I am a mathematician, and at the same time I can't resist the temptation to purchase the occasional lottery ticket. What most people miss about the lottery is that there can be utility to variance - the opposite of ennui.

Have you guys read The Lottery in Babylon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon

I gain happiness also from the miniscule hope of the life-altering outcome of winning the lottery.

That gain in happiness is occasionally worth the price of a lottery ticket.

I'm not an expert, but seems to me this feeling is also the main driver leading to gambling addiction, which ultimately leads to addicts saying things like "It's not about the money, but the game itself", after having lost a ton of money.

Wonder if Yotta can lead to the same addiction, and if so if it is then solely applied for positive objectives (i.e. saving money), or lowers the barrier to entry for other gambling schemes that are less beneficial.

But the odds are on a completely different level of impossibility in lottery that I just cant really get your end of the argument :/

If I were poorer, I suspect the happiness I gained from the lottery ticket purchases would be even greater.

If I already owned a home, on the other hand, I would value the lottery ticket hopes much lower.

Buying a lottery ticket from time to te, when the prize was big, made us live in a fantasy world between the time we bought it and when te results were announced. I think this thing - imagining a life without financial worries, lavish vacations and expensive toys, motivated me to learn more, try to launch a few startups and sacrifice my free time in order to try and achieve greatness.

Were those money well spent? Definitely yes (even though I haven't actually won the lottery)

Tbh lottery tickets can be a pretty cheap form of hope relative to other forms of gambling. Take a look at some of RobinHood's customers who are ”investing”. The odds seemed so favorable until they realized 95% of traders lose their money.

I own my home. It's an objectively bad investment (my tech stocks sure appreciated more than a home I bought in 2008 before the crash :) But I like the feeling that comes with owning a home.

I go out for dinner. (Well, used to). It's objectively a waste of time and money, but I still like the feeling that comes with it.

I play guitar. There's no EV attached to it (in fact, people might pay me to stop ;) but there's still an emotional payoff.

The same goes for the lottery. For some people, there's entertainment value in it, despite understanding the mathematics of it. If you've ever played poker for money - unless you're exceptionally good, you paid money to sit around a table in a smoky room. EV is negative, emotional experience is a lot of fun. (Yeah, poker isn't entirely chance, but I promise that unless you're pretty good at it and spent a lot of time learning, it's pretty much equivalent)

A lottery that doesn't have a winner sounds rotten and I don't think you'd eat rotten food from a restaurant, no matter how much you accept that inherent EV of the transaction is negative. There are many, many more words that can and have been written about the psychology of lotteries, but suffice to say, for many lottery players, it's not as simple as "I know that the EV < 1, I'm just playing for the entertainment value".

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...

Will definitely check out The Lottery in Babylon!

Actually even then, it wouldn't make sense to hold your e-fund in a volatile asset.

- The Garden of Forking Paths - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - The Lottery in Babylon - The Library of Babel - Funes the Memorious - The Secret Miracle - Three Versions of Judas - Death and the Compass

You will not regret it. :)

The way I understood the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern on game theory, there is an extensive discussion of utility and the derived ordering on preferences.

I interpret recent work on behavioral economics as building on their work to call into question the claim that one can easily estimate such a utility function for an economic agent in a manner invariant to the internal state of that agent.

This train of thought seems like it should leave laissez faire capitalism in the dust.

utility is neat in theory, but seems to be messy in practice. it's one thing to spell out the relationship, but another to calculate an analytic solution (from my limited mathematical experience, navier-stokes comes to mind in this regard).

Is there any reasonably accessible literature on this topic, in particular the latter idea of not being able to estimate an agent’s utility function?

1. Von Neumann and Morgenstern's book (particular the sections where they develop the notion of utility) is pretty readable - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483055.Theory_of_Games_a...

2. The Economic Naturalist (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629238.The_Economic_Natu...). It is a great compilation of economic edge cases which show that the notion of utility is not so easy to capture using the standard "narrowly self-interested economic agents" world view. It requires a lot of subjective interpretation.

3. The Honest Truth about Dishonesty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honest_Truth_about_Dishone...). Shows how contextually dependent utility (if it is at all quantifiable) can be.

4. The body of work around the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...). In particular we can see how the dynamics of simulations using rational agents diverge from the dynamics of experiments involving actual humans. This suggests that the utility assumptions used in economic analyses do not reflect whatever notion of utility that could actually apply to human behavior.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/konnikova-biggest-bluff/

I'm currently getting 2% from a non-FDIC insured institution, but there are many examples of FDIC-insured accounts with far greater returns.

Axos - 1.09% https://www.axosbank.com/Personal/Savings/High-Yield-Savings

CIT - .95% https://www.cit.com/cit-bank/bank/savings/savings-builder-ac...

T-Mobile Money - 4% (up to $3,000) https://www.t-mobilemoney.com/en/home.html

I'm a large fan of behavioral finance (read Misbehaving, in Thinking Fast & Slow), etc. -- but this feels like a huge disadvantage to be giving people. Unless you have math that says the average winnings people will get will make up for the .7-8% difference you see other institutions giving?

- Is that only for the average or also for the median?

- Is the data published anywhere (would love to see distribution curve)?

- Are the calculations assuming someone is saving every week? Or has it also been tested monthly / bi-monthly?

- When someone gets a "windfall", do they keep it in their account or do they withdraw it? (i.e. no longer savings but spent in some sort of celebration)

- Is this using an actual random number generator in which case there will be long-tails of people winning much more as well as losing much more? Or is there some sort of engine that ensures everyone gets something?

- It's purely probabilistic so it doesn't need to be tested. It's just random number math.

- Wins are deposited into your Yotta account and are immediately available to withdraw if you'd like

- It's an actual random number generator

The variance should be relatively low for deposits in the 5 figures and above. See the results of my calculations below, based in part on the spreadsheet linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781247

If one holds $10K in the account, one should get 400 entries a week, and the expected number of times to hit each prize under $1 is between 1 and 9 times every week. I calculate the equivalent interest rate from the <$1 prizes alone is about 2.02%.

The $10 and $15 prizes should be hit about once every 2-3 months, and add about another 1.16% to the expected winnings.

Since the $300 and up prizes are split amongst all winners, it's hard to calculate the expected value, but assuming 10 million entries a week, the EV of the larger prizes is adds about 0.42% extra per year, with the vast majority coming from the expected value of the $5.8 million prize.

I believe that would be very unlikely for one to get below the equivalent of 2% interest over a few months if they held tens of thousands of dollars in an account, with the median outcome being around 3.4%. One could run a simulation to confirm this.

That is how I personally interpreted this statement from the OP:

> We provide a rate of return on savings that on average is in-line with the top yielding savings accounts out there like Marcus or Ally.

If that is true, then you're either choosing to earn your ~1-2% interest rate slowly but surely (in one of the high-yield savings accounts you listed) or in "batches" (using Yotta). It makes sense to me why people would prefer the latter. It also makes sense to me why many people here on HN would prefer the former.

If people who are already saving in a high yield savings account move all of their funds to this, that’s almost entirely on them.

On the other hand, if this entices people who aren’t saving at all to start saving, that’s a huge advantage for them.

Also describing the lottery mechanism without any gotcha is the right thing to do for consumers, and being in the unique position you are, you have the opportunity to lead that change.

That sounds like a super-awful kind of savings account, but I think this argument assumed that many numbers-game players' next-most-preferred use of the money they would bet on it was even less like savings, so it could still be helpful by pulling money away from other things. Of course, that's a pretty big and pretty specific assumption.

This project and the idea that inspired it are a way better form of savings because the savers can actually access their principal and don't actually have to pay the bank.

First, the difference between being mistaken and lying is intent. The site guidelines call for being charitable. So unless you can prove intent, don't call out someone for lying.

Second: Just saying someone is wrong/mistaken/lying turns into a five-year-old's argument: "Am not!" "Are too!" That's not a useful conversation, nor even an interesting one. Instead, supply some evidence that the rest of us can look at and judge whether you're right. (Actual evidence might even convince the person you were replying to - some of us here do actually listen to facts from time to time.)

When you interview for a job, and the salary is 100k, should they advertise it as 70k?

I note from your comments the socially-laudable aim of attempting to help people in financially vulnerable populations. I wonder if emulating more elements of a lottery-like game would assist with this... EG imagine if I could walk into a shop, buy what looks and feels like a lottery ticket, but I've actually effectively added money to my phone-number linked savings account. I think there would be real power there, but naturally real logistical complexity also.

Appreciate the feedback.

Another thought is that while it is true that in the UK a large number of the population have PBs, these are usually bought by their parents when they are born. I still have my PB account that was set up by my parents, but I wouldn't consider it a tool for saving. Most people's balance in PBs are a tiny proportion of their total savings. Yotta's 0.2% base rate might change that behaviour though!

Building trust is definitely a challenge for us as a new company. Funds with Yotta are FDIC insured up to $250,000, which helps, and we communicate that to users, but people still need to trust us fundamentally.

We looked into Premium Bonds and also found that a lot of Premium Bond ownership comes from older generations. We are hoping that our UI and mobile first approach make the concept more appealing to a younger demographic in the U.S.

Does that mean that one could essentially get a list of your customers (that won in a particular week) if someone requests the winners every week? Over time one could figure out about how much each customer has in their savings account.

What information is released on the winners list? I'm not sure if I'd be willing to sign up for an account where my personal information would be released publicly if I "won" a 10 cent prize.

We also allow you to be completely anonymous from the privacy settings within the app.

Based on this, I think someone with $10000 deposited would appear in the winners list about 4 times a year, assuming those that win the $15 prize appear on the list of winners.

In the UK, no such list is published. Nor is it published for lottery winners (you can opt to be anonymous, which is the default option).

> Potential winner will be notified via the App or using the email address / phone number provided with the entry or on file with the Sponsor. Failure by potential Sweepstakes winner to respond to the initial verification within two (2) days of notification will result in disqualification.

This rule, unfortunately, makes the savings scheme unattractive to someone who cannot access the "App" or email or phone for extended periods of time.

For those of us that enjoy variance - I wonder if you could make it so we could generate our own payout structure than could never get above what you are setting as "EV API"

Based on my back of the envelope calculations you are still running at less than 1% API, but I could be wrong (still need to run the exact numbers)

I'm not sure exactly how the legality works, and I understand that you need to make your money, but I do think it is an interesting (if not an MVP) option to allow advanced users to tinker with the amount of variance - perhaps I want to support your project in encouraging better savings but I want closer to no variance, perhaps I don't care about 1% a year but I want the chance of something more life changing...

Yotta solves this with an amazing approach. You get the long term reward of saving money at the some time that you get the exciting possibility of winning a short time reward. It's genius.

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%ADtulo_de_capitaliza%C3%A...

That Wikipedia article is very skeptical toward this instrument. Notably, it looks like the typical implementation is like a Certificate of Deposit in the U.S., where the depositor's money is locked up for a fairly long period of time. At least one author of the Wikipedia article suggests that it would be more advantageous for depositors to use a regular interest-bearing deposit instrument. I guess that criticism doesn't address whether it's succeeding in getting some people to save who otherwise might not save at all, and might also be less applicable when the depositor doesn't have to wait a super-long time to make withdrawals.

That means all the third parties would have to be corrupt to corrupt the results. So if you can pick a diverse set of third parties such that everyone is likely to trust at least one of them, that will raise overall trust.

But you can do better than that.

You can also have people provide their own random input. In that case they will certainly trust themselves, and therefore can trust the results if they can verify the combination step.

And you can draw input from public sources that people can check for themselves, and have confidence is effectively random, in the sense that nobody can control the values. For example public blockchain hashes (as part of a combining scheme, not by themselves).

These sorts of schemes would give people absolute assurance that the drawn numbers are fair and uncorruptible, and they aren't difficult to implement.

(PM me if you'd like to discuss further. Email in profile.)

If you get to choose or influence any of the inputs and (for the most part) know the others, you can influence the result. I.e. choose from a set of outcomes, or at least influence outcome probabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provably_fair

https://github.com/search?q=provably+fair

It's also very easy to provide the auditing tool. (I did it, long ago. Basically a form.)

A. Improves the transparency of the process

B. Improves the entertainment proposition of the gamble aspect of hitting the jackpot.

Maybe with a live event you can do both at once.

They have no access to the numbers users have selected, so it's completely blind.

Companies wrongfully fight unemployment claims all the time to keep their insurance rates down. It would be awful tempting for the insurance agency to send you the drawn numbers even ever so slightly early and let you alert them so they can redraw if the jackpot was ever awarded.

It actually would be beneficial for us for someone to win the jackpot, and not beneficial for the insurer. The marketing benefit of a $10 million payout that an insurance company pays for would be huge for us. That's why the number drawing process is double blind. They choose the winning numbers and they can't see the picks. We can't see the winning numbers but we can see the picks.

Also since this type of insurance is purely mathematical, the risk doesn't change for an insurer if someone wins, so the price wouldn't change either. Unlike, say pet insurance, where if Bulldogs get sick more often than you thought, the insurer simply mispriced the risk.

This type of insurance is impossible to misprice. It's almost like a casino for the insurers. There is risk but no uncertainty of what the risk is and the odds are in your favor when you write more premium.

A simple one (not necessarily anywhere close to the best that cryptography people have come up with) is to combine several sources of randomness in a prearranged time order and format, and use the result as input into a prearranged cryptographic hash function. At least some of those sources should be publicly verifiable, and at least one of those should be https://beacon.nist.gov/home. I can think of critiques and limitations in this approach, but it's a good start!

Edit: someone elsewhere in this thread has given a link to a more sophisticated method.

We would be able to spot anomalies over time in number of winners of high prizes vs. what the probabilities say, and we would investigate it if anything looked off or suspicious.

We also carefully vetted the insurance co. and the people there that we work with.

These don't eliminate this risk entirely of course, but they help mitigate it.

The difference in the U.S is that there has been legislation explicitly supporting prize-linked savings, which didn't exist in South Africa. It was more of a grey area there.

A great academic read on the FNB MaMa program here: http://beniverson.org/papers/MaMa.pdf

Few comments:

1. Product: It in the wide spectrum anywhere between savings account <-> lottery. In your mind, is it closer to one edge vs. other? - Per my read and based on the rate (0.2%) offered, it is closer to the lottery end

2. Web page: "Savings + rate >15-100x banks + Win $10 mil" is what could be a turn off. Depending on the answer above, fix the headline

3. math on how this works: Show ONE public account with $ (say median of all accounts on Yotta or $100 for simplicity) that you would fund and track it in realtime with APY

4. FAQ: Could be more direct. Yes, one will need a Yotta account

5. FAQ: "3rd party “A” rated insurance carrier": May help you if you can reveal who on your website & theirs too

6. FAQ: In one answer, it say 15x and in another it say 20x (Chase or Wells Fargo)

7. 7 digits = 10 ^ 7 #s: if one can get 1000 users with $250K each, is the $10 mil guaranteed? :)

Edit: for readability

1. We don't really think of it as being closer to one vs the other. From a front-end perspective, it's closer to a lottery/sweepstakes. But from a back-end perspective it's more of a savings account with a twist. So maybe I'd say right smack in the middle of that spectrum on a blended basis.

2. Thanks for the feedback here

3. Good idea. I like that

4. Fair

5. Agreed. Will update

6. Thanks - will fix that

7. I think your math is off on this one. Numbers are 1-70 and the special number YottaBall is 1-25, so lots more combos than that.

From the website: > Mailing In. You can receive one (1) Ticket by sending a handwritten sheet of paper with your name, address, e-mail, and phone number to: 45 East 22nd St. #26B New York, NY 10010. For each completed sheet of paper, you will receive one (1) Ticket. If you want to select your own numbers you should include those numbers on the sheet of paper. If you do not provide numbers, they will be randomly provided. Limit of one request per envelope. The entry will award a Ticket for the drawing that starts on the next Monday, after the mail in was received (not postmarked). ... Limit of 10,000 Tickets per person per week, regardless of method of obtaining a Ticket.

We prohibit automated entries though and each mail-in entry needs to be handwritten sent in its own envelope. The postage costs more than the EV of one entry, so we don't expect this to be an issue.

From my research, it sounds like, because prize linked savings accounts are so new in the US, it's unclear whether requiring someone to have an account would count as consideration. By offering an AMOE are you taking a conservative position on this until it's more clear? Or, has a judge/court ruled on this?

I was involved in a sweepstakes at a bank a couple years ago and we took a similar route as you, offering a mail in AMOE, requiring handwritten entries. Without any marketing, we received several thousand entries, mostly from people who mail in entries to every sweepstakes they find.

More detail here, a quick scan showed it to be reasonably in line with my outdated knowledge on the topic, at least... https://gleam.io/guides/no-purchase-necessary

I don't know the economics around acquisition/retention in this space (or much about revenue streams from a user...) but it seems like the core offerings of challenger banks and banking in general are relatively fungible and that long term success will really come down to how efficient you are on gaining and keeping your base from going elsewhere. However, I've also read on how the markets challenger banks are aiming at are greenfield in comparison to the established players, so there may be room for lots of small players for a good while. I'm really interested in how Yotta/this space is going to diversify in the future since the inherent location moat of the brick and mortar banks (i.e. you had to bank at what was nearby - nobody was going to the next state over to bank) doesn't exist and the core banking products (checking/savings/loans) are generally the same. Who comes out on top in the long run - the banks with specialized offerings that generate more revenue per user, or ones that only do the regular banking products but are super operationally efficient? When and how will consolidation happen/is scale the most important thing? Just doing some personal spitballing here, as I doubt there is anything here you guys haven't already thought of.

As another former finance person now in consumer analytics/tech (coincidentally, also Penn/Wharton '14) it's always cool to see more work being done on the product and creation side. Would love to chat/connect to see if I could be helpful (selfishly, I'd like to learn more about your guys' work.) Of course, no strings attached and no pressure at all.

Best of luck!

I do have a couple of questions/concerns/comments, which I'm posting here for everyone's benefit:

1) Have you thought about slowly increasing the jackpot as your customer base grows? That would add another fun element to see the jackpot grow every time nobody hits it (could be in very small steps)

2) Is there any way to verify your partnership with Evolve Bank, other than on your own website? That would give me more peace of mind before depositing a larger balance and recommending it.

3) I agree that posting the name of the insurance company would help trust in the lottery system. Live drawings and/or the insurance company publishing the numbers on their website will definitely help, too. Out of curiosity, given that the insurance company doesn't know the picks beforehand, how do they ensure that you don't alter a pick after the fact to hit the jackpot?

4) Privacy: I agree that the default setting should be invisible. Same goes for friends, as the definition of "friend" seems to be anybody who has my phone # in their contacts. I'd like the functionality of adding individual people via an ID and/or QR Code for friendly competitions. Does the invisible setting also allow to stay anonymous in the scenario of winning the jackpot? The T&C's say otherwise but I wonder if it's legally possible for you to disclose customer data without explicit consent (does accepting T&Cs count as explicit consent)?

5) App User Experience: I'd keep the lottery results and winnings of the current week on the main page until Sunday is over and reset on Monday. It was a little weird at first to log in at 9:05PM on Sunday and see everything blank. Also, a fingerprint/password prompt would increase the feeling of security.

Curious to hear your feedback and awaiting tonight's numbers draw!

2) Yes - some people have emailed Evolve directly. If you email them, they'll confirm the partnership.

3) We have a system where we send them an encrypted file that has all the picks. We can't alter that file after we send it to them.

4) Thanks for this feedback. Yes you could stay anonymous on winning the jackpot.

5) Thanks for this feedback as well. We will be considering both of these things.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Not very useful but I guess if you have 81B in cash laying around, it makes sense to put your money in Yotta over some large banks! Of course that should probably not be in cash but hey, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your 81B dollars.

If you limit the savings options to tried and trusted savings vehicles - savings account, total bond market, total US market and total international - perhaps you can instill investment knowledge in the users on top of the good savings practices.

That said, it was a fun idea. Instead of picking lottery numbers, ranking tickers in the right order, and then pulling a date out of a hat? Something that only operates on past data?

But to be fair, we didn't think too deeply about the exact time and probably should have, so we will think about this some more.

> While technically not "interest," you receive a savings bonus every month that functions very similarly to "interest." Savings bonuses are paid on the first of every month and are based on your average balance in Yotta from the previous month.

How do taxes work with these "savings bonuses". Do you issue a 1099-INT for this money earned or does this show up on a W-2G?

Of course, the $50 person has nothing to lose, but there's also a sense of dejection.

Perhaps a cap on the total number of tickets an account can have?

Someone else having more tickets than you doesn't really affect you other than the potentially splitting the bigger prizes, but having more depositors also helps us offer bigger prizes in the first place, so it's somewhat circular.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781247

We are considering rolling out the ability to fund accounts with debit cards in the near future, but the transaction fees are quite high. That's the drawback.

We would love to find a way to hook into Venmo or Cash App, but we've yet to find a feasible way to make it work seamlessly. If anyone has ideas on how we could do that, e-mail me at adam@withyotta.com as I would love to chat on this topic.

Here in the UK it used to be common for children to receive premium bonds as birthday gifts from grandparents who have no idea what children actually want.

  For the sweepstakes aspect, not considering the splits for larger prize money, the expected value is ~ $0.02 for every $25 you put in.

  The APY here seems to be 0.2% which seems to be lower than Ally which offers 1.1%.

  Though, the aim seems to be to “gamify” baking.

From the privacy policy, I see this:

> In addition, we may, from time to time, offer promotions with various businesses, websites, mobile applications or third parties, which may include opportunities for you to earn deposits within your Yotta account.

It sounds like you are just sharing our information with advertisers.

Edit: I know you addressed this in the post, but I don't see earning money on interest in accounts as a very sustainable business from a VC point of view.

On the VC side - the Premium Bond program has generated $100 billion in deposits. The UK is a fifth the size of the U.S in terms of population. Premium Bonds isn't completely apples to apples (it's run by the gov and has been around for 60 years), but if we can capture Premium Bond magic in the US, earning small interest on a massive deposit base can be a big business. We also plan to offer other revenue-generating banking services as we grow, like other neobanks have done.

Can you elaborate more on this? (Maybe you can't because of the SEC?) APY of Ally is 1.0% right now, vs. 0.20%, so are the expected value of winnings 0.8%?

Odds from here: https://www.withyotta.com/official-rules

I might be completely wrong but looks like your estimate yield is heavily dependent of amount of other people saving as well.

I bet the real model gets pretty damn interesting. Would love to get a closer look for sure.

If you wanted to be a bit more "evil genius". It would be interesting if somehow the money in the grandprize grew based on how many people participated. This would give people incentive to join and lower the overall EV for everyone, but also give you guys more funds to manage :)

- Odds for the $0.20, $0.80 prizes are slightly off.

- The $15 and below prizes are not split between participants, so one would not need to consider the number of other entries for winning those prizes.

If one just considers the $15 and below prizes, I think the odds work out to about 3.2% per year, making it about a 3.4% expected interest total.

For this to have the societal impact ya'll seem to want, it's going to need high usage from people who probably have little experience with the changes in the Fed rate and its impact on savings accounts. You obviously need to adjust to this yourself, but I can see changes in lottery odds (or changes in prize value) as being aggravating to users.

If you are new to crypto you can access it easily using wallets like: https://www.argent.xyz/

https://www.longgame.co/

Seeing that it's effectively a 3% interest rate, I'm now trying to deposit a much larger amount.

However, it's infuriating to do so, because the only way I can figure out how to deposit more money is in $25 increments.

I also can't figure out how to do a single deposit instead of a recurring deposit.

Is there no way to enter the specific amount of money I want to deposit?

Turns out there's a $8000 deposit limit. Not sure if that is daily or what.

I do budgeting using ledger cli and live it although it’s pretty manual and would love a decent tool to do it.

None of the paid ones really draw me but if there was something really good in this space I’d be interested.

Not sure if the solution but I imagine something that gives you virtual high fives for saving instead of spending etc.

Finally, you pay 0.2% but Ally pays 1% yet you say your rates are as good.

On the insurance side, there are specialty insurance companies that do this kind of thing, similar to hole in one prizes or half court shot prizes at sporting events.

We pay them a mark-up on expected value. Since the risk they're taking is purely mathematical random chance, it's pretty much the best type of insurance for someone to underwrite. There is no uncertainty about what the risk is to them, unlike most other insurance where people are using actuaries to estimate what the risk is, but it's not actually known for sure.

Couldn't you structure the contest so that you know you'd payout $X per week and not need insurance?

Did you know that this is only to show your first name on a leaderboard if you win prizes above a certain threshold or did you take this to mean something else?

Wondering if it's an issue of it not being clear what it means or if even knowing what it means, it still is a privacy concern for you.

(As for the first name thing, just FYI: in my case, my first name + last initial fully identify me.)

I have one minor feedback: On the bank comparison portion of the site, you list Marcus as having 1.7% APY, when it is actually 1.05% APY. These savings rate having been pretty volatile in the past few months so it's understandable but I figure updating it to its current % makes your product look even better in comparison.

So I'm unable to get confirmation from the FDIC-insured bank that you're using that their FDIC insurance extends to your customers. Sure, I can contact Synapse, but I don't know why I should trust what they say any more than what Yotta says - Synapse isn't FDIC-insured either.

While looking for this, I also found a medium post by Beam (https://blog.meetbeam.com/a-primer-on-fdic-insurance-72fe688...) who explain how their savings accounts are FDIC-insured upto $250,000 for every customer - they would open an account in every user's name at Evolve bank. Perhaps it would help you gain more trust if you did a similar post.

Good idea on the blog post. I think we will do a post like that.

We do allow you to be completely anonymous from the privacy settings within the app. If you don't want your first name, last initial, and city shown anywhere, you can toggle it off.

I applaud your ability to work through the regulatory environment, but I hope this endeavor fizzles.

I want an adult populace that saves because it is the sensible thing to do, not because it is a game. Educate, don't trick and skim from, people.

Saving less and using the remainder to buy tickets is another possibility. No need to wait until the tickets are interest financed.

Buy enough lotto tickets to match the (appropriately normalized) variance Yotta provides. Then calculate whether full-amount-in-Yotta or lotto+residual-savings has higher EV.

If you withdraw, you lose tickets so that is a deterrent to continuing to deposit and withdraw to game the system

Right now it's $2,000 per day. If you want to withdraw more than $2,000 per day, you can upload a driver's license to verify your identity (prevents fraud) and then you can withdraw up to $100,000 per day.

They wanted people to have more flexible access to their funds given given the macro environment.

See the third question at the Fed FAQ here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/savings-deposi...

The business models here is to be a bank that raffles money based on your deposits. And they need to hold that money to generate the profits to support those payouts.

It's quite clever. This fully disrupts businesses like scratch tickets which are quite popular (haven't seen one gas station that doesn't sell them).

I actually wish I had this idea. It's super smart. My only doubt is that this model apparently doesn't scale just with holding money. Digit tried that for a while and then they start charging for their sevice.

Walmart has a huge distribution advantage over startups which has allowed their program to become the biggest, but there's really no front-end, mobile-first approach, and not much fun gamification to it. We also don't think the few startups that have tried something in this space have taken the right approach either by making their products overly complicated, among other things.

> Use of any automated system to enter is prohibited and will result in disqualification.