Generating Real Cash from Digital Horse Racing

My New Side-Hustle Exists Only in the Cryptoconomy

Greetings from wet and cold Amsterdam. Great city. Less-than-great weather. But coastal, northern Europe in late fall was never known for its balmy and temperate climes.

I’ve ventured to the Dutch capital for a cryptocurrency conference this week—Solana Breakpoint, the Solana community’s annual gathering. It’s something similar to—albeit much smaller than—Apple’s famous Worldwide Developer Conference, in that this is the big, annual event for Solana fan boys and the developer teams from around the world working on projects that populate the Solana blockchain.

I figured that since I’m at a crypto conference, I’d use this moment to update a dispatch I sent you a couple weeks back… the dispatch I wrote on a Solana-based horse-racing game called Photo Finish Live. If you missed that one, you can find it here.

It’s the story of a video game that is generating unexpectedly large levels of income for players—from racing, and particularly from breeding horses that other players are buying to play the game too.

When I sent the original dispatch on October 17, I’d been involved with the game for a week. And I was addicted. The game is compelling on a number of levels. There’s the process of researching the horses for sale to determine the one you think represents a great racing horse… or a great foal that you think will grow into a great racer and ultimately a horse in demand in the breeding stables.

There’s researching all the different races that go off every day to determine which one you think is the best fit for the horse(s) you own. And there’s breeding—selling access to your stallion for stud purposes, or selling your broodmare’s offspring. That’s an entirely different level of research: determining what horses to breed to (hopefully) generate the strongest traits and preferences in the next generation of racer.

Before I update you on my progress (it has been good), I want to define my comment about “unexpectedly large levels of income.”

One particular stable has earned—are you truly ready for this?—more than $227,000 in the last five months of racing, breeding horses, and selling the offspring.

Anyone can see the numbers. They’re all on the blockchain—the digital ledger that openly tracks all crypto transactions.

Granted, that stable owner manages more than 40 horses at the moment and has owned and sold scores more. Moreover, not everyone playing the game is generating that kind of wealth.

But there are many stable owners who are earning thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per racing reason (each digital season is a four-week period here in the real world).

I point this out because Photo Finish Live represents where we’re moving as a society in terms of generating income.

Our world is a few short years from unemployment problems created by the rise of machines. Robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning… it’s all conspiring to build a world where humans are no longer needed for untold numbers of jobs we now populate.

Which raises a perplexing problem: How and where will humans earn a living?

My bet: Governments are going to tax the bejeezus out of technology, and it will redistribute that income as something like a Universal Basic Income.

That’s a different topic for a different day, but I will say that I realize there’s a great deal of animosity toward a basic income structure. That said, government is in the business of protecting itself first and foremost. And if we proletarians rise up by the hundreds of millions because we can’t earn an income in a world run by tech, then we represent a risk a far greater than government can control, even with a military. Better to just pay the rabblerousers to not rouse… and that’s a basic level of income.

With the income, people will go in search of ways to expand it, no different than what we do today with investing or starting a side-hustle with our spare money.

In the cryptoconomy rapidly reshaping our world, income-based gaming options like Photo Finish Live are going to stand out. Though it’s a game, managing a stable is, frankly, a side-hustle-like job. Researching horses, researching races, determining which horses to buy to race and then breed, marketing your stallions, selling your foals… this is not like playing Pac-Man. Real work is involved. Hours of work, literally.

I know that from my experiences with the game over the last three weeks.

From one horse, I now own 11, including a high-grade colt and filly that I bought for breeding purposes several months from now. Based on those horses’ combined traits, their offspring—which will share those traits—will likely sell for between $300 and $700 each, possibly a bit more, depending on the parent’s racing results.

Selling breeding access to the colt, once he’s a breeding horse several months from now, will cost $125 a pop. And each breeding male can breed 35 times per season. Assuming my horse fills out his dance card every month, that’s nearly $4,400 monthly.

But all of that is several months from now.

In the meantime, I have a stable of six racing horses. I manage them daily (which requires a couple hours of work per night). I’ve been keeping a meticulous spreadsheet for every horse and every race. I can tell you that I’ve earned $1,038 in what’s called “race stimulus,” a distribution of an in-house cryptocurrency that’s used to run the game.

I’ve spent $958 on entry fees, and my horses have won back $643 in race purses. So my racing winnings haven’t covered my racing costs—yet.

But a good bit of that gap was part of the learning curve that exists with this game. No one flies into flying, and no one instantly becomes an expert at Photo Finish Live. I’ve spent untold hours pulling apart horses to dial in their exact racing style (the game collects a ton of racing data), and I’ve pulled apart races to home in on specific types of races that certain horses excel at.

Those efforts are beginning to show up in my results.

Last Friday, my six racers ran five races between them. Three finished in second place, one finished in third. The other ended up back in the pack because I entered him in a race that wasn’t his exact style as part of a test.

In all, I spent $86.25 entering those five races.

The four winners returned $142.86—a 66% return on my entry costs, and proof that my research is paying off. In turn, that should begin closing the gap between cumulative entry fees and cumulative winnings.

Plus, I picked up another $76.64 in race stimulus.

All in all, not a bad day at the e-track—nearly $220 in profits.

Wrapping in all my entry costs and all my winnings/stimulus over the last three weeks, I’m up $636.58.

All from a digital horse-racing game.