To fall to, and rise with, greed is human.
Many people associate the rise of cryptocurrency's value with human greed. I, for one, started rearing digital cats (cryptokitties) in the sole hope that they will rise in value and I'll get decent compensation for figuring out lines of genetic codes.
I think after stumbling onto Etherjack, I can say that no game or dapp or ico in crypto history has taken the idea of human greed and expressed it in as innovative a manner as the project has. (No, bitconnect doesn't count, it's just a scam.)
What is Etherjack
- It's essentially a digital, crypto jackpot. The ICO collects a certain sum of eth, 333 to be exact, peanuts in the world of ICO collections. BUT, the fun starts there.
- Players bid sequentially, using a defined amount of ethereum or native Jack tokens. I bid, u bid, she bids. A certain timeout duration is allocated after each bid. If someone else bids during the duration, the clock restarts. IF NO ONE ELSE BIDS during the period, the jackpot goes to the last bidder!!
- Personally I think this design is ultra-smart. Think about it --> although the amount of eth needed to place bids is designed to increase with time, the incentive to bid will grow as well, for the following reasons. One, the time needed to win the jackpot (without a follow-up bid from some bugger coming through) gets increasingly shorter, and two, the jackpot amount increases with time.
- The increasing eth amt needed to bid also brings abt a FORESEEABLE END to the game, as players like you and I get increasingly reluctant to place bids. At some point, as all players (except the last player) hesitate, the clock will run out, and someone will actually win the game. This foreseeable end adds credibility to the game design.
- This kind of games has the potential to create a self-reinforcing storm as the gameplay continues, as the jackpot grows exponentially and more people gets attracted to the potential of further returns.
Benefits of holding JACK tokens
SO why purchase Jack tokens now? Why not wait till the game starts?
Well, u can purchase Jack tokens for 0.004 to 0.006 eth per token now. But when the game starts, each bid will require at least 0.01 eth. Since Jack tokens can always be used in place of eth for bidding (i.e., regardless of the eth amount needed at time t for bidding, 1 Jack token will have the same equivalent function), it will inherently have the same value as the required eth bid at that point in time.
This value GOES UP with time, just as the value of eth required to make bids does! And the platform actually allows u to sell ur Jacks to other players purchasing it for future bidding. In fact, if you place your Jacks for sale on the platform, it will always be sold first. Only when no players have their Jacks put up for sale will the platform conduct sales from the reserve store of Jack tokens on the platform.
FURTHER, if Jack tokens are stored in the Vault, u get a cut of dividends from the gameplay. Dividends are formed from 25% of ether bids made during the game, and 50% of every Jack value sold from the reserves. These dividends are then divided between people who store their Jacks in the Vault and the developers in a 7-3 ratio.
Minor prizes are distributed from small shares of the eth bids along the way, for every 20th or 50th or 100th bid. To sustain interest in gameplay.
For more details on the token mechanics and gameplay, u can refer to the whitepaper below. But just to reiterate, IF THE GAME DOES TAKE OFF, the returns from being able to sell the Jacks to bidders alone is humongous, especially in the later stage of the game where each bid takes more and more eth. In addition, u get dividends in the meantime, every single time someone makes a bid using eth or buys more Jack during the gameplay, if ur Jacks are deposited onto the Vault.
In short potential returns are crazy, but of course u cld end up spending all ur Jacks in bids and get nothing. Caveats: all ICOs come with risks. The project is designed for a SINGLE game. No such thing as learning and doing better next time. How things will turn out will depend a lot on human behaviour (which we all know is irrational), and its interaction with this particular game design. Never put ur life savings in it. Maybe two weeks worth of your coffee or lunch money perhaps. Go for fun. Fun greed. Not insane, I can't sleep-levels of greed, pls.
That's all folks.
Resources:
Whitepaper: https://etherjack.io/EtherJack.io.pdf
Site: https://etherjack.io/
bitcointalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2810704
twitter: https://twitter.com/etherjack_io