might suggest they’re not disabled after all. This includes following and taking videos of people in public places and scouring their social feeds. They’ll follow people into restaurants, parties and even church. They are only prohibited from surveiling people in their homes and at work.

A denial addressed to a newborn baby

Speaking of KFF Health News, much like my monthly assignment to find the worst claim denial court cases, KFF and NPR collaborate on a “Bill of the Month” feature, which rehashes the most ridiculous insurance claim denials.

In one segment, a provider’s denial letter, addressed directly to a newborn baby, explained that they would not pay for the baby’s fourth day in the neonatal ICU because it was breathing on its own and drinking milk from a bottle. The implication was that the baby didn’t read its policy closely enough.

Insurance staff doctors are… not good

Insurance provider staff doctors, the ones in charge of approving or denying claims, are often hair-raisingly unqualified. I’ve seen cases with reviewing doctors who hadn’t treated an actual patient in more than a decade, doctors that the courts previously found to be not credible, and doctors making diagnoses in fields of medicine they had never studied or practiced.

These same doctors also routinely override the notes and recommendations of doctors that, you know, actually treated the patient. These fan fiction diagnoses do not play well in court. Again, ALWAYS APPEAL.

Nor are their lawyers

Insurance provider lawyers are sometimes hilariously incompetent. To be fair, they are often in the position of defending the indefensible, which would make anyone look like a galloping ding dong in court. In any case, it’s highly unlikely that a team of the best lawyers that money can buy will be grilling you on the stand.

If it quacks like a duck…

If a benefits denial seems absurd, then it’s probably absurd and it should be challenged. Don’t let providers gaslight you into thinking you’re simply not smart enough to understand the legalese in the policy. Appeal any and all denials. See above.

There’s (usually) no need to rush an appeal

Yes, having your only financial lifeline cut off is panic attack material. But a rushed appeal will mostly likely not help your situation. Typically, people have 180 days to submit an appeal, unless they give you a shorter deadline. You only get one appeal before it turns into a court drama, so use that time wisely.

You want to carefully, comprehensively review your claim and denial. Insufficient or incomplete paperwork is one of the most common reasons for benefit denials, and you cannot introduce evidence in court that wasn’t already in the appeal, so thoroughness will be key.

Make sure you have a firm understanding of why you were denied and then collect every scrap of paper and piece of supporting evidence you can find. There’s no such thing as too much evidence (probably). You want to thoroughly rebut every point in the denial letter. Your doctor can help with this.

If you don’t have it already, request a copy of your full claim file. The insurance company must provide this by law.

Finally, it’s going to be the worst beach read of your life, but reread your entire policy. Read it twice for good measure and use a highlighter liberally to flag the important parts. These things are intentionally written to be as confusing and impenetrable as possible, so you’ll need to focus up.

It’s not required, but enlisting an ERISA attorney is strongly recommended. They can do all of this faster and more thoroughly than you can, especially if your disability has a cognitive component.

Et tu Social Security?

Due to new quotas, Social Security disability claim rejection rates are at an all-time high. Courts are finding fault in six out of every 10 denials. The rejection quotas are an over-correction that resulted from a 2012 case when a Kentucky lawyer ran a disability scheme that defrauded taxpayers for almost $600 million. (Why is it always a rich, white guy ruining things for the rest of us?)

This renewed oversight got worse during the first Trump presidency, when tight-fisted political appointees started firing judges with a record of high claim approvals. The other judges quickly fell in line.

The reason I mention this is because already having an approved Social Security Disability claim can force an insurance provider’s hand into approving your claim without a courtroom showdown. If the insurance provider is bold enough or dumb enough to deny a claim with SSDI backing, they aren’t going to last five minutes in even the most conservative court.

Lawyers are the unlikely heroes in these cases

Talk to a lawyer. Many of them don’t charge a fee unless you win your appeal. Sure, they get some of your payout, but that’s better than no payout at all. And boy do they LOVE beating insurance companies.

Be careful what you sign during an ongoing appeal

We absentmindedly sign user agreements and such almost every day. Do not do this during a long-term disability case. I wrote about one situation when a plaintiff signed an employment separation agreement, including compensation, without carefully reviewing its contents. Her employer assured her that the agreement wouldn’t affect her long-term disability appeal. They straight up lied – and she lost her appeal, worth $1.2 million.

Avoid Medicare Advantage at all costs

If you hear about any of your older relatives thinking about enrolling in “Medicare Advantage,” tackle them to the ground. It’s a scam that actually un-enrolls them from Medicare and hands them off to private insurers with only a fraction of Medicare’s coverage and a squillion restrictions. Even worse, once someone leaves Medicare for a private insurer, they may never be able to go back.

I’ve spent a lot of time visiting a family member in the hospital this past month, so I’ve seen numerous Medicare Advantage commercials on CNN. Disingenuous talking points, meant to conceal the true nature of these privatized programs, include terms like “consumer choice,” “competitive prices,” “empowering shoppers,” and “encouraging innovation.” Sometimes these commercials are several minutes long. I have no idea how this is legal. The whole Medicare Advantage concept appears to be the brainchild of the hated Heritage Foundation.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), proposed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will almost definitely encourage Medicare Advantage to cut spending and possibly even eliminate actual Medicare.

Sick and injured former NFL players are being aggressively screwed

The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan spends most of its time plotting ways to deny benefits to former players with traumatic brain injuries and other debilitating conditions. Google “Michael Cloud v. NFL Player Retirement Plan” or read my posts on the subject here, here and here.

On a related note, the Fifth Circuit Court has devolved into a GOP tool.

Don’t quit your job due to a disability right away

No matter how disabled and incapacitated you are, do not quit your job until AFTER you apply for long-term disability benefits.

Quitting before you apply will make your benefits case far more difficult. But also, don’t be a hero and keep working through the pain while you apply for benefits, because the insurance company will argue that if you’re still working, you must be fine.

“Denial nurse” is a job title now

Insurers have become so brazen with their snap claim rejections, that a former Medicaid worker in California, tasked with upholding preliminary rejections from thousands of claims, was given the job title “denial nurse.”

Again, this is just a sampling from my two-year effort to track down the worst of the worst long-term disability insurance denials. Not all claims are a nightmare, but a substantial portion are, and untold millions of claims never got to the nightmare stage because the customer didn’t appeal. It’s best to go into these situations with the mindset that your insurance provider is deliberately, enthusiastically trying to deny your rightful disability claim, so you’re mentally prepared for an appeal and possibly a court battle.

Friends, this poor, neglected, repeatedly rebooted and then abandoned blog is a certified mess. But! It still comes in handy for days like today.

I’m thrilled beyond words, except for these words here, to announce the release of my first work of long-form fiction, Saving the World on $50 a Day!

Synopsis:

After a teensy, weensy mistake on a short-term mission, where only five houses burned down, Jay is sent on a punitive two-year, deep cover assignment in Romania. Jay’s cover story, crusty guidebook author, adds many insults to injury, but Jay will guidebook author the hell out of this assignment to get back to his comfy short-term ops job in Langley where they have air conditioning and single-origin chocolate.

Then Jay stumbles into the late stages of a billionaire terrorist’s audacious plan, only slightly more plausible than the plot of Moonraker, to reshape the planet’s power dynamics in his favor. With the help of unlikely accomplices—like the Avengers, if they didn’t have powers or reasonable fitness—Jay intends to save the world before he’s fired for too many missed deadlines.

I’ve always thought it would be amusing to shove a random person into the role of travel guidebook author to see how they’d do. Though I’m convinced this would make an excellent reality show, no one has shown any interest, so I decided to do it myself with an imaginary person.

I drew directly from my years of frustrations and near-nervous breakdowns as a guidebook author to enrich the story, putting Jay through needless hell while he attempted to go through the motions of the job. It was super fun!

Please buy the book and leave an Amazon review, so I can justify writing more stories about Jay.

Happy World Dracula Day (May 26th) to those who celebrate!

On this most solemn of occasions, isn’t it time you learned the horrifying, true history of Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula, who somehow managed to be a psychopath and a national hero?

(Hint: The answer is “yes.”)

Buy or gift Backpacking with Dracula, my laugh-out-loud deep dive into the life of the real Dracula, augmented with travelogue vignettes of my time living and traveling as a Lonely Planet guidebook author in his home, modern day Romania.

Not convinced? Check out this new trailer for the book and read some of the 69 (nice) reviews on Amazon, where the book enjoys a 4.6 out of 5 star rating.

https://youtu.be/yLuWXq6ibL4

I’m naturally a suspicious person. I like my paranoia like I like my jalapenos: Just enough to burn a little. So, when a buddy told me about something called “Coin Hunt World”, all my scam alarms rang. Free cryptocurrency to play the equivalent of Pokemon Go? There’s no way that’s possible.

And what, my regular readers must be thinking, does this have to do with travel? Keep reading.

I’m more than two weeks into this little exercise now. I’m happy – and honestly a little surprised – to report that the pitch is accurate. Earn crypto while playing an entertaining game. In fact, as the next 2,000 words will attest, I’m a little over-the-top obsessed with it.

There are three main perks to playing Coin Hunt World:

1. TONS of walking and some biking (exercise!)
2. A slow trickle of cryptocurrency earnings
3. Like Pokemon Go, the Coin Hunt World community on Discord is full of good vibes and camaraderie

If you’re using an Android phone and you want to download Coin Hunt World to check it out, please use my referral code. By using it, both you and I get free loot! (iOS users will have to wait – it’s still in beta and all the beta downloads have been used up.)

What the hell is Coin Hunt World and why does the name sound so scammy?

CHW is a geolocation game, which allows you to earn cryptocurrency while walking, running, biking, driving or, if you’re a degenerate sidewalk troll, skateboarding around collecting keys and using those keys to answer trivia questions that you unlock at “vaults.”

Every time you answer a question correctly, you get anywhere from $0.10 to $100 or more in crypto, depending on the rarity of the vault. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’ll be answering questions at the ubiquitous, $0.10 blue vaults.

Currently the game pays out in Bitcoin and Ethereum, though other cryptocurrencies will be cycled in and out – including a brief, recent appearance by DogeCoin.

You also earn in-game resources, namely “blueprints,” “resin,” and “paint,” which you can use to craft “cubies” (in-game avatars), which are already somewhat valuable and will be extremely valuable at some point in the future, presumably after the game is released worldwide. It’s currently only available in the US, Canada, UK, and it just launched in the newly christened crypto-haven of El Salvador.

You’ll notice that there are no actual coins in the game itself, so why they chose this name, which to me screams malware, is a mystery. “Crypto Hunt,””Crypto Go” or even “Hungry Hungry Cryptos” would’ve been better, but as usual no one asked me.

OK, you earn cryptocurrency playing Coin Hunt World, but how much are we talking?

tl:dr Not a lot.

Your earnings depend entirely on how much free time you have, how many keys/vaults are in your area and your stamina for collecting keys and visiting vaults. Again, most of the vaults currently in the game are the $0.10 blue vaults, so you have to visit 10 of those just to earn $1.

Green vaults are lightly scattered and pay up to $1. Yellow vaults are very rare and pay up to $10. Red and purple vaults only appear at key locations for special events and they pay up to $100 and $1,000(!) respectively.

On my hunting days, I have been logging 20,000 to 25,000 steps with some biking thrown in there, weather permitting (winter is coming), and I’m only getting about $35 a week in cryptocurrency, a mix of Bitcoin and Ethereum, though I’m still a relative newbie. Some OG players (i.e. those who started four, five, six months ago) are reporting earnings of up to $60 a week.

So, you won’t get rich playing this game, but then again I played Pokemon Go for three years for zero riches, so clearly lack of revenue isn’t deterrent for people like me.

Your playing mileage may vary depending on where you live. I live in downtown Minneapolis, which has a high concentration of keys and vaults. If you live in a less dense area, you aren’t going earn much – or you’re going to have to drive somewhere that has a good cluster of keys and vaults.

Here’s a handy map to help you find good hunting grounds. NOTE: This map is user-generated data, so the accuracy is entirely dependent on players taking the time to update it. What I’m saying is you might find areas with a lot more keys and vaults than appear on the map and there’s always the possibility of hastily input inaccurate data by multitasking players.

How exactly does it work?

There’s a bit of a learning curve with CHW, and there are plenty of places to read up about it, but here’s the essence of the game:

• Collect blue keys Keys are currently the game’s only “currency,” allowing you to earn crypto and use in the auction house to buy/sell cubies and resources
• Use the blue keys to open blue vaults and answer the vaults’ trivia questions (categories include books, art, TV, film, celebrity, geography, general knowledge, sports, cryptocurrency, science and more)
• Answer trivia questions correctly and you earn Satoshis (a denomination of Bitcoin) and Gwei (a denomination of Ethereum), as well as in-game resources (resin, paint, blueprints and/or more keys).

Each color key can only open their same-color vault counterpart. Key denominations are pretty straightforward: Ten blue keys can be forged into one green key. Ten green keys can be forged into one yellow key and so forth. So yes, you’ll need a jaw-dropping 10,000 blue keys to forge one purple key. If that seems bonkers, rest easy; encountering a purple vault is about as likely as encountering a meteorite – at least for the moment.

That’s the basic concept. Suffice to say the game has many layers. There are a lot of strategies, which will very likely change as the game evolves, and is made available to iPhone users and the rest of the world. In the mere two weeks that I’ve been playing, the game developers have been dropping news about upcoming changes/enhancements to the game almost daily.

How is this legit? They’re just giving away crypto? Nothing is free, dude.

If you’re wondering how Coin Hunt World is earning money while they give away crypto to, as of this writing, 70,000 players every week, the answer is they currently aren’t. They’re losing money. They have a business model for revenue down the road, but they’re wisely waiting until the game is more firmly established before they make that leap. They seem to be in no hurry.

And yes, you have access to the crypto you earn. The game allows you to link your profile to your Uphold wallet (currently the only crypto wallet available in CHW) and your earnings are automatically transferred to your wallet every Tuesday. You need to have earned at least $10 that week for the Uphold transfer to occur. Otherwise whatever you’ve earned carries over to the following week.

As for its legitimacy, one of the co-founders is Bill Shihara, CEO of Bittrex, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States. For me, that settled any worries I had about this being a scam and also explained how they were funding this, for the moment, money-losing enterprise.

So, how do I earn actual cryptocurrency again?

A couple ways. The quickest way is through answering vault trivia, opening “mystery boxes,” and giving your referral code to new players.

When you refer a new player you get kickbacks when that player establishes their headquarters. (The new player MUST use your referral code link before they establish their headquarters.) The referrers also gets loot when the referee answers their first blue vault trivia question and other easy milestones.

The referee will get two mystery boxes after they establish their headquarters, so there’s something in it for them too. Establishing your headquarters is one of the first things you do in the game, so be sure to get that code to whomever before they do that or you’ll both miss out on good loot.

You can also get passive “income” in the form of keys with your “uservaults.” Each player is allowed to establish 10 uservaults. If you place these wisely, other players will visit them to answer trivia questions. Uservault usage pays out to the owner in a number of ways. These include blue keys, bonus higher tier keys (mostly green keys, but you might land a yellow in some instances), better chances for receiving resource boxes, leader board points and more.

Players have an incentive to hit uservaults, versus the game’s default vaults, because uservaults pay out more in resources and sometimes extra keys.

Early adopters are going to clean up with uservaults, because they must be placed at least 100 meters from other vaults. People getting started now can snap up popular, high traffic spots for their uservaults. The late-comers will have to place theirs in less ideal locations.

Tell me more about the Coin Hunt World cubies

Cubies are the Pokemon of the Coin Hunt World. You’ll want to collect as many as you can, the rarer the better. As I teased above, there’s an in-game auction house where players can sell and bid on cubies. There are common cubies, rare cubies, epic cubies, limited edition cubies and so forth. There are various ways to put in the work and craft these cubies yourself, but there’s always going to be a market for the rare and limited edition cubies. (Usually only available during special events.) And, again, these are expected to increase in value as cubies are given more and more features.

Per the game’s developers: “…the world we are building will be operated by cubies, different cubies can do different things in this world, some cubies will be much better at certain things.” And “I believe cubies will outprice their resources once they have functionality ingame.”

Bidding and payment for cubies in the auction house is done with keys. Keys aren’t crypto revenue, but having a stockpile of keys leads to crypto revenue through vault trivia. Also, you cannot purchase keys (at the moment), so having keys fall in your lap is pretty nice.

The best comparison I can think of for CHW’s keys is V-Bucks for buying skins in Fortnite. These are extremely lucrative (and Fortnite skins don’t even have special abilities), so this is already a wildly successful model. There’s also an in-game store that currently only opens for special events and temporary sales.

Eventually, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be available too, but there’s little information available on that right now. Whether in-game NFTs will have a similar market value as the public ones you read about, which are selling for bonkers sums of money, remains to be seen. My guess is a pretty confident “no.”

Getting started in CHW

Uphold account: Getting started in Coin Hunt World can be a bit tedious. The learning curve of the game itself aside, you’ll want to open an account at Uphold, so your crypto earnings have someplace to go.

A Twitter account helps, but isn’t necessary: You’ll need this for the “photo quests.” If you already have a Twitter account, but you don’t want to spam your followers with CHW posts, just open a second account dedicated to CHW, like I did. Most Twitter smartphone apps allow you to toggle between several Twitter accounts, switching back and forth on the fly.

Join the CHW Discord: Discord, the instant messaging app (available on mobile and desktop), links to your CHW account, so you can participate in relatively simple but lucrative “buddy quests” (which pay one yellow key, which, if you’ll recall, are worth 100 blue keys!), but also for the aforementioned community, camaraderie and information sharing that you’ll need to develop your game play strategies and follow new developments in the game. Some events require moderate cooperation with your local CHW community, so you’ll definitely want to keep tabs on that.

CHW has a main Discord server for each country and most active cities/states have their own more intimate Discord communities. Staying isolated and playing alone will severely limit your progress and earning potential in the game, so even if you never post to the CHW Discord, you’ll at least want to read it – and use it to coordinate your buddy quests.

Read the wiki: There’s a sporadically updated official Coin Hunt World wiki. Some of the information can be pretty stale. The running collection of trivia questions, so one can study up, is notably incomplete and even has some pretty glaring errors. That said, these updates are done by volunteers. Presumably, their time and dedication to the wiki ebbs and flows because real life.

Is Coin Hunt World fun?

For me, yes, absolutely. If you spent even a short amount of time playing Pokemon Go, imagine the enthusiasm you had for that compounded with the added perk of crypto earnings thrown in. It’s a double endorphin shot every time you answer a trivia question or complete a quest. 

That said, there are some issues

The GPS is almost unbelievably glitchy, particularly in dense urban environments, like my hunting grounds in downtown Minneapolis. In terms of tall buildings, downtown Minneapolis has only moderate building density, if that, so I can’t imagine the trouble people are having in places like New York or Chicago.

But even outside downtown in sparse neighborhoods and parks, my cubie freezes, lags, jumps and wanders. I spend a significant amount of time trying to coax my cubie onto the spot where I’m actually standing. Sometimes, unsuccessfully. I hope the developers straighten that out soon or, if not, widen the access perimeter around vaults to account for the GPS drift.

Additionally, playing CHW drains my phone battery faster than any app I’ve ever used. Running off the phone alone, I get in an hour, maybe an hour and a half, of hunting in before my phone dies. (Caveat: My phone is pretty old.) Being diligent about turning off the screen while walking from point to point has not helped much. If I plug in an external battery, I can get almost three hours of hunting before I need a recharge. So, if you wanna do Pokemon Go-style marathon hunts, you’ll need to carry around a second/third external battery.

You said Coin Hunt World somehow relates to travel?

Oh right! There are a few ways CHW supplements the allure of travel – or, depending on your passion for the game, the other way around. (The first person to open a purple vault for a $1,000 payout had to travel to Hawaii to do it.)

There are or will be country-specific cubies, cubie “decorations,” and, one assumes, regional cubies, which you can only acquire while traveling (or the auction house). This enticement was wildly popular for Pokemon Go players, so I assume the same will be true for Coin Hunt World.

Dedicated players can use the map to help them select a hotel at their destination in a dense hunting zone, so they can play during downtime.

Last, but not least, is the social aspect. You can join the regional Discord server for wherever you’re going and make friends before you even arrive. The pessimist in me says that as these Discord groups grow, they’ll cease to be warm, fuzzy, inclusive places, but for the moment they are and it’s pretty great.

Is this really a thing or will the next shiny geolocation app plunge it into obscurity?

Based on the global popularity of Pokemon Go, and the global popularity of free money, I’m fairly confident this is going to be huge. There are lots of play-to-earn crypto games right now, but almost all of them have substantial minimum buy-in. As of this writing, Coin Hunt World is the best free-to-play, play-to-earn game out there.

If CHW is so great, why haven’t you heard of it yet? The developers are conspicuously doing zero marketing at the moment. It’s pure word-of-mouth (and word-of-this-blog). There’s also the matter of the glacial iOS approval process. CHW may be a fringe game now, but getting it into the fidgeting hands of iPhone users and putting a little gas behind marketing is probably all it’ll take for someone in a cubie costume to appear on Good Morning America.

If you have questions or reservations about the game, read the wiki and do a little Googling for independent research. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I was highly skeptical, but after a lot of reading and a few weeks of playing, I think something would have to go terribly wrong for this game to NOT be a global phenomenon.

One last time, if you’d like to give Coin Hunt World a try, please use my referral code to score free loot for both of us. Or just scan the QR code below. Much appreciated!