please note: this i no financial advice. it represents just my opinion

Powerball or better known in germany as 6/49 (pronounced "sax ouce noin-und-fearzig") is one of the most famous lottery games i know and the starting point for Trueflip the so called first dezentralized blockchain lottery.

animation from giphy.com


The product (Powerball) was already online months before before the token sale (April 2017) started and that was the first big plus for me. Trueflip has set three goals:

1. fully transparent

(every ticket sold, every win, every payout to investors visible in the blockchain

2. decentralized

(hosting at different data centers works as shutdown or failure protection if some nodes break down

3. sandbox for any lottery

(for private companies, charity, government)

Now on July 28th the token sale ended. They sold 6,247,267 TFL out of 14,700,000 TFL under 1,676 participants. That are only 42,5 % of the provided public supply. The rate was 1 BTC = 2,400 TFL tokens. That resulted in

2070.93 BTC or 5,594,578 USD

That is an average price of 0.8955 USD per TFL token (changes dependent to current Bitcoin rate). Trueflip accepted also Litecoin, Ether and Dash, good service with the current high Bitcoin fees. To attend in an ICO it is often not the regular stuff somebody is doing with a computer but Trueflip had done their best to make the process as easiest as possible.

One wonderful thing was that following statement in the whitepaper

All unsold tokens will be burned.

And that was the second big plus for me because it means that your share will increase the more of tokens are burned. 57,5% now are in heaven and that should mean the dividend for investors has more than doubled already!

animation from giphy.com

But why was that initially a reason for me to invest. I read blogs and message boards before the token sale and done some homework on the ICO. And there were many voices who had strong doubts including me with the lottery. In general if you think to invest in a lottery it's counterintuitive at least at the beginning because gambling is the opposite to investing.

What if they play with my money?

ProjectManhattan, Casino at RWS, size, format von onetin84, CC BY-SA 3.0

A main reason was also because of the 40 % invested in the Jackpot (respective 80 % of the 40 % for first and 20 % of the 40% for the second Jackpot). Do the math now:
The crowdsale resulted in: 5,594,578 USD
40 % of the crowdsale value for Jackpot: 2,237,831 USD
80% of the Jackpot value for Jackpot 1: 1,790,265 USD
20% of the Jackpot value for Jackpot 2: 447,566 USD

They asked:

Why it's necessary to further increase the already existing and filled Jackpot.

After thinking about that argue i decided it was the opposite for me. It would be much more a catalyst for the already successful product in terms of sold tickets. In the gambling sector it's important to provide some big incentive for players to attend the lottery and if you ever experienced the hype of the lottery with a huge Jackpot of multiple Millions or even Billions! of Dollar you know what i meaning. The press, TV and internet place the spotlight on such event and all players an even often people who never played a lottery before think:

Wait a minute! I never played but thats a one in a lifetime chance! If i win this Jackpot i can quit my job forever, if not now, when?!

Because of that i felt even more comfortable with Trueflip if the Jackpot increases and if they will not hiding and running away with the filled pot. AND the doubts during the crowdsale may continue and holding many people back from investing. And it was true, the token sale started slowly in the first phase (0 - 1,000 BTC of 6,125 BTC +30 % bonus). It took many days before the second bonus phase had reached (1,000 - 2,000 BTC +20 %bonus). It was odd for me because if you look at other ICO's they were outsold in one day, hour, minutes or even seconds and here is a great income opportunity (see later), clear written whitepaper, a visible team behind and a already successful product.

The Bigger The BETTER?!

Now, as investor you got a bigger share the more token were burned. But a the same time it's an disadvantage with the lower Jackpot now. If the crowdsale had worked like intented we had instead of $2.23 Million a Jackpot of $5.26 Million and that's a bit more motivating for players to attend. BUT if you look at their website the current Jackpot is at a value around 169,000 USD. The added value via crowdsale is more than tenfold! And think of that currently they sold around 2.000 tickets per day with a price tag of $2.50.

snapshot from Trueflip website

What happens now if they increase the Jackpot more then tenfold?! I think that should drive up the ticket sales significantly as intented by the team and so it's a success nevertheless the Jackpot could be even higher. The plan is to increase the ticket sales at least to 15,000 tickets per day (0.4 % market share globally) and after that if 3 new lotteries are online 50,000 tickets per day with a market share of 1.4 % globally. That sounds promising because as investor you get a payout from every sold ticket (see later)

Don't get me wrong, currently we're still in the beginning, many things can happen from regulation side (see Russia), competition popping up, growth plans are not met, and so on .. but what's sets them apart from the many SCAMS with Ponzi schemes was the logical and realistic roadmap and also the affordable share or dividend for investors.

Hardcapped Token Supply

The distribution contained a hard cap of 21,000,000 TFL tokens. The public crowdsale consisted of 70 % of all created TFL or 14,700,000 token. The remaining 30 % were splitted in

• 20 % (4,200,000 TFL) for the team (the third plus for me)
• 10 % (2,100,000 TFL) for other purposes like escrow, advisors,..

picture from Trueflip whitepaper

Changed Weightings for the distribution?

That means in the end if i assume that the remaining 30 % will properly distributed we get the following distribution of TFL tokens

charts by author

On the left side you see the planned or intended distribution and on the right the realized distribution because of the high amount of burned tokens (8,452,500 tokens or 57.5 %) as i understood.

Should i be concerned of that?

I think a little bit, when that distribution takes place because of the bigger influence of the team. But the majority of tokens or voting power belongs still to the investors and that's good and important. And as investor we vote for the payout percentage between 10 to 15 % of the revenue from ticket sales.

10 to 15% of the ticket sales revenues will be proportionally distributed
between all the TFL Token holders.

That's like a dividend for long term investors. If you think of the continous rising crypto ocean than that dividend works like cost averaging for Bitcoin or Ether and should lead to increase in value over the long term. That was a third big plus for me. Also Trueflip platform works internally with Bitcoin but you can hold the TFL tokens in MEW, Parity, Metamask for example and Trueflip does the conversion to ETH for Reward payouts automatically.

Yesterday i had a conversation via Email with Renato Almeida (legal advisor) because i had a question and i got a prompt answer. That makes me even more confident that the team behind Trueflip will accomplish some great things in the gambling sector on the blockchain in the coming months and years and so i think it's long term opportunity and was a very good organized ICO. Congratulation to Trueflip Team here on steemit!

animation by giphy.com

Lights for blockchain technology are green steemit friends. There are so many promising developments now, exciting times ahead!

Please leave some comments and Vote me Up! Thank you!

What do you think of Trueflip or other approaches like Wagerr? @rkreddy told me about