Demo · interactive

Try to cheat

One lot, run on the real rules of the mechanism. Start with a short game, then try the other ways to cheat. Each time you’ll see two numbers: what cheating got you and what the honest path would have cost you instead.

The lot here is an NFT (a digital item on the blockchain with a single owner), so every amount is in ETH, the cryptocurrency NFTs are usually traded in. The home page uses dollars in its examples; the rules are the same.

Start here

You’re selling an NFT for 2 ETH, and you have 7 days to sell it. To back your promise, you posted a 0.3 ETH deposit: until the NFT sells, the deposit drips away, a little every day, to the doubters—the people who bet “against” the sale. The lot has one supporter (0.6 ETH “for”) and one doubter (0.4 ETH “against”).

With 3 days to go there’s no buyer, and the deposit keeps dripping: by the deadline all of it will have gone to the doubters. You only get part of what has dripped back if a sale happens—hence the temptation to “sell” the NFT to yourself. Or you can give up honestly: withdraw the lot early and pay the penalty. What do you do?

Buying from yourself is technically possible: an NFT sale is an ordinary blockchain transaction, and the platform can’t tell it from a real one (who confirms the sale). So the defense isn’t a ban but a price: cheating has to cost more than giving up.

The lot behind all the numbers

what these numbers mean

    A few more words you’ll see below:

    • Safety margin—how much more cheating costs than the honest path. The bigger it is, the sturdier the defense.
    • Planted stakes—shill stakes: the seller’s own money, put in from other wallets so it looks like it came from someone else.
    • Seed stakes—small stakes the platform itself puts on both sides of every lot (0.01 ETH each here), so that every stake always has someone on the other side. That’s why the numbers differ slightly from a lot with only people on it. Whatever the seed stakes win goes into the participation-points fund, not to the platform.
    • The platform—what the platform keeps: its fees, plus the part of what dripped that isn’t refunded to its owners on a sale.

    What an honest lot looks like

    Here everything is honest: the NFT sells to a real buyer on day 4.2 of 7. Drag the slider or press “play.” Before the sale, the seller’s deposit and the supporter’s drop pile up in the doubters’ pot; once it sells, part of what dripped goes back to its owners (40% on this NFT lot). Watch the “platform” line: on a sale it gets about 0.156 ETH; if the NFT hadn’t sold, it would have gotten about 0.018 ETH. A sale pays the platform more, and that’s on purpose: it makes money when things sell.

    More ways to cheat

    Tap a trick to open its sliders and see the two numbers. “Your result” is how much the cheater made (+) or lost (−) by cheating. “Honest path” is what the honest exit would have cost you (−) or earned you (+) in the same situation, counted the same way. The higher number is the better deal. For the seller, the honest path is giving up early: paying what has dripped plus a small compensation payment to the doubters. The sliders start at default values; move them and the numbers change.

    Closed: cheating costs more than the honest path

    Residual risk: the cheater can squeeze out a little—here’s how much, and the fix

    Open: not calculated yet, and no fix so far