Recently the Chia Fork Stai launched an online store where you can buy various computer related goods online using some Stai to cover fees. Because they are in Germany, I wanted someone local to them to go through the process of ordering from the Stai store, and so to The Chia Plot discord I went. Because you can’t pay the whole thing in Stai, we didn’t order a hard drive or anything too cool. Just some useful stuff.
As you can see, the most important question was answered – did it come? And it did. The process, however, was a little stilted. First we got an invoice for the total amount minus the Stai discount, totaling 20.63 Euros. This is not a terrible price for 2 duster cans and 5 patch cables, but its not particularly great either. Not as bad as 22 Euros though, and the extra 2 Euros were what we saved by paying in Stai.
And true to the rumours we only had to spend 0.0404 Stai to cover that 2.02 Euro. This meant that they did honour the 50 Euro per Stai originally stated on Discord. So after all this had been setup they followed up with a separate communication to handle the Stai transaction, which we did and were able to see on the blockchain at AllTheBlocks. All in all it was an interesting process, but not very automated.
Compared to ordering from Amazon or Ebay the process leaves a lot to be desired. But compared to the other forks, except for HDDCoin, this is a remarkable level of utility. It shows that a lot of the work the the Stai team is putting into their many projects is starting to pay off. We really did pay for a portion of our purchase in Stai, at 50 Euros per Stai exactly like they promised.
The German person I recruited to perform the transaction hated it. It was a lot worse than basically any other online shopping experience, and I think that even the free air dusters was not worth the hassle. I think its a good first effort but there is a lot of room for improvement. Lets hope we see that progress, because other than as a gimmick I cannot see anyone seriously using this first version.
