My name is Jay Berg and like many of you I have been playing Fantasy Football since the 1990s. Back then we used magazines for rankings and calculated Fantasy Points by hand from newspapers. Fantasy Football has come a long way, from the hobby of a special kind of nerdy stat geek, to generating more revenue than the NFL itself!
I listen to a popular weekly fantasy football podcast, and the same question is asked to each guest, who are some of the most skilled and experienced High Stakes Fantasy Football players on the planet! They ask:
“When not playing fantasy football, what do you do for a living”?
I cringe when I hear this. Shouldn’t the top players in a 27-billion-dollar fantasy football economy be playing fantasy football professionally for a living?
As veteran fantasy football players, we know how hard it is to win. Even the best players can go years without a championship team. Playing season-long Fantasy Football professionally full-time is just not possible. For a deep dive into why this is the case, see my 2016 paper – ProtoblockOpportunity
Should the Barry Sanders of Fantasy Football not get paid just because he has not won a championship?
Imagine Barry Sanders in his prime, being asked:
“When not playing NFL football, what do you do for a living?”
We love Fantasy Football, it’s a unique game of skill with a social component. You can keep in touch with old friends and make new ones. Fantasy twitter is alive with heated debate, yet it remains civil. In Fantasy Football, most debates are settled one way or another with each week’s games and each season’s totals. In contrast to my other community, Crypto Twitter, where the debates are continuous and have become nasty and personal.
The current game evolved from the early internet days, with Commissioner.com, RotoWire, RotoWorld, WCOFF, FSTA, Podcasts, ScottFish, and Pros-vs-Joes. Experts have found new ways to monetize their skill and knowledge, by providing content: Articles, projections, YouTube, twitter, and paid subscriptions.
Then came DFS - but will leave that for another day
Just as we evolved from Newspapers to the Internet, I believe the next evolution will be from the Internet to the Blockchain
PROTOBLOCK – Professional Rotisserie Blockchain, is a system with a set of rules. Each user runs software locally on their computer and connects to each-other in a peer-to-peer distributed network.
- Protoblock will NOT kill the expert’s business models
- Protoblock will NOT replace data providers
- Protoblock does NOT compete with season-long or DFS game providers
- Protoblock is NOT Fantasy Football
- No Teams
- No Leagues
- No Luck
- No Off-Season
- Protoblock has no business model
Protoblock, founded in 2014, is The Original Football Blockchain, and has the potential to double the Fantasy Football economy!
- Protoblock IS a public utility for the fantasy football player
- Protoblock IS controlled by fantasy football players
- Protoblock IS a system designed to create new value
Protoblock is the beginning of an evolution, a revolution that puts Fantasy Football back into the control of the community itself. With no central point-of-failure, it has the potential to solve many fantasy companies legal and payment processing issues. It can also eliminate problems of DFS insider information.
Protoblock can generate free, accurate, real-time, last-minute, start/sit advice. As well as accurately price dynasty trade values and enable Fantasy Football players to monetize all their skills, including predicting busts. Protoblock can democratize fantasy football celebrity.
Protoblock has the potential enable hundreds of thousands of season-long veterans to become full-time professionals, earning a living doing what they love!
Protoblock is 100% free. Protoblock users may remain anonymous. Protoblock is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is no free lunch - you already paid with 20+ years acquiring Fantasy Football Skill!
- Protoblock DOES requires individual action, responsibility, and attention.
- Protoblock DOES requires community and consensus.
- Protoblock DOES requires early-adopters to trust the process before its obvious, while climbing a steep learning curve, with potential rewards of fantasy fame and fortune at the end.
We WON’T ask for money, we WON’T ask for your name, we WON’T ask for your email address. We WILL pay you for your attention to football. We WILL provide Windows and Mac Fantasy Desktop Wallet Software with schedules, player info, projections, and results, as well as Android and iOS companion Apps. We are the decentralized Protoblock developers!
Who’s in?
Welcome to the first decentralized fantasy football community. Its currently week 9 of 2018 NFL Season. There are 7 weeks left and there will be around 22,000 PPR points scored through week 16. This means that 2,200,000 Fantasybit coins are up for grabs, valued at around $200,000! (will explain below, but first let’s get you some coins!)
Projections Game
- Download Protoblock (desktop preferred)
- Claim Fantasy Name (chose twitter handle or fantasy team name to remain anonymous)
With Blockchain there is no login with a name/password, as there is no central company or server to log into. Instead, each user’s computer creates a Public / Private key pair. This public key is your identity and the private key is kept secret.
- Write down your secret. (or skip now and export secret later)
- Make Week 9 PPR Projections
- First Copy Average or Drag Drop and Copy from another Fantasy Name
- Hit Send
- Feel free to make individual changes
- Try export/import CSV file
- Contact me for custom connection to projection APIs
This is not really a competition with your fellow fantasy experts, since all your projections are instantly public. Rather it’s a community effort to widely distribute coins among all NFL knowledge and Fantasy Football skill.
Come back after each game to see how many coins you earned. Projections are open through week 16 and startup again after 53-man-rosters for 2019 Week 1 projections.
Rule #1 each PPR point scored in the NFL from Week 1 to Week 16 generates 100 Fantasybit
1 Fantasy Point = 100 Fantasybit
Rule #2 all Fantasybit are split among users with qualifying accurate projections. The more accurate your projection the more Fantasybit awarded.
Fantasybit - The PPR Coin - Is a token of fantasy football Skill!
Each user’s software independently keeps a ledger of all other users projections, runs the numbers, follows the rules, and keeps score.
Example: Tom Brady scored 20 Fantasy Points, this equals 2000 Fantasybits – if 50 users projected 20, then each user gets 40 Fantasybit
Let’s use a thought experiment to try and explain blockchain in Fantasy Football.
Imagine a 12-team high-stakes league, where each team downloads open-source desktop software that connects to each other. All draft picks, waiver moves, and lineups, are sent to the other 11 teams’ computers. Each team “brings his own” NFL stats data.
Now, since your computer knows the league settings and scoring rules, it can independently score each matchup, each week, and crown a Champion at end of the fantasy season.
For everyone to reach the same conclusion, the stats data must be exactly the same. Consensus must be reached on the NFL data. (As we will see below, this consensus is the core of the Protoblock system.)
Now, all that is left is to payout the winners…
Question: Why can’t we currently have 100% payouts? What do current fantasy game companies give us in return for fees?
Answer: Companies provide safe keeping of funds though escrow and provide payouts to winners.
Bitcoin and Blockchain are the final piece to the internet puzzle – a trustless way to transfer value without the need for escrow or a central authority!
So instead of using a Company for payouts, we can created a virtual currency that is native to our little 12 node network. As soon as the season is over, each machine will automatically update a ledger and assign the winnings accordingly.
This idea can be applied to all industries, companies, banks, casinos, etc. Take away any fees, or revenue from almost any product or service, and instead create a virtual currency that is required to be used as payment for the product or service.
The hard part would be using this made-up virtual currency to buy groceries! For it to have real value, it must become “hard money”. It must be scarce, censorship resistant, have an immutable ledger, and real utility.
- Bitcoin with Proof-of-Work (POW) was the first real “hard money” Cryptocurrency.
- Fantasybit with Proof-of-Skill has a similar potential!
As difficult as it is to understand bitcoin and blockchain. Trust me when I tell you, it’s just as hard for bitcoiners trying to understand fantasy football!
Bitcoin is a system of aligning economic incentives – every 10 minutes a bitcoin miner, usually located in China, is awarded $100,000 just for finding a virtual needle in a virtual haystack. The one who finds this needle becomes central authority for this “Block”. Every 10 minutes a new random authority is chosen. This creates the censorship resistance property and enables bitcoin to reach consensus and prevent double-spend.
Why are billions of dollars spent finding needles in haystacks? Because they are being paid for it. Incentives are economically aligned between miners and users.
Bitcoin POW miners are searching for a single number, that when combines with the Block and put through a one-way SHA256 hash function, solve a difficult random problem. Each bitcoin node runs their own SHA256 on the block to confirm it. This is how the bitcoin creates a distributed ledger.
POW is slow, and some say it not environmentally friendly. However, until now, there was no other way of independently agreeing on random data.
We may be sitting on a gold mine!
Professional Sports is human phenomenon where major sporting events, like NFL football, are watched by 100s of millions of people at the same time. After the game this data is published in every newspaper and broadcasted online.
Billions of dollars in bets are settled, all without a central authority! In fact, major sporting event data already has decentralized consensus!
We now have a second kind of random data, that “everyone” can independently agree on, we can replace POW with Proof-of-Skill!.
Fantasy points data from each NFL game already has consensus. Users running Protoblock act collectively to turn Fantasy points into Fantasybit coins. They then distribute all coins to the football community, for Skilled Projections. Now, every 40 seconds we have a lottery, where one random Skilled user with the “winning ticket” becomes the central authority and gets to create a block of transactions!
Why would anyone pay us $200,000 for Fantasybit created out of thin air?
Fantasybit has value from its “hard money” properties. They are scarce, hard to obtain, immutable, and has real utility.
-
Scarcity comes from the limited number of NFL games each season. Around 50,000 fantasy points are scored, generating 5 million Fantasybit each season.
-
Hard to obtain – right now, it’s easy to obtain, but at some point “mining” Fantasybit with Projections, will become a specialized endeavor for real knowledgeable NFL fans and skilled Fantasy Football players. As we all know, Fantasy Football skill is hard to obtain.
-
Immutability - comes from the fact that your balance cannot be changed. As long as you can independently verify that the NFL stats are correct, you can be sure that no cheating is possible.
-
Utility – Protoblock Trading Game is the current utility. However, one can imagine a Protoblock Casino charging 0% vigorish on spread bets, or Protoblock Season-Long or Protoblock DFS with 100% payouts. The only requirement would be all entry fees, bets, and payouts are made in Fantasybit. These utilities create the fundamental demand for the token,
Now that Fantasybit takes on properties of “Hard Money”. Some investors may buy Fantasybit as a “Store of value” to hedge their stock portfolio. Other investors would buy to speculate on Fantasybit price rise due to demand.
These buyers will pay bitcoin or even dollars for Fantasybit. Now guess who gets paid? The community of Fantasy Football Skill will get to sell their coins that they mined for free! It’s a WIN WIN!
10 years ago, today Satoshi Nakamoto released bitcoin software, anyone who downloaded the software would be earning 100s of coins a day. Now it takes a huge multi-million-dollar operation to mine a single bitcoin. The price of bitcoin went from $0 to a high of $19,900 and is now trading at $6500.
Trading Game
The first utility for Fantasybit is currently live.
Decentralized Fantasy Forwards Market
Protoblock is a financial market for hedging and speculating on individual players Fantasy point results. Player contracts are available for a single game, rest-of-season, or next season.
- Solves a real-world problem with a $12 billion-dollar untapped market.
- Hedge Early Round Draft Picks
- Short Season-Long Busts
- Hedge DFS Fades
- Generates Real-Time Efficient market-based sit/start decisions @Prototicker
Want to become an early adopter? If and when your 2018 Fantasy teams are out, take a couple of minutes of your time, download Protoblock and make projections. There is even an “easy button” where you can copy other players projections. Then, after each game, see how many Fantasybits you have. It’s not a competition between Fantasy Football players, rather its meant to be equally distributed among all Fantasy Football players – the more real fantasy players with coins the more robust the system would be.
Protofund, has allocated 1 million coins for any and all Fantasy Players – just create an account and send a tweet. Bonuses available for Scott Fish players or Fantasypros experts, and more.
Thank You and good luck! Jay Berg October 31, 2018