I was excited to see a decentralized lottery on the blockchain (TrueFlip) so I went in and briefly analyzed their ICO or token sale, here are the results:
Bakground
I was pretty happy to discover that TrueFlip has already built a working product and is conducting BitCoin lotteries regularly! Unlike many crypto-companies which are mostly... well, promises. The ICO and website in general are really comprehensive and well documented, with a level of effort that seems to me defies any posible notion that it may not be a serious business, or a scam-attempt. So far so great!
Disclaimer: I'm not a profesional investor and this isn't investment advice.
ICO
Mixed feelings about this: Their tokens, @ 0.0005 BTC (plus a 20% or less bonus depending when you buy) are definitely selling and already amassed over 1300BTC for the company! At the current rate of the sale however, it seems unlikely they will sell the entire 6125 TFL offered, so some of them will be destroyed to redistribute the share of the investors (which is good) but this also means their initial jackpot after the ICO won't be quite as large as they aspired to (this is bad because less people will want to
Return of Investment
Here's where I have a problem with TFL :T . Look at the following figure:
Straight from https://ico.trueflip.io/
Even at the most optimistic of their projections, selling 100,000 lottery tickets every day (their current use base is around that number today), every 100 TFL only yields you .03 BTC per year. That's less than the sale value of those 100 tokens! And we all know the token value will likely drop drastically at least for the first year like with most ICOs.
Conclusion
TrueFlip is definitely a logical application of decentralized ledgers, but I fear their tokens don't offer good enough rewards to incentivize investment. The true potential of TFL is in the longer term (year plus) if and only if the company really takes off and their token prices surge.
Happy gambling!