0 sats \ 5 replies \ @ek 5 Oct 2022 \ on: Real life game of hodl bitcoin
Am I dumb or does this not make sense? How can the sats move after you swept them?
But I really like this idea! I had a similar idea (just stucking random private keys around town and see if they ever get claimed) but didn't think of making a game out of this!
I think this could get some real attention with word of mouth if this is done consistently (like once per week a new letter mysteriously appears somewhere in town).
Edit: Ah, I got it now. With sweeping you mean the particular date before you take the sats back to you. The person should claim them and only move them once. If they then hodl, another letter will appear for them to claim again.
Regarding incentives:
Maybe you can mention that the reward will increase exponentially. So if they only move it once, they will get more and more rewards (with an upper limit) for hodling.
This way, you can start (very?) small which decreases the initial financial impact for you and they have time to learn since it will take some time until their stack is big enough to be worth to sell.
Also, they must do some initial effort (sweeping the sats) and will only really benefit in the long term which rewards people with low time preference even more.
Example calculation:
Every two weeks, the sats will double up to a max of 500k.
Starting with 50 sats for example (will maybe be too low due to transaction fees. We will need to play with this amount), they would have 500k sats after ~25 weeks (half year):
| Week | Sats |
|---|---|
| 0 | 50 |
| 2 | 100 |
| 4 | 200 |
| 6 | 400 |
| 8 | 800 |
| 10 | 1600 |
| 12 | 3200 |
| 14 | 12800 |
| 16 | 25600 |
| 18 | 51200 |
| 20 | 102400 |
| 22 | 204800 |
| 24 | 409600 |
| 26 | 819200 |
We can even adjust the increase a bit so it takes longer first (less than double) but increases faster at the end.
This can maybe be used to increase the initial sats to make a transaction possible.
We can also just add a flat amount of sats first to already pay for the transaction. This amount will not be considered for doubling.
All in all, a very interesting game you came up with!
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I thought about 100k as the first reward, it's a big enough amount to make almost anyone interested. Maybe get your average daily wage and start from there. Working 1 day "for free" to conduct such a social experiment could be worth it!
You can't really sweep 50 sats because it's below the dust limit so you need to already own a UTXO for that and you'd be at a loss (need to spend ≈140 sat for a tx at least). Of course, 100k would result in too generous numbers if you double it every two weeks so maybe multiply it by 1.5 and only stick the next sheet every month or so. Or cap it after 1-2 mil. All depends on your generosity and the stranger's patience.
Thanks for your kind words!
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No, thank you for this post, it is inspiring!
Would love to see you posting your experiences if you are going to follow up on this :)
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Also, I don't quite get that:
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
If the person swipes the sats (generating a new wallet), how will it matter what method was used before?
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It doesn't matter but sweeping is easier than explaining how (and why) to use two seed phrases. They might simply enter the phrase I provided and call it a day since they can access the sats but I wouldn't see that and swipe it a week later. I don't want to disappoint people like that!
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