SNT Lotto (Marketing and token utility opportunity)

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For a while now I have been thinking about a smart contract lottery game Dapp.

I think this would be a good way to utilise SNT more whilst also creating a great piece of marketing.

I feel it would be a niche opportunity to hold an SNT lottery event whereby participants can allocate a fixed amount of SNT, for example 100 SNT per wallet entry with 10,000 total entries culminating in a prize pool of 1 Million SNT to the lucky winner.

This could be a one off event with 100% of the SNT going to the winner, alternatively it could become a full time live Dapp within Status holding multiple draws with multiple different amounts to be won thus allowing individuals the chance to take a greater or lower risk depending on the number of participants and the amount placed. This could even have a prize pool of 99% with 1% of SNT going to fund the GMBH and future development.
I am not a developer so don’t profess to know the fundamentals of creating such a Dapp but I assume there may be a fully trusted random generator out there that can pick a winner.

For context I get this would possibly constitute certain laws and yes I know Decentralisation is the aim of the game but I also know Status want to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner so therefore haven’t thought too deeply around this side of things. However I have researched gambling law issues in the UK in a previous business venture (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer) and found that something like a raffle can be held if there is an element of skill involved rather than a pure lottery/raffle draw. For example, before the user places his/her SNT they are faced with a question (eg: What is the name of Status native token?) to which they have to answer from a multiple choice and up on passing this question (skill test complete) they can then move on to the next stage (100 SNT placed).

I realise the pros and cons to this so please feedback with any thoughts at all but oh man would I love to see this happen :slight_smile:

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Hello, glad to see your excitement in crypto. I`m also very excited about it.

I think is an interesting idea, but not sure if for Status Network. I am usually against lottery because I can’t trust them, however if you able to make it fair and trustless, then I think is a good idea. The main challenge would be RNG.

Status Network roadmap have no lottery planned. The planned SNT use cases being created by the core team is listed at whitepaper. New ideas are welcome, but they should make sense to the context of our application. For example, Tribute to Talk is a feature because of its relationship with Messaging.

However anyone can create an use case of SNT if they want to, because just like Ether, this tokens are permissionless. By using SNT you will ensure that participants are token holders

100 SNT per wallet entry with 10,000 total entries culminating in a prize pool of 1 Million SNT to the lucky winner

The restriction of 100 SNT per wallet is possible to be made, but must be remembered that this is not a Sybil protection, as making another SNT wallet is trivial by sending 100 SNT and have the cost of about 103563 gas.

Regarding the laws and gambiling, that would be a challange aswell, but probably solved with KYC.

There are other Loterry Dapps, if user want they can just make transactions to this Dapp. Your idea is not bad, is just out of context for Status.
Making a Loterry Dapp that funds developers, for example, if using ETH it would fund Ethereum Foundation, if using SNT it would fund Status GMBH, this would be a interesting path for your idea.

Consider disrupting lottery model, not just copy-pasting into a smart contract.
For example:

https://medium.com/@gomox/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-token-toilet-and-couldnt-be-bothered-to-ask-c0440c09d8c5
https://tokentoilet.com/

I would suggest to do something similar, however whoever deposits a ERC721 gets 1 ERC20, and who buys pays 5 unit of a ERC20 to get 3 units of ERC721s. The difference of ERC20 could be sent to address zero, or donated to the token developer (or donated to yourself, if your greedy, but than it wont have much social appeal).
Both ERC20 and ERC721 would have to be in a curated list, which could be managed by a onlyOwner or a liquid democracy.
Also, don’t use .com domains, use .eth and share content in Swarm or IPFS. Use embark to help you with that.

Thanks for sharing your ideas, consider trying to write your own lottery contract in Solidity as hobby, maybe you find a talent in yourself, or even create something interesting. Then you take your idea and participate in a hackathon. At least you will have guaranteed fun.

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Thank you for the detailed feedback Ricardo, I can see both sides of the coin and how it can be seen to conflict with Status’s overall vision. I guess my eagerness sometimes gives me moments of euphoric madness :slightly_smiling_face:.

From initial feedback it seems like it’s a non starter as far as Status is concerned so I won’t be pursuing the matter any further but I do like your idea of the hackathon development and value your feedback very much. Thanks again, all the best.

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I’m usually against lotteries because even if they can be trusted to follow their rules, by design most participants will lose money.

A interesting twist on the traditional lottery is one where by design most participants win. This could work where in every draw 5-10% of the participants are drawn as the losers and their lottery stake gets redistributed to the other 90% of players.

Making the drawing provably fair is probably the largest technical challenge.

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