Getting into the Bitcoin game has never been easier. On top of mining or purchasing Bitcoin, we can have our employers pay us directly in Bitcoin thanks to BitPay’s new Bitcoin Payroll API. And now, hotel booking service PointsHound is adding yet another option to the mix: Getting paid in Bitcoin for booking hotel stays through its website.
That’s right, instead of opting for frequent flyer miles or other standard rewards, PointsHound users can choose to receive Bitcoin as their incentive of choice. When using the site, simply enter in where and when you want to stay, and select Bitcoin from the drop-down menu. Simple.
PointsHound currently partners with more than 150,000 hotels around the world, including major chains like Hilton and Marriott. But not all hotels are created equal. A hotel stay in New York City will earn you more than one in, say, Pittsburgh. In fact, you can earn as much as 0.26 BTC for a 3-night stay in NYC, according to PointsHound. To receive the biggest Bitcoin payout however, there are a few more things you’ll need to know.
First, PointsHound uses an in-house algorithm, “which calculates how much Bitcoin (and other rewards currency) is offered for each hotel,” Pete Van Dorn, co-founder of PointsHound, tells Digital Trends. You also need to become a frequent PointsHound user to get the largest rewards, as the site assigns “levels” to each user. For example, “Level 3 members earn at a higher rate than Level 1 members,” Van Dorn says. And finally, Van Dorn adds, you’ll want to book at hotels that have the most lucrative partnership deal with PointsHound.
“To maximize reward earnings on PointsHound bookings, travelers should look for hotels marked with the ‘Big Earnings’ icon,” says Van Dorn. “These hotels offer much higher commissions to PointsHound, allowing us to pass through more rewards currency to PointsHound users.”
Of course, the specific amounts of Bitcoin PointsHound users receive depends on the market value of the virtual currency, and Van Dorn says his company updates its rewards algorithm “daily” to ensure proper payout. It can take “up to two weeks” to receive the Bitcoin rewards in your wallet, says Van Dorn, “but in practice, most Bitcoin rewards post within days of checkout from the hotel.”
[Image via Carlos Amarillo/Shutterstock]
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.