Today, the POWToken.com airdrop officially began. More details are at the website, but to summarize, the basic premise is to put some free crypto tokens in the hands of as many existing social media users as possible, distributed on a "first come, most served" basis, as a way to give early adopters an incentive to get onboard. Then, once a large enough number of people have these tokens in their accounts, they may start trading them with one another for goods and services, and eventually when they become fungible with the ERC20 version on the Ethereum blockchain, and hit the crypto exchanges, users will also be able to trade them for other cryptos, or even ultimately cash out in fiat if they so desire.
It uses the facebook app api to give each account an allocation, so all that's required to claim a share of the tokens is to login on the site with facebook, hit the claim button, and the amounts of tokens awarded is calculated, using a steeply descending 10,000,000,000/X function, where X is the number of users who have made token claims so far.
With such a strong incentive to get onboard early in the game, as you can imagine, this morning, when the countdown hit 0, crypto fiends around the world who had caught wind of it early on were hitting their reload buttons repeatedly, bringing the site to an utter standstill. Reload, wait, timeout. Reload again.
Eventually, after over a half hour, I managed to get past the "Login with Facebook" screen, checked the captcha to verify that I was a human, and saw the Claim button. But then, clicking it only resulted in a long delay, followed by an alert popup: Unknown Error. I tried that again several times, waiting minutes between each response from the web server.
I scanned the thread on the bitcoin talk forum, and saw that many others were reporting similar issues. Some upset folks were suggesting that since the web servers were obviously not ready to handle the load, the airdrop should be canceled and postponed, due to the unfairness of trying to claim an airdrop on servers that had become utterly inaccessible to many.
Finally, my repeated attempts resulted in another blank page being loaded after the Claim button was pressed. After many more attempts to load the website to try and find out what was going on, at last a page appeared showing that my tokens had been allocated. I was among the first several hundred lucky enough to make it.
After that, I felt the need to take a break from the screen, turned my laptop off, and went outside to get some much needed exercise in the sun.
Now, returning to see that over 2000 accounts have signed on so far, I contemplate the degree to which POW may have the potential to welcome a much larger userbase to crypto via the viral mechanism of social media giveaway...
On the plus side, with POW, the onramp for the non-techie-elite crowd could be easier than ever. Anyone with a facebook account only has to login and click Claim to get free money.
Obviously, they're going to need to do some work upgrading their web server infrastructure to handle a much, much bigger load if even a sizable fraction of facebook users start to transact regularly. Some early potential users may have been left with a bad taste after hearing about it before launch, trying to get in early, and then giving up when they couldn't even get to the website.
Since the POW "Lite" tokens given to facebook users cannot yet be transferred or traded, it will probably be at least a few weeks or months before we get an accurate idea what the market value will be. In the meantime, I would watch how many new members continue signing up in the coming days as an early indicator of potential success.
One point that may go against increased adoption is that as larger number of users sign up, the amount of tokens awarded to each user may become so trivial that people start thinking, "Why even bother?" Then again, with such low effort required, even the equivalent value of a candy bar might be enough to interest new users on the long end of the tail.
As of this moment, new users signing on are still getting over 4 million POW tokens each. If the extremely low volume trading on etherdelta so far is any indicator, 4 million POW might even be worth at least a couple ETH for each new person who signs up at this time, which is still a very decent chunk of change for a free money giveaway.
In any case, I continue to watch with interest as things unfold. The crypto roller coaster has new twists and turns around every corner!