It's a fine idea - it has a precedent in the real world - something called 'Prize Bonds' -
http://www.prizebonds.ie/
Essentially interest is paid on cash investment - but the interest is not awarded uniformally, but rather each bond has a chance of winning some of the prizes - so potentially you might have a very small investment, but win a very large prize.
You might implement it in a DAC so that each player has a small chance of winning, but a small chance of losing too - or a small percentage reduction of balances each drawing. You might also have two classes of coin in the system - one that plays for prizes, one that doesn't - that would address BM's important point.
Overall, it would be easier to implement than the lottery, but the lottery would generate more excitement and interest.
Thanks FreeTrade, yes prize bonds are a great example of the concept in action and I see they're popular in many countries.
That could even be a useful model for the conservative implementation of the concept. (I think launching a conservative, normal and aggressive model of the concept would be a good idea, so we cover all markets and will have a stake in whichever one takes off - and once it takes off - it should ensure a competitor would have difficulty catching up or forking.)
You might also have two classes of coin in the system - one that plays for prizes, one that doesn't - that would address BM's important point.
Bear in mind for the lottery coin to be sustainable it would on average have to pay out less in prizes (via inflation) then there is new money coming into the system. Therefore with all but the most aggressive calibrations, even though your % share of the total coins would decrease each week,(if you didn't win anything), the $ value of your investment should be increasing,
but yes I would also want a more investor geared option & I think the simplest way to do this (& address BM's important point) and still have it remain frictionless is to have an 'opt out' option where your coins just increase with the rate of inflation but don't stand a chance to win any of the prizes. (Hmm. that's pretty much what you said, good idea.)
(Ie. If you owned 1% of the total at the beginning you'd still own 1% after each draw - if the lottery proved profitable the rate of return on this would be astounding!)
Thoughts:
If we distributed it to Bitshares holders initially it would be pretty pointless as we're all mainly investors, so either the 'opt out' option should take a few months to come into effect or/& a large % of the coin is also air-dropped elsewhere - perhaps Dogecoin holders would be a good demographic.
We (Bitshares) could seed it with a few $ in guaranteed prizes for the first 4 weeks helping it to reach X value.
I also realised it's not as simple as designating X% inflation for the coin that will dominate this market because a popular coin will grow rapidly in the beginning but then the rate of growth relative to the base will slow even with large $ inputs, so the inflation metric used to award prizes would have to take account of that. (It (inflation) also needs to be high in the beginning to be attractive and it needs to slow as the coin matures to avoid being unsustainable, so somehow it would have to be designed/dynamically adjust.)
Overall, it would be easier to implement than the lottery, but the lottery would generate more excitement and interest.
We could for the aggressive implementation aim for similar metrics as normal lotteries (aiming to give up to 50% of average* new weekly growth as prizes via randomly distributed inflation - how that could be implemented though, I have no idea, unless the coin could self-track it's price and other metrics.) but leaving the remainder of value in the coin, (which is lost in normal lotteries) so it would be just as exciting and rewarding as a normal lottery but it would build on itself and you wouldn't lose everything if you lost and still have a chance to win future lotteries.
Other thought: Someone should make a BitUsd icon, that would be cool to use instead of $ in these Bitshares forum posts, (Like the
)
(* Average new weekly growth - because we still want there to be the same level prizes in weeks where the value may have dropped, due to bad news for crypto in general, speculation etc. so it would have to be some algorithm that also tries to maintain a minimum level of inflation not just distributing increases in value in any one particular week.)
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