If you could open up a savings account where you lost 10% upon opening it but earned 1% a day, would you do it? That’s the tantalizing proposition behind P3D, a disruptive new economic experiment cloaked in the sheep’s clothing of a controversial lottery type of game on the Ethereum blockchain.

How It Works

Created by an anonymous group of developers under the name Team JUST, P3D (or, PoWH3D, which stands for Proof of Weak Hands 3D) is a cryptocurrency trading platform. Using a browser extension like Metamask or Trustwallet, you exchange Ethereum (ETH) from your own digital wallet into an open-sourced, fully-automated smart contract (smart contracts are digital contracts that “help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman,” according to blockgeeks.com) for P3D tokens.

[Read ‘Digital Gold’ for an overview on cryptocurrency]

But there’s a catch: Every transaction is taxed 10%, whether you’re buying, selling, or re-investing your P3D tokens back into the contract. That 10% fee is then distributed among all P3D token holders by the proportion of their holdings in the platform. As the amount of ETH in the contract rises, so does the value of the tokens to buy and sell.

Although there are negative articles out there about this practice, it’s really more the case that both new and old investors are rewarded—and punished—alike for participation. Those with “weak hands,” meaning those who sell before earning enough dividends to recoup their combined 20% entrance-exit fees are really the only ones to lose at this game.

First P3D, Then, FOMO3D

These days, selling at a loss is getting hard to do. Launched only this March, P3D exploded on the scene, running up as much as 20,000 ETH (~$9.6M today) by the beginning of April. Promising its players future interconnected games that will reward those with “strong hands,” Team JUST created an addictive addition, Fomo3D.

Designed as a type of lottery-style game that pays dividends, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) 3D offers a jackpot fueled by ETH token buys called “keys.”

Greed Is the Key to These Blockchain Games

With the current pot scaling well over 21,000 ETH (~$10M) at the time of writing this article and no end to the timer in sight, why would anyone ever play this game? Why does anyone ever buy a lottery ticket?

At its heart, the P3D-Fomo3D ecosystem is an audacious socioeconomic experiment fueled by the bottomless pit of human greed. Through compounding my dividends alone, I quadrupled my ETH in a single weekend. As the F3D contract took off July 20–21, clocking an impressive 15,000+ users and 80,000+ ETH (yes, that is more than $38 million dollars), P3D also skyrocketed from less than 8,000 ETH in the contract to over 49,000 ETH in the same time period. Fearing it to be a Ponzi scheme or potential victim of Ethereum miner manipulation, critics of P3D have tried to dismiss it as yet another crypto-based exit scam.

However, what Team JUST has created is truly remarkable: a financial ecosystem where saving and re-investing is rewarded, powered by a feedback loop of aspirational avarice. The global desire for passive income is on full display here. With the contracts currently at 60,000 ETH for P3D and over 21,000 ETH in the pot for F3D (at the time of writing), almost .1% of the 100M Ethereum token supply is out of circulation—in less than three weeks.

Granted, in the five more rounds that have played since then by the time of this post, the volume of ETH has slowed dramatically. Nonetheless, seeing how there are less than 17,000 and 20,000 user addresses in P3D and F3D respectively, Fomo3D offers a tsunami of opportunity for those invested in the P3D platform. Team JUST has created a relentless dividend machine, set to run in perpetuity, so long as there is an Ethereum blockchain.

The Implications of This Blockchain Technology

The implications of this game have already tantalized the online pseudo-economists out there. P3D has been called a potential application for UBI (universal basic income). The trustless nature of peer-reviewed, open source, automated smart contracts inspires confidence in potential welfare reform. Can you imagine a credit union where every time someone makes a transaction, your savings account gets a piece of the action?

Obviously, this is an opinion piece. I have HODLed (held) P3D since April. Having seen so much “journalism” around the breakout debut of Fomo3D, I felt it was worth putting something together from an insider’s point of view, someone who actually has skin in the game. The self-righteous and snarky ignorance of outsiders pathologically spreading misinformation (which really could have been avoided by just reading the F3D and P3D wikis) through normally reputable crypto journalistic outlets needed to be tempered with a dose of inside baseball.

Eventually, with the continued popularity of Fomo3D games, significant portions of ETH will be sucked out the system, pumping its price – and your P3D bags. Team JUST has already promised more games and content to come, with future games to feed into the P3D system (the developers have even released a SDK (software development kit)!). Stay more than 20 minutes in the P3D Discord, and you will see the full creativity of potential new games

Learn more about P3D and F3D, as well as on BlacksinBitcoin.com. Disclaimer: Edwardo Jackson is invested in POWH3D and Fomo3D. This is not financial advice. He is not a financial adviser.