I've got an idea for a real life game of hodl that might improve adoption or even make it to the local news 😄 Tell me what you think.
The goal of the game is to teach people, who are likely not aware of bitcoin, self-sovereignty and lower their time preference using roughly the same incentives that Bitcoin has, except we'll help a bit. The rules are simple and all you need is a piece of paper, a printer and some sats that you want to donate to a random stranger. Pick a block in your town that's not particularly wealthy as rich people already have low time preference and also it's not very exciting to play with them.
Generate a new wallet in Electrum, send some sats to a single address there, the amount is arbitrary but should be high enough to make a stranger interested. Export the private key for that address. Print a message that briefly explains how to redeem those sats from the key (I propose using Electrum because it allows exporting and sweeping private keys, if there's any other wallet that can do that, please tell me). It's up to you to make this message good enough to attract attention. Mention how much these sats worth in your local fiat currency to motivate a person who finds this message to install the program and swipe the sats, also mention these coins can be sold easily for fiat (so that the person knows they can do it any moment). However, there are few rules to follow that make this a game and not just a random donation:
- After one week since making this instruction you (the game master) will take these sats away, you have the passphrase and the key so you can do it. Tell the date explicitly so the stranger knows how much time they have or if it's already over. The game ends if the sats weren't swept before that.
- If those sats move to another address after sweeping, the game ends (you can assume they were sold or spent).
- If the sats don't move after sweeping for a few weeks (don't tell precisely for how long) a new message will appear at the same place with a larger amount of sats (up to you to decide how much it would be). The rules will be the same.
If the game ends you can then wait a few days and start again in another block. At most you'll lose the tx fee for swiping it yourself if no one's interested.
Now all that's left is to actually go to the chosen block, pick a house (preferably with multiple cheap-ish apartments) and stick the instruction there somewhere. Then you go home, monitor the chain activity and enforce the rules. Both you and the potential player are anonymous. Poor neighborhoods are unlikely to have any surveillance. It should be easy to get inside a house to stick the paper at the landing somewhere so that many people would notice it.
Someone might quickly swipe and sell the sats for a few cans of beer or a pizza. However, they'd lose the future opportunity to get even more (as you promise, and you should be ready to do it so better buy these sats while they're cheap). You can run multiple such games in parallel in several neighborhoods, just write down where you put each address to track participants, winners and losers.
It might be easier for a complete newbie to just enter a seed phrase instead of swiping a private key (as almost no wallets support the latter), however you will never know if someone joined the game this way as it won't appear on chain. And explaining that they should create a separate wallet with a different phrase, then send the sats there from here might be much harder as most mobile wallets don't support multiple seed phrases at the same time.
So, is this idea good/exciting/meh? Any suggestions to improve the flow or incentives?
p2wpkh:), Sparrow doesn't understand it but requires manually selecting the key type (legacy, segwit etc.) and if you pick a wrong one it just says that it couldn't find any UTXOs. So this UX isn't very good but that's all we have.