I'm the creator, thanks for the insights. This was really just a fun project to explore the Stellar API (which is really good, and I hope they will reach their goal and transform international payments).

It seems the attention on hacker news drew quite some payments into the system, whereas I had thought that it would just stay in the play money range forever. The lottery aspect I hadn't thought about. I'm eager to transform the model to make it less lottery like as I certainly don't want to violate any laws, but am a bit unsure about exactly how. There could be a small chance that 100% of the money goes to a charity, or that there is somehow a matter of skill involved in the exact amount you send. (FYI, the only other piece of information that can be sent along with a Stellar payment is one 32-bit integer ID). Any suggestions are welcome.