Seriously? You Can Get Paid to Walk?

Now that it’s time to work that Thanksgiving feast off – how about getting paid for it?

One of the latest innovations is Bitwalking, an app you download on your phone that tracks your mileage and literally pays you for walking.

The company’s website maintains that everyone should have the freedom and ability to make money. It also incentivizes people to get out more and stretch those legs!

But before you quit your day job, or attach your phone to your favorite furry friend and set him free in the backyard, the app only generates about one dollar for every five miles, and the monthly maximum is $26. (Maybe enough to cover Fido’s food bill?)

Now, I’m not talking about dimes, nickels and Benjamins. Bitwalking dollars are actually a digital currency, similar to Bitcoin. The difference is, instead of “mining” through complex algorithms, you walk.

And while you’ll at most make a couple hundred dollars a year with this app, there’s a bigger development at play here. Bitwalking could ultimately make the still-cryptic concept of “digital currency” more available to the average consumer.

That’s important. The creators of Bitwalking dollars have just found a new, friendlier approach to unleashing a new digital currency to the masses.

And it’s even bigger than that: this company is really at a new threshold of innovation by blending fitness lifestyle data with digital currency.

The end state for digital currencies is to eventually use them as a low-cost transfer between major existing currencies. Digital currencies cut the big banks, and more importantly their fees, out of the picture for currency transfers.

That’s the goal… and in the meantime, innovations like Bitwalking can drive business at whatever online vendors choose to accept it.

I’m tracking emerging digital currency trends as well as major advances in lifestyle data so my subscribers can be a step ahead of the market – no pun intended.