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That’s basically what cryptocurrency Mining is. You get paid for mining with a digital lottery.

• sidpatil 5y ago
  A similar interest payment structure exists for conventional savings accounts as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    Huh, when you mentioned that, it made me think this was a way to allow frequently compounding interest even when the amount of interest earned is smaller than the precision of the account (ie 1 cent). If you earned 0.01 cent of interest, instead of trying to keep more digits of precision, the account just gets a 1% chance of being increased by 1 cent. It seemed like a really clever workaround to not having enough digits of precision (whether explicit or hidden), but now I see it’s just a regular sized lottery, a psychological tool to encourage investment. :)
• nivertech 5y ago
  No, most so called "cryptocurrencies" are using lottery-based Proof-of-Work (puzzle solving) as a leader election mechanism for Byzantine consensus over the state of the distributed replicated ledger of transactions. What described here is a simple probabilistic micropayments. Since the payment transactions are expensive, you amortize the cost of many smaller "virtual" transactions over a single large real transaction. This scheme is frequently used in the API billing, or even for all-inclusive costs in hotels (i.e. you charge for the buffet instead of for each meal separately) and you hope that probabilistically it will end up OK.