An alternative model for variable pot sizes is to have a much larger guarantor (or a pool of guarantors), and then run rolling lotteries. Rather than playing against the pool, you’re just playing against the guarantor, and you could set the pot size you wanted to draw up to (e.g. your $1000 donation could give you a 10% shot at a $10k pot, or a 1% shot at a $100k pot). The pot size should probably be capped (say, at $150k), both for the reasons Paul/Carl outlined re diminishing returns, and to avoid pathological cases (e.g. a donor taking a $100 bet on a billion dollars etc). Because you don’t have to coordinate with other donors, the lottery is always open, and you could draw the lottery as soon as your payment cleared. Rather than getting the guarantor to allocate a losing donation, you could also ‘reinvest’ the donations into the overall lottery pool, so eventually the system is self-sustaining and doesn’t require a third-party guarantor. [update: this model may not be legally possible, so possibly such a scheme would require an ongoing guarantor]
This is more administratively complex (if only because we can’t batch the manual parts of the process to defined times), but there’s a more automated version of this which could be cool to run. At this stage I want validate the process of running the simpler version, and then if it’s something there’s demand for (and we have enough guarantor funds to make it feasible) we can look into running the rolling version sometime next year.
An alternative model for variable pot sizes is to have a much larger guarantor (or a pool of guarantors), and then run rolling lotteries. Rather than playing against the pool, you’re just playing against the guarantor, and you could set the pot size you wanted to draw up to (e.g. your $1000 donation could give you a 10% shot at a $10k pot, or a 1% shot at a $100k pot). The pot size should probably be capped (say, at $150k), both for the reasons Paul/Carl outlined re diminishing returns, and to avoid pathological cases (e.g. a donor taking a $100 bet on a billion dollars etc). Because you don’t have to coordinate with other donors, the lottery is always open, and you could draw the lottery as soon as your payment cleared. Rather than getting the guarantor to allocate a losing donation, you could also ‘reinvest’ the donations into the overall lottery pool, so eventually the system is self-sustaining and doesn’t require a third-party guarantor. [update: this model may not be legally possible, so possibly such a scheme would require an ongoing guarantor]
This is more administratively complex (if only because we can’t batch the manual parts of the process to defined times), but there’s a more automated version of this which could be cool to run. At this stage I want validate the process of running the simpler version, and then if it’s something there’s demand for (and we have enough guarantor funds to make it feasible) we can look into running the rolling version sometime next year.