[IPO] Teehe - DAO sports book and casino based on Peershares

Sure. However we must wait for Nu to become open-source first. Also, we will rarely use motions I guess as managers will do most of the work. Beside choosing managers of Teehe motions could be use for voting for Marketing strategy, partnering with some exchange, etc.

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@Teehe, excited to learn about new layers being built on top of Nu.

After reading the business plan, I have some questions and doubts, especially one outstanding issue.

When comparing the legal aspects of Nu vs. Teehe you said they are comparable. True, but while the main product of Nu as a DAO is the decentralised network/currency itself, Teehe’s main product is one centralized platform - actually a website from what I read in the business plan.
Without going too much into details, did you consider a strategy to keep that website open/immune from seizing? If you did, it is worth mentioning in the business plan imho.

EDIT: uupps. found a partial answer in OP

Beside classic Internet channels our platform is accessible trough Tor and Namecoin’s p2p DNS system to avoid possible censorship in the future.
Our platform will be exclusively hosted in politically neutral countries with sane and well-implemented privacy laws to ensure safety.
With focus on security, anonymity, and stability we envision a long and fruitful organization.

Secondly, the business leverage an heavy assumption:

Volatility causes professional gamblers to avoid use of digital p2p currencies. Volatility risks made it impossible for them to bet with Bitcoin.

Are you absolutely sure of it? Common sense might suggest this is true, however assumptions derived from common sense derailed many startups. Can you test/prove the assumption? Did you surveyed professional gamblers? Does anybody on the team have experience with professional gambling, especially using bitcoin? Have you talk to failed bitcoin betting businesses ?

Knowing that you tested the aforementioned assumption will make prospect investor much more confident in your business plan.

Another possible weakness in the plan lies, imho, in relying mainly on word of mouth for marketing while declaring that the profits for Teehe comes from commissions on bets (aka you need large volumes) .
I personally consider the below paragraph of the plan a bit weak :

The biggest form of advertising for Teehe is word of mouth advertising. Customers who are happy with the service Teehe provides will let others know about it. These peers are likely in the same demographic that Teehe wants to attract. This form of advertising can be applied to the Internet as well. Teehe stimulates word of mouth advertising. For example, after a customer wins a bet they have the option to share their wager on all the different social media platforms. This expands the traditional word of mouth from one person to a whole network of people.

Finally, where did the name Teehe came from? Except from one entry in urbandictionary I couldn’t find any reference. I personally believe that there is an hard tradeoff here to consider between the originality of the name and the possible harm that it can make in terms of marketing a product with a name difficult to spell/type/remember.

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Yes, as explained in OP we will host the frontend only in countries where privacy is respected and enforced by the law.

This is a nice question from community member, followed by nice answer. I will use it to deliver you answer.

So, what would happen if a government found your servers?

Nothing.
Which government would be responsible in this case?
No government has rules or authority over NuBits and Teehe did not offer service in any nation state specifically.
We broke no laws, this is important to comprehend. Teehe is not illegal.

Even if authorities do seize the server and get around heavy disk encryption, what would they see; a database full of soccer game results and current odds.

Naturally we will have backups of database and wallets and the important stuff will never be on that server.

Technology has come far, Teehe is really not endangered from authorities if we utilize technology properly.

Our threats will come from within crypto-community (hackers, scammers, ddos) and reliance on Nu network and it’s ability to hold the peg.

“Volatility causes professional gamblers to avoid use of digital p2p currencies. Volatility risks made it impossible for them to bet with Bitcoin.”

Are you absolutely sure of it? Common sense might suggest this is true, however assumptions derived from common sense derailed many startups. Can you test/prove the assumption? Did you surveyed professional gamblers? Does anybody on the team have experience with professional gambling, especially using bitcoin?

Yes on every question.

Have you talk to failed bitcoin betting businesses ?

No, as there are no such. At least not some that failed due to business model.

Professionals gamble with Fiat, that is a fact; 99.89% of gamblers gamble with Fiat. Bitcoin is still very much irrelevant in gambling business. Stay with me, I will give you a tour now.
Our managers know this from experience, as they have gambled online before.
What is the gamblers itch we are trying to scratch?

  • Money deposit/withdrawal fees;

Credit card company will take fee, PayPal/Skrill will take a fee, gambling house will take a fee. Those can reach up to 20 USD on each transfer in any direction. Most of people gamble with less than 50 USD at the time. So they loose up to 50% of their stake just to transfer the money.

  • Money transmission delays;

It will take up to two days to get your money to gambling house, even more if you need to withdraw.

  • Fiat to Fiat conversion fees;

Most of gambling houses accept Euro/US Dollar. If customer uses another currency, credit card company or PayPal/Skrill will rob you on conversion rate.

  • Easy taxation on behalf of authorities;

Authorities ignore small time players. However if you score big win, like 5-10-20k Euro governments will try to tax it. Sometime taking as much as 50%. With Fiat you can not hide this money, with cryptcurrency you can.

  • Total loss of privacy;

Your bank, credit card company and goverment can track your activity easily.

  • Seizure of customers funds by bank or credit card company.

This happens sometimes, you can read about it on gambling/betting forums. For no obvious reasons credit card company or PayPal will just take your funds and keep them for months as you try to get it back hopelessly.

What do we solve? All of the above.
We handle USD without handling Fiat, thanks to NuBits.
Customers can use Bitcoin to reach us; Bitcoin is for us what credit card company is to classic gambling house.

Bitcoin is easy to acquire in most of the world, you can buy it in numerous ways ranging from credit cards to ATM’s.
It is also highly liquid and easy to exchange back to Fiat. Best of all you can use Bitcoin to purchase stuff online or even pay the bills.

We allow customers to bypass classic financial institutions while retaining their habits.

imho, in relying mainly on word of mouth for marketing

Indeed, it is poorly worded. Thanks for noticing, we will re-phrase it. It is the case however that we expect our customers to be from similar social circles due to nature of cryptocurrency and crypto economy.

Finally, where did the name Teehe came from?

We have based the name on: http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Tykhe.html
Adopted it to English language and modern demographics.

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good points, Teehe seems to address all of them.

Correct, seizing the server is unlikely. However they will block outgoing connections from their own state to the server (try to access any UK gambling website from another EU IP address). That will put an entry barrier to the service which will impact the user-base.

True, please consider that the network effect will be considerably smaller. People is likely to tell their friends “dude you should check out airbnb for your next trip” but less likely to go around and advertise they gamble online with cryptocurrency.

I just want to add that this will not interfere Teehe much. We still have back-channel via Namecoin p2p domain system. Mostly they block the DNS entry, so IP can not get resolved - Namecoin will handle this. Namecoin is getting easier to use, they even have Firefox/Chrome addon that resolves their DNS on the fly.

Also, Teehe will be under the radar for quite some time. We will have time to adopt to anything.

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There was interesting idea posted in NSR auction motion thread by @tomjoad. It is interesting discussion, we had some similar ideas internally but never polished the thought. While it is in Nu’s best interest that Teehe works, further discussion is needed to see will this work for both DAO’s.

OP @ [Passed] NSR auction motion

Please, share your thoughts. We are interested what will become of this idea.

My example was hypothetical in nature, but it’s interesting to think about.

One important consideration that I think makes your existing fundraising structure more appropriate than an NBT grant is the size of operations. Your fundraising target of 100,000 NBT would simply be too much for the peg to handle at this point with our current liquidity operations, if it was given as a one-time grant. It is also unclear whether shareholders would find Teehe to be overly risky because it operates in gambling. Shareholders would not want to expose themselves to unnecessary risk.

A parallel equity swap would not necessarily be appropriate for fundraising now that I think about it, but as a complementary piece to encourage NuShareholders to use and promote your service. In compensation for access to those network effects, it is likely Teehe would have to offer much more potential equity to NuShareholders than is returned to them in the form of NSR. Although it also introduces the question again of whether NuShareholders want to be holders of Teehe shares due to the risk of the markets it operates in.

Generally speaking my example was intended to highlight the fact that NSR grants can be used creatively, and that NuShareholders would be wise to consider non-conventional grants.

However Teehe will not spend IPO funds at once, but continually over period of 4-6 months. @Peerchemist also reported that he used NuBits to pay 3rd party developers for some Teehe stuff recently as they have learned to appreciate stability of NBT as well.

This is true however.
Despite our attempts to lift the stigma of “risky business” from Teehe it is becoming clear that community is still uncertain about this.

Yes, we agree on this. It is more favourable for both parties to keep things as they are now. Keeping risk of investment in startup to individuals rather than using network funds to get Teehe going. For sake of network it is best to avoid this kind of endeavours.

We see it more appropriate to ask for NBT grant from Nushareholders in the future, once platform is about to become operational and use those funds to boostrap our liquidity reserves.
However, there is still a long way to that point.

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So a manager is someone that has access to the server in which the Web application is installed.
It is also someone that would be in charge of marketing and fund management.
Am I correct?

From the business plan:

Managers are group of persons who are committed to organize funding of Teehe.

Meaning of manager will change after the IPO, now founders are managers and they will get Teehe to some point where DAO is functional. That includes all that is needed to start Teehe, from writing business plan to hiring developers and organising fund-raising as well as writing this post.
Then, after the IPO, shareholders will vote on who will be next manager of operational Teehe.
Role of manager of fully functional Teehe is to run the business, that ranges from hiring extra staff to choosing bet limits. To place it simple, managers will make sure business is profitable for shareholders.

@Peerchemist has designed the web administration interface for future managers, based on similar interfaces from classic sports books. It is website only managers can access and contains all data about Teehe; status of market monitoring bots, status of wallets, currents odds, active wagers and their sum, liquidity, etc.

And only sysadmin has access to actual server, and that is @peerchemist currently.

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From the business plan

Teehe aspires to have its share available to
trade on an exchange shortly after the second round of funding.

and

current
management expects the distribution of these shares to take place a year in the future to
finance an aggressive marketing campaign.

So you expect the shares not being publicly traded for a period of 1-y from the IPO?

Also, I did not find the excel sheet related to the financial highlights.

@Teehe, do you already know which kind of betting/gambling are you going to implement in the first iteration of the product?

This answer is already spread around previous discussion but it might be worthwhile expanding a bit. You already selected the niche of crypto-gamers as target so the question is : what do they like betting/playing on? What is the most attractive game or gamble that can be integrated with feasible level of effort? Moreover, given the nature of the platform I think that people will be attracted by something they cannot bet anywhere else (UK-style) …
Will you allow for users to submit their bets ? “What will be the next cryptocurrency to overcome 1 B in market cap” kind of

Due to open-source nature of Peershares implementation, we will not be able to stop exchanges to start Teehe-shares markets. But we will not actively support it or pursue this idea. We feel that Teehe needs to be stable and profitable before going on open market.

You can request financial sheets, just contact us on BM/email.

We will start with sports. That goes in “sports book” category. UK is famous for its sports book, culture of sports betting is strong in UK; so UK has bet365, Pinnacle, Williams, Stanlybet, …

It is not niche, it is mainstream.

We have studied how big gambling houses work (the ones mentioned above), they all offer sports and base on that. After they attract enough customers and reach certain volume they expand in casino games; namely Poker as the most popular and than roulette and other simpler games.

They do this to achieve constant volume, as sports gambling varies greatly with season. Volume of bets is much higher during the finals of UEFA champions league than in summer when most of team sports in Europe are inactive.

You can read upon this subject, papers were released on this tactics.
Fact remains, sports gambling is number one; that is why we start with it.

Contrary, we don’t have to aim for something exotic to offer customers. As we have stated before in answer directed to you we aim to offer better experience to classic gamblers; like the ones you find in UK and who favour team sports.

Sure, that is quite simple to implement.

Ok. Are you using any specific feed for quotes? Subscription to reliable feeds with quotes can cost up to several hundred thousands dollars a year, or at least that was the state of industry a few years ago. I hoped it changed

Well the UK gambling market is so unique because it does offer exotic bets. “When will Blair lose 35% of his hairs” attracts betters. Not exploiting this kind of unique bets you can only place in an free-from-regulamentation environment is a loss opportunity, imho.

It is stated in business plan how will we get the odds. Web scraping, there are some alpha implementation of such bots already finished. It works, and works well. And don’t ask silly questions about this, it really works. :smile:
This is what we refer to as “market monitoring bots”, and by using those bots we get more data sources than just one feed provider and can notice any change in odds, from any provider.

As for subscriptions - that was original plan yes. And it costs about $9000 a month.
However, Teehe does not exist so it is not possible to sign contract and deliver bank payment.

As stated in business plan, Teehe has extremely low running expenses due to this - we don’t exist so we don’t have to buy licences. We have turned show-stopper to strength.

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We know that, and as stated before - that is easy to implement and will be implemented. However, sports are priority. Customers will judge the platform basing on sports - if we do sports right only thing left is to expand.

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One more thing about “Market monitoring bots”, they will allow Teehe to monitor every aspect of the sports gambling market. By gathering and standardizing that data we open a whole lot of other options like implementing bots that will tweak the odds offered by the Teehe depending on the situation on the market to implementing neural network to run this segment instead of manager - reducing risk of error, reducing operational costs and moving Teehe to true autonomous organization. Machines can do the work.

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