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KFC Accepts Bitcoin In Canada Now

The “Bitcoin Bucket” costs .0011204 BTC and comes with two dips.
Screengrab: Facebook/KFC Canada

The latest item on KFC Canada’s menu will run you .0011204 BTC… Shit, I mean, .0010082 BTC… Wait, now it’s .0011673 BTC? Anyway, it’ll cost you whatever $20 CAD worth of Bitcoin happens to be at the exact moment you buy it, plus $5 in shipping.

Yes, KFC Canada is accepting Bitcoin for a limited time, and only for online orders of the the “Bitcoin Bucket,” a new menu item that can be purchased via Bitpay, a popular Bitcoin payment processor. The bucket comes with 10 chicken tenders, waffle fries, gravy, a side, and two dips.

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“Despite the ups and downs of Bitcoin, the Colonel’s Original Recipe is as good as always,” KFC Canada’s site for the Bitcoin Bucket says. “So, trade your Bitcoins for buckets and invest in something finger lickin’ good.”

Yes, let the taste of fried chicken distract you from thinking about how the Bitcoin you spent on a $20 bucket of chicken could be worth $2,000 a couple months from now.

Screengrab: KFC Canada

The move to Bitcoin might seem surprising from KFC, but the company has been looking for ways to flip buzzy tech into a viral hit recently—last year the company released a Bioshock-esque virtual reality game to train employees and a Faraday cage.

KFC Canada has been leaning into the cryptocurrency memes. “Another big rise in Bitcoin,” one tweet from Thursday read, “Hodl for the dip,” referencing a cryptocurrency in-joke. “If Satoshi reveals his true identity, his bucket is on us,” another tweet stated, referring to Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

It’s an interesting time to be accepting Bitcoin as payment, mostly because Bitcoin can be really expensive to send (the average fee people are paying is just under $30), and because it’s so valuable, increasingly fewer people want to trade it for things like fried chicken. Nobody wants to be that guy who spent a ton of Bitcoin on two pizzas years ago, which would be worth millions of dollars today.

Still, having nowhere to spend Bitcoins on normal stuff in the first place is big part of the problem, too, and KFC Canada accepting them as payment is a small step towards addressing that. Maybe some of Toronto’s shiny new cryptocurrency ATMs will get some use now.

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