Blockchain Adoption, or How to Make a (Fake) Whale Squirt

Every day, there is something new to surprise us in terms of technology and how far we’ve come. Now, blockchain is there to let you make an artificial whale fountain squirt on command. What a time to be alive.

The fountain, located in the Netherlands, is integrated with Steem cryptocurrency payments - courtesy of blockchain developer Roeland P. Lanparty. Those who are interested can go to steemwhale.io to make a small donation and watch the whale spray water live. The amount you can pledge is anywhere between 1 and 100 Steem, where 1 Steem was USD 1.79 at the time of writing.

The whale fountain only operates from 09:30 AM and 9:30 PM Central European Time (CEST), and all payments made outside of this time will be refunded. The website warns there might be a 20-second delay in the livestream.

Lanparty told Hard Fork that the project is just for fun, to showcase the power of blockchain. “I was asked to write a code for the whale fountain to squirt randomly, so I thought it would be fun to integrate cryptocurrency payments and let users squirt it randomly,” he said. “I also found the analogy between the whale fountain and the ‘whale’ slang used to signify wealth in the cryptocurrency community funny.”

However, there are more such exceptional use cases of blockchain. Twitter user Lightning K0ala has created an online graffiti board, called satoshis.place, to show the power of the Lightning Network in processing micro-transactions. The features of the game mean that there are 1 million pixels on the canvas, each costing 1 satoshi to paint, and each can be painted over indefinitely.

“I created satoshis.place to explore the application of micro-transactions in the context of multiplayer games. I also just wanted to mess around with running a Lightning node figuring out how this stuff works,” Lightning K0ala told Hard Fork. “Things have been amazing so far, it’s been a laugh trip for the last three days watching people draw on the board and comment on social media. We’ve got a nice little group on Telegram forming where people post suggestions and I can gauge what stuff should be fixed or improved.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the beginning the board was almost completely covered in phallic doodles. Now it looks like this