There has been a rise in gambling apps on the Steem Blockchain this year but a bomb was dropped recently with a first Exit Scam from Magic-Dice. This made my personal favorite gambling game Moonsteem also close down today (in a proper way) and overall confidence on the gambling apps on the platform is at an all-time low currently maybe creating an opportunity for Scorum to take a part of this market.
First off, when looking at what is going on with the scorum devs, it looks like there are somewhat in an exit scam themselves making sure the price goes as low as possible to be able to throw the towel afterward without getting in legal trouble. (This is the most sensible explaination that would make some sense right now). This post just in case this is not what is going on...
The main issue with gambling dapps on Steemit is that it is very much a legal grey zone since none of them actually have a gambling licence. It was one of the reasons Moonsteem ended their operation because they were not willing to reveal their identity. The same thing probably goes with nearly all the gambling games on Ethereum / Tron / EOS.
For as far as I understand, Scorum does have a real gambling license and is allowed to host similar games on their platform. I'm not a legal expert and right now I'm just building on the idea that it's possible.
Gambling Games Model
The trending model on all the gambling dapps is that players earn tokens by playing and get part of the losses from future players in the form of dividends. This model is somewhat of a ponzi where people are willing to make losses thinking they will recover those over time with the dividends they will receive. (and it works because many were gambling like crazy just to earn tokens). Another problem with this model is that owners can play their own game losing against themselves and getting a big part of the tokens that way giving back less to actual players.
Moonsteem tweaked this model in a way that seemed to work a lot better, was fair and looked to be more sustainable over time. They allowed investors to act as part of the bankroll they use to pay out the winners and collect from the losers. This pretty much guaranteed dividends to investors who also were at risk for losses since the game had a 2% edge. Only 25% of the dividends were paid to the ones who had tokens earned by playing / leasing / investing / affiliates. They also had a lottery model where players could win nice upvotes on their Steemit blog post.
I wrote a Review on Moonsteem here on Scorum mentioning that this model could also work for this platform. If the price of SCR is ever going to go up it needs a real use case and "a blogging platform for Sports Associations that shares unexisting advertisement revenue" clearly is not going to work. Sports Betting along with Gambling apps where it's possible for people to play and invest their SCR to earn dividends really has the potential to make this platform more attractive again. I know it's unlikely that this will happen, but one can only dream :-)
My Moonsteel Final Results
I had a clear plan going into Moonsteem and it worked out exactly as hoped. Over time I increased my Steem investment in it to 500 Steem and managed to earn 49 STEEM in dividends and Upvotes after substracting my playing losses in about 2-3 months time.
It will be interesting to see how the centralized bookmaker the development team say they are working on will play out here on Scorum. First, we are all still waiting on the highly anticipated post from @vlad with an update...
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