No matter where you are in the world, no matter what country you live in, lotteries are everywhere. In the United States alone over $70 BILLION is spent annually on lotteries and raffle tickets. But it's not only Americans who are spending money on the lottery! Latin America, Asian Pacific Countries, and Eastern Europe on average out spends Americans on lottery tickets 2 and sometimes even 3 to 1. The world LOVES lottery tickets....but why?
It all has to do with Psychology...
According to "Psychology Today," the primary reason people tend to play the lottery is due to our brain's lack of natural ability to comprehend probability. Our brains evolved to recognize patterns all around us to better help us identify our friends, family, and the animals we would be hunting. The parietal lobe which is involved with Mathematics, however, didn't evolve quite as much. This is why lottery tickets are here to stay and will only continue to grow as the world population continues to grow. People love their lotteries, which leads me to my next point.
People love crowd funding
The idea of a collective contributing a small amount of money to a cause they believe in is an awesome idea. It's why websites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe and so many other crowd funding websites like them have sprung up in the last 10 years and are going no where. However, one of the draw backs to a centralized system like Kickstarter and GoFundMe facilitating these crowd funding campaigns is that it's inefficient and prone to manipulation. Kickstarter is the one that gets to decide which campaigns make it to the front page -- no one else. But worse than that, they take heavy fees from every campaign as well, detracting from the money people give to contribute to causes they believe in. The fees are heavy too. Some sources estimate up to 15% of some crowd funding campaigns go to Kickstarter and payment processors like Stripe. This is outrageous. Campaigns would be able to raise 15% less money to reach their funding goal if they used the blockchain to facilitate crowd funding campaigns, or put differently, they'd raise 15% more!
Using the Blockchain
Thanks to ethereum, blockchain-based lotteries are quite easy to setup and run, but this is not good enough; we can do better. People have simply looked at existing websites and systems that exist in the centralized world and tried to clone them on the block chain without taking into account what the blockchain is capable of and enables us to do. Introducing... the BLOCKCHAIN LOTTERY CROWD FUNDER 2000 -- the world's first blockchain lottery crowd funding facilitator(that would actually be a sweet ass name, but I digress). People already use raffles all the time to raise money for little league teams and for all sorts of people in need. Churches occasionally do them sometimes to raise money for their church, and even some state lottery systems use a portion of the profit they take in to fund education programs and student college tuition. Before the blockchain, this idea was not possible, now, it can actually happen.
As of the time of writing this article(June 26, 2017), there was no such system out there to facilitate blockchain-based lottery crowd funding. For any of you Entrepreneurs/Software Engineers(like myself), who'd like to work on such a project I'd suggest getting on this project ASAP. The window of opportunity for blockchain startups is quickly disappearing.
If you're interested in pursuing this idea, I'd suggest some of the following steps:
Non-Technical Founders:
- Setup a landing page describing your idea and getting sign-ups for early adopters.
- Run an ad campaign and see what kind of interest for this idea there really is out there.
- If there's enough interest, find as many technical Co-Founders as possible through a local Co-Founder meetup in your city.
- Build an MVP(Minimum Viable Product) and try to organically grow as large as possible.
- Talk to investors only if you can't continue to organically grow.
Technical Founders:
- Setup a landing page describing your idea and getting sign-ups for early adopters.
- Run an ad campaign and see what kind of interest for this idea there really is out there.
- Try to find as many technical Co-Founders as you can, and maybe a more business-oriented Co-Founder as well.
- Build an MVP(Minimum Viable Product) and try to organically grow as large as possible.
- Talk to investors only if you can't continue to organically grow.
Hopefully you found this interesting! Do you think this idea is possible or even worth pursuing?? Leave comments in the comment section to give feedback.
Citations:
Thompson, Derek. "Lotteries: America's $70 Billion Shame." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 11 May 2015. Web. 26 June 2017.
"Full Year Global Lottery Sales up by 9.9%; Growth Driven Again by Latin America and Asia Pacific." World Lottery Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 June 2017.
Bennett, Kevin. "6 Reasons We Keep Playing the Lottery." Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 12 Apr. 2016. Web. 26 June 2017.