Gambling on the Win

Looking through the State of the Dapps lists it interesting to note that by far, the two most common applications are gaming and betting with betting taking the top spot by a fair margin. When it comes to usage, betting also attracts a lot of users and pushes large volumes of coins through them.

Look at the numbers of Dice -on EOS, the highest dApp by volume:

$150 million over the last 7 days is more than the complete Steem market cap value. For comparison, Magic Dice on Steem put through $267k. Just like in the 'real' world, when the crypto economy is perceived as bad, people turn to gambling to recoup their losses fast and easy.

The more affected by the recession one is, the more likely they are to turn to games of chance. I have heard a number of people mention things like locking away their liquids so the don't lose everything on dice games. So far, these aren't the high earners. To each their own.

I personally have never been much of a gambler and casinos don't interest me. In my head, I don't have the money to lose and I live by the rule that eventually, the house always wins. I trust digital gambling like those nonsense slot machines even less. At university I met with someone who programmes the payout equations, as by law they must return a certain percentage or they get fined. He said the margin for error is miniscule but it doesn't matter, the house always wins.

Luckily for gambling companies, while a loss carries twice the weight of a win, a big win sticks in the memory far longer than a lot of small losses. It is about providing consistency on the low band loss and exceptions on the wins so to game the player into thinking they are up.

I was writing a little about consistency last night and for me, a lot of small wins has a great deal of value over aiming for one large score. Yes, it takes a lot of work but considering I haven't bought in that much, consistency of work and proof of brain has led me to a point where I have a fair amount of Steem collected. There is risk of course but time and effort put in is always a potential loss in investing into and building personal position, unless crossing fingers and going for a lottery win.

Part of our nature as humans is to search for shortcuts through life, heuristics to evaluate, habits to act and hope for financial freedom. Luck always plays a role but if our process plays a hand that luck can more easily find and leverage, the better our chances.

How I see it is that we are all pretty lucky to be in crypto and on Steem early already, for as first adopters of new technology such as this, the chance of benefiting is very high if it pans out. What I wonder is how many of us are playing the game hoping our luck holds, betting that we will keep having opportunities presented to us on a silver platter.

With the understanding I have of the platform, the better the crypto space does, the higher the price of Steem, the less opportunity we have as there will be many more in playing the game. At the moment it is like playing poker at a private table whereas later it will be more like a tournament of thousands where only the last table takes prizes.

As I have said, there are many ways to play the Steem game here and while I might play relatively safe, others prefer to play games of chance with varying degrees of risk. We are all gamblers though in some way as none of life comes with absolute certainty. Well, me saying the house always wins sounds like certainty but it is not a true statement, it is a heuristic I use as a reminder that while the attraction of fast gain is high, slow and steady will perform better on probability.

Game on.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
_{(posted from phone)}

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