In the past 24 hours, you may have seen ad over lightning where I conducted a casual social experiment, not adhering to strict scientific protocols but rather for amusement.
For this, I utilized eaglesats.com. A detailed discussion about this business model can be found in a recent post here: #316903.
The premise of the experiment was simple: I offered participants the chance to send me 1,000 sats, and in return, they would receive 2,000 sats back to their LNURL address, which they were instructed to include in their payment comments. I sent out about 5000 messages at 5 sats each.
Observations from the experiment include:
- I collected approximately 15,000 sats and paid out around 20,000 sats. Some participants sent smaller amounts, likely skeptical of a potential scam. After immediately reimbursing the first participant, I decided to wait until the experiment concluded an hour ago. This was to prevent others from creating multiple addresses to exploit the system after realizing the offer was legitimate.
- Over 90% of the participants used Wallet of Satoshi.
- Some participants failed to follow simple instructions. I received several 1,000 sat payments without a corresponding return address. Consequently, I didn't need to disburse 30,000 sats in total. This issue could also stem from a limitation in some wallets where custom messages are truncated, as discussed in one of the comments here: #316903.
- The experiment showed that people are still vulnerable to falling for double-your-bitcoin scams. While I did honor the payback in this case, malicious actors might not do the same.
Yesterday, the minimum payment on eaglesats.com was 5 sats/message. Now, it is at 10 sats/message. I presume this is as a reaction to the messages posted here: https://primal.net/e/note1ym0p4qlswhkhxfz5wqs23j5rrkuc6zlgn0z0kw3xxlmzvjsfv3sqzs5hqa to avoid people getting spammed for too little money.