New Scratchcard Game Now Available on the Lightning Network: The Start of a Gamified Patreon?

The Lightning Network has provided an array of use cases for Bitcoin, including ones that were previously inconceivable. It is now possible to buy drinks, feed chickens and play casino games and so on.

The latest addition to the Lightning Network is scratch cards. The cards have 0.01 BTC (1 million Satoshis) which is equivalent to $40 at the current rates. Given that cards cost a few cents in Bitcoin, this is certainly a good deal.

How the Lightning Scratchcard Works

Similar to typical scratch cards, these cards are designed in a way that the content is covered. Players have to scratch away pixel to disclose the information hidden in a particular card in exchange for Satoshis. The rewards are paid through the Lightning Network. All players are listed as funders.

The cost of a scratching a card is dependent on the funding goal of the cards’ creator as well as the length of the content. Also, players are charged an extra 10% on top of the aforementioned funding goal.

For instance, the hidden phrase might contain the private keys to a wallet that has $20 worth of Bitcoin. If the phrase has 12 words with four characters each, it would have a total of 59 characters if spaces are included.

Then, the creator might set a funding goal of 500,000 Satoshis to cover the wallet’s cost. This means that a player would pay 40 cents to scratch each character and effectively have a chance of winning the $20 prize. However, the prize can only be claimed after the entire phrase is revealed, a process which will require 5550,000 Satoshis. The extra 50,000 is the additional 10% charged by the Lightning Scratchcard.

Besides money, other things that may be hidden in the scratch cards include jokes, poems, and even manifestos.

Application Areas

Guilaume Verbal, a developer on the Lightning Network, is confident that scratch cards can be used for many other purposes. He specifically mentioned that it can be used as an alternative to advertising. Instead of hiding phrases, creators could hide articles that only become viewable after the funding goal is realized.

A user on Reddit likened Verbal's idea to communism because the rich are acknowledged as funders, while the poor get free content.

Although it might take time for the scratch card concept to replace existing methods of advertising, the prospect of it certainly exciting.