Many, many companies fail when they use the same assumptions for getting a tiny fraction of any business. The xxx industry is a bazillion dollars, we only need 0.01% to be rich!

I realize you were qualifying that statement, with advertising needed, but perhaps a better way would be to look at all the new sites (particularly the crypto currency ones) that have come up, and how many have gotten any traffic of note. Most sit there with a few players at best, and these guys are using a new, unestablished crypto currency.

I doubt the potential presence of dusty poker celebrities adds much value.

We will see, but I think everyone would be surprised if this is more than a non-failure within a year.

You are 100% correct, my post about the 0.01% as applied to whatever market share is a dead dog with fleas business strategy that is a sure fire loser...

Absolutely.

However, if the marketing is right and you have the capital to pump a few million dollars into the marketing so you can fleece the suckers, then it can be a very effective short term strategy (as demonstrated during the dotcom fiasco in the 90s.)

Unfortunately, the research I've done shows they haven't pumped any serious marketing dollars into this thing at all.

From what I've seen, I would be surprised if they spent more than $100k on marketing and that is an absurdly low number.

Imo, in order to successfully roll this site out they need to spend a minimum of $2M in marketing complete with some seriously juicy tournaments where they are giving away $500k in freerolls ($10k here, $5k there...) and $1M in bonus matching just so they can initially get the traffic up and reach critical mass.

From what I've seen so far, this site is going to be a gigantic flop failure...

Well, actually, not that big a failure. Since they've probably only spent $300k on this entire effort (marketing and software development), they will only be out $300k which is peanuts for a venture like this...

I think their plan is to convince people to buy their premined ScamCoinbro TM and then give freerolls where you win ONE BILLION SCAMCOIN1@!!!

It's a fine idea if you can make these coins valuable, but that usually takes some work. This reminds me of a high tech TJ Cloutier, "Hey! you've seen me on TV, lend me $200."

1. Premine 10 billion coins
2. convince people they're worth $100 each
3. ?????
4. profit

edit: To be clear. I love cryptocurrency and I think they are the future of banking, but regular Bitcoin is already safer, more secure, and less volatile than any new cryptocoin and brocoin has no technnical advantages over bitcoin that we know of. So the only reason they're using it instead of bitcoin is because they are trying to use it as a fundraiser because they can't get anybody to invest in their company...

That is the other flaw in their idea - I doubt that hard core bitcoiniacs will want to get into supbrocoins or whatever, and how many non cryptocurrency people will even want to venture into that as well.

Maybe they need to ask those guys who made that Micros cartoon to do advertising for them. They loved talking about all the outdated poker celebrities.

bitcoins or bust

quote me on it

agreed... everything im not smart enough to type yet totally agree with.... spot on harris, gj keepin it 100 /rail

bee tea dubs how the *** do i get my old account back when my email addys are abandoned /derail

Start here
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/55...-post-1198491/
/derail

I agree, it's just that these ScamCoinbro TM guys are seriously late to the party.

Whenever a new product hits the market you typically have the market share leader who is 60% of the market, then a #2 who is like 25% - 30% of the market, then 4 or 5 wannabees that scrap out the last 10% to 15%.

Bitcoin is #1, Litecoin is #2, then there are 3 or 4 more and now ScamCoinbro wants to enter this market being 4 years late to the party (which is an eternity in e-space).

That's like me saying, "dude, I got this great idea, lets create a search engine, it will be like google, we will call it Joogle. You go to our search engine type in what you want, then our engine goes to google then brings the results back to you...

I find it hilarious that this ScamBroCoin TM actually is using BitCoins to establish their primary financial base LOL. And then they actually have the gall to say/project that their new coin will be more stable than Bitcoins ????

WUT ??

Are you talking about before or after the Mt.Gox (aka Magic the Gathering Online Exchange ) scandal where 774,000 bitcoins – worth $409m disappeared from clients e~wallets ? Or maybe you are referring to after the closure of the now-defunct black market website known as Silk Road.

Wasn't it just one year ago that one bitcoin was worth a bit over $ 1000 ? ( the all time high in 11/13 reached $ 1242.00. That same bitcoin today is now worth 392.54. What part of more secure and less volatile am I missing here ?

Hello, dgiharris,

I am consulting on the Breakout Gaming projects specifically and working with other folks looking to bring crypto-gaming to the regulated, legal gaming markets, including both bitcoin and other crypto-currencies.

Your posts mix together two very different activities and how 2+2 poker players can participate, if they want to do so:

1. The Coin Sale, which will be an offer of coins for sale, deliverable upon the launch. This sort of Coin Sale project is sometimes successful, sometimes not so much (A recent success would be the Ethereum ETH sale, which raised something like $15 million to $18 million USD worth of bitcoins.)

The BRO Coin Sale is intended to sell 4.5 million BRO, allocated among buyers. One of the effects will be to establish a market price for BRO going forward.

Another Sale function is clearly to monetize the production of those coins and convert their value to another asset form. If you wonder, why is bitcoin the way to buy other crypto-currencies ? The answer is pretty simple, Coin Sales tap into the bitcoin technology to facilitate the sale of BRO. Overstock, Expedia , et cetera sell things for Bitcoins.

Finally, the Coin Sale sponsor intends to provide the Games venture access to the proceeds funds for marketing of the Games' project channels as they roll out. (My experience in the industry and discussions with gaming marketing channels pretty much confirms that they will want payment in fiat currency. Same as spending for office space, staff, gaming license fees, et cetera.)

FWIW, spending a bitcoin to buy a BRO at a Coin Sale is a lot like buying a product from Overstock or a service from Expedia; with all three you get what you are buying, but you are not getting any ownership interest in Overstock or Expedia, nor in any gaming business that will accept BRO for payment for BRO-denominated game play and offer similar prizing.

2. The Gaming project venture, which is not the same as the Coin development projec, will launch a number of channels for play, aside from poker. Offerings of Fantasy Sports, Poker, Skill Games, eSports, Casino games, Free-to-play games, et cetera, will be rolled out in markets where the games will be legal, licensed and regulated, as may be required. Breakout’s Poker offering will not be available in the US for traditional gambling; other versions of free to play tournaments, with real prizing and subscription tournament play are being reviewed and considered. The ROW poker will be more traditional, licensed, legal and regulated gaming.

Why not seek venture capital investment, and sell equity interests right off in a Poker or gaming venture? ? You raised a a business decision that is interesting. The Breakout Project was selected to make a presentation in Las Vegas recently to a BitAngels’ investors conference. The presentation followed a panel on Crowd Sales of new cryptocurrencies; Breakout’s presentation discussed the Coin Sale and did not ask for any equity investment in Gaming . (Typically, members in that investor group hold a mix of direct investment in coins and enteprises related to crypto-currencies.)

Finally, to address your marketing needs analysis, could the Gaming venture’s planned promotional giveaway of 7.0 million BRO to promote gaming attract pools of recreational players for the various games to be offered, including poker tournaments ? Maybe, yes, maybe, no. Would a similar giveaway of say 7.0 million Bitcoins for a gaming promotion in 2010 have left some current value in more poker players hands if they had played a bit back then ? There is a sample illustration available on the breakoutcoins website which shows how those 7.0 million BRO may be deployed for marketing. (That schedule is pretty detailed, will be subject to change. None of those specific uses are set in stone, but the plan is to use the BRO for promotions.)

As for buying BRO or playing some game to win BRO, if I recall correctly, the first Bitcoin product payment transaction was for a pizza. Some guy in the UK sold the pizza to some guy in the US for 10,000 bitcoins, delivered, no mention of the tip.

Thanks for raising these topics for discussion.

Good post. Slight derail: can you recommend good business books/other resources for educating yourself about starting and growing a company?

mt Gox was not a failure of bitcoin security it was giving the keys to the vault to untrustworthy people.
Yes, bitcoin is highly volatile and its volatility is decreasing as the market acceptance and trade volume increase. new cryptos tend to be either highly volatile even compared to BTC or their price is a pretty steady 0, so I guess it could be more stable in that sense...

Your comparison to Bitcoin, the pioneer of crypto currency, is laughable. Honestly laughable.

The point was that plenty of folks laughed at the low value of every new product launch or advance in the last 5 years, regardless of the utility of the underlying technology. Bitcoin and blockchain technology are not synonymous; a new coin type can build upon blockchain technology in many ways, be tailored to specific industries, and offer liquidity in and out of bitcoin. The value proposition lies in improvements and in attracting new value through specific use cases.

If acceptance and use grow, a newcoin may attract users and bring in value, a weakness that bitcoin has is attracting new users. Blockchain technology supports improvements over Bitcoin for start-ups to leverage, without need to make changes/improvement on Bitcoin itself.

Gaming long accounted for over 1/2 of all bitcoin transactions; people think that was because of bets placed, that is wrong .... a lot of those transactions were deemed spam, because they flooded the blockchain with various signaling efforts. A newcoin, built for gambling and trading on its own blockchain, may be encouraged by bitcoin enthusiasts because it cooperates with bitcoin, rather than competes with it.

iGaming is an industry which offers tremendous value to both the cryptocurrency industry and to the igaming operators who seize upon the technology to create a better customer experience, starting with payments but moving way beyond that arena.

I understand your view, however, because I've made the same error. I actually took a photo of a Robocoin prototype at Bitcoin2013 because I thought I would never see one again. Three months later I was asking Jordan, Robocoin's CEO, for pricing on acquiring some units. I think 10 months or so later, I was signing up a Robocoin account on someone's Robocoin unit on the floor of the D Hotel Casino on Fremont Street. Two weeks ago, I saw at InsideBitcoin Las Vegas that the Robocoin technology improved and mad the user experience more friendly and easy .....

If you feel that any and all altcoins coming down the pike are laughable, you might do a little research on what has been variously deemed bitcoin 2.0, blockchain 2.0, the concept of "colored coins", et cetera.

There are a lot of interesting proposals and developments coming to market in the next 6 - 12 months. For starters, you might take a look at launches like Tether, Ethereum's ETH, or even Mastercoin. But if you really think technology stopped with the launch of the bitcoin blockchain, you might check out the Bitcoin Foundation as a resource as well.

Is being late to market actually a problem? Google seems to be a counter-example (many successful search engines existed prior to its creation). They just revolutionized the industry. I think the same could be said with Apple and their iPods.

I don't think the question is whether you get to market first, but whether you bring enough to the table to disrupt the market. As far as I can tell, this new company does not, but their late arrival doesn't have to be damning.

To be fair, the vast majority of new ventures like this fail, which in turn causes the natural reaction to be dismissive. A few do manage to carve out success, but this project certainly does not have too many of the indicators of that.

I am not quite sure how a new coin will attract any kind of new casual users, and I have to assume the crypto currency market is filled with the equivalent of telemarketers pushing new currencies to current crypto currency users, but how large of an incremental market is that at the moment?

I am not sure why anyone is actually mad at this project. In the end the marketplace does a pretty good job sorting out the good from the bad. If a ton of people want to buy supbrocoins to play on a room that might feature the living embodiment of Comic Book Guy then it deserves to succeed. If not, then it deserves to fail.

college?(couldn't help myself)

I know what you mean, but they can simply change the coin supply and release new wallet version, and if people want to withdraw their coins from their site they better be on the same fork.

lol @ Comic Book Guy line.

To be clear, the idea is to promote the games to folks without requiring them to buy any crypto to play ..... a marketing challenge, but one which may be met by the quality of the gaming product, not necessarily by marketing that depends upon a "new coin" as the attraction. Different pitches for different market segments are available.

Clever! I actually own and operate a small business. I consume a lot educational materials, and wanted to see if Harris had any suggestions that might end up on my reading list.

again for all the people itt saying they dont understand the project, its pretty simple:

they are freerolling a pokersite by doing an IPO on coins that they own.(more than half of all the coins will go to them for free during the IPO and the price will be the result of how much money was injected by the buyers(us,normal people) so basically they will be taking more than 50% of all $$$ injected into the IPO.

example:

have 10 coins, 10$ will be injected during the IPO, they get 6 coins for free so basically they got payed 6$ by doing nothing.
with the money made they will open a pokersite and even try to make more money on us.

what a sick plan if you ask me.

You fail to see that the only freerolls here will be for gamers, literally.

Yes, the idea of a Coin Sale is, in part, to establish a market value for BRO Cons, which IS based upon what folks are willing to pay for 4.5 million Coins. That market pricing mechanism for BRO Coin is way better than simply selling BRO at $ .... some arbitrary price set by magical insight.

The Coin sponsor has born the cost of creating this product. Much of the "unsold" inventory will be dedicated to building a use case for all BRO Coins, including those purchased in the Sale. However, you fail to see that the only freerolls here will be for gamers, literally.

The lack of such a ready use case has hurt the post-launch liquidity of any cryptocurrency. The use case here, supporting liquidity post-Sale by issuing freerolls and other promotions for players, is that a regulated igaming company must match assets to cover 100% of player liability.

The dedication of a large part of unsold Coins created to support igaming ventures using the Coin is a positive attribute; the alternative you seem to favor is "simply selling all the Coins".

"Selling all the Coins" would do nothing to focus on post-Sale use or demand. In your seemingly preferred scenario, all Coins are sold off and nothing is dedicated to promoting use. (There are about 275 other cryptocurrency launches along your preferred lines of sell them and let the chips fall where they may; this Coin has a different approach.)

Ahhh I see-It would probably help then with a little more specific question-what kind of small business do you own? Is it software, or hot dog stands?- but this derail has gone far enough-you probably should take your questions to the business threads-

Is there more to it than just this video?

I hope Russ gets hustled out ever nickel he owns. If he's a golf fish and Flack took advantage good for him.

If they are just buds, well that's disappointing, but doesn't make Flack a scammer either. If I recall Flack wasn't ever in UB like most of Russ's good friends. Maybe they weren't all that tight?

This was one of my favorite business books, I listened to the audio version of this book while driving on a road trip....