What if sneaker releases used GAS?
For those that don’t know about GAS…it’s this mechanism in the crypto world. This is a completely dumbed down explanation: Whenever we do something online that requires data to be written to a database, (ie: ordering a pair of shoes), that can be considered to be the equivalent of ‘writing’ a transaction. So GAS is basically the cost of recording those written transactions to the blockchain. So when the network is calm, GAS can be really cheap ($2-5) and when the network is busy, there is no limit to how high GAS can go. Imagine 100 people are trying to write the same exact transaction to the database at the exact same time - the person who pays the highest amount of GAS is the one who will get the transaction written the quickest. So if you choose to pay higher gas, your chances of having the transaction written the way you like it are much higher. If there are a limited number of entries, only those who pay the highest fees will get in there.
For example, a couple of weeks ago, the company that made the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs released a new NFT project, and in order to actually *purchase* one around the time they released (and have your , you’d have to pay roughly $3-4k in GAS in order to have your transaction recorded. That is basically the amount the purchasers determined their transactions were worth at the time.
Oh, and one more more thing, the company that released the NFT doesn’t keep those GAS fees - they end up going to those who actually write the transactions to the blockchain. The ‘miners’. Whose only incentive is to prioritize those transactions that pay the most GAS.
So if you’ve followed this far, the question I’m trying to ask is…
What would you think if SNKRS implemented a similar mechanism? What if SNKRS, who typically says ‘it’s a completely randomized selection process’ said, instead, ’whoever pays the most in transaction fees is prioritized?’
Is that preferable to ‘completely randomized’?