The Economics of the Lottery - Seeking Token Funding
At first glance, one would see lotteries as nothing more than random gambling of chance. A concept of taking unearned money without balanced contribution back to society. These type economic conundrums don't seem very much like a stable economic solution at all.
However, seemingly over the last several decades this has seemingly changed. In the United States now over 85% of the states have a state lottery. Nearly half of the funds generated in lotteries go to fund government programs from education to infrastructure. Leading the idea to be categorized as a win win scenario to some.
Application of Lottery economics to social media networks. To fully understand how the economics of the lottery can help social media networks on the blockchain. We first need to understand the early days of social media networks like steemit. In a presentation from Ned Scott (CEO), of Steemit. He explains that Steemit became unpredictable due to stakeweighted voting not being leveraged against account based voting in a more democratic model. In stakeweighted voting "special interest" groups would use their influence over the network to only support specific areas. Below Steemit attempts to solve issues inherent to the system:
In game theory ideas of such networks alongside human psychology you'd always hit " the wall". In a game like strategy session of social networks composed this way. You'd have an influence game aspect where the most influence on the network wins. You'd try to gain more influence and that would invigorate the game. However, as the game became less challenging your interest would diminish.
Human psychology aspects of fairness. Several years ago in france the retirement age was to be raised to 60 years old. Riots and civil unrest erupted all over france. Meanwhile in the United States the retirement age was around 67 years old. It's expected to rise even higher in the future. The question is would the age 60 be less fair than 67 or more? What is clear is that as long as people believe and perceive unfairness maybe the actual absolute truth of unfairness is irrelevant. The idea within itself of some sort of unfairness is enough to establish and cause upheaval. Whereas, as long as people identify with a mental concept of fairness they generally stick to the networks and there is growth. Facebook has been able to push towards a $1 trillion market cap. This may be due in fact because despite facebook's shortcomings people still use it as they expect a specific outcome much as everyone else who uses the network.
Lottery economics would solve many potential issues. In a similar fashion to how many lotteries are run today. We'd use random number generators on lists of posts who enter our lottery. We'd establish a lottery administration that would video televise the numbers that are pulled. All who entered would receive a lottery jackpot of tokens we're funded by.
Where this would work different from other lotteries and more like within the concept of lottery economics is how the funding would be used. The jackpot would go to the winners. You'd then have a percentage that goes to be used over the platform for high quality curation.
How this would work would is over several areas. There would be three judges each lottery round selected to curate over specific categories of posts they have certain levels of knowledge over. This being established members of the community whom seemingly express exceptional knowledge in their given areas. To incentivize them to participate. The lottery administration will be funded 10% of the entire jackpot funds given over to the community.
This we believe would improve higher quality content curation. It would encourage a more "attention based" community. Lastly it would help in better distribution across the network.
The case for better distribution across the network is probably the most important case. The reason is that many economist would agree that without proper distribution there is no democracy. This threatens in the eyes of many the very nature of use of blockchain technology.
We'd love to have your assistance in experimenting to hopefully solve this issue once and for all. It seems ever so present on the horizon. Perhaps lottery economics is the answer.