Two hundred per cent on a tenner, and an account that is two thirds somebody else’s

1

One pound of the reader’s against two of theirs

Thirty pounds is the balance after a ten pound payment has been tripled by a match at two hundred per cent, and the interesting thing about that total is its composition. Ten pounds of it came out of a bank. Twenty pounds of it is a figure the cashier entered against the account, and the cashier can reach that figure with a keystroke at any point until the clause is discharged.

One third is the reader’s share, and the fraction is the whole subject of this note. At a match of one for one the two parties stand level. Raise the match to two for one and the party who supplied the money is in the minority on their own account, outvoted two to one by funds that were never theirs and never will be until £800.00 has crossed the reels.

Two rows there disagree with each other, and the disagreement is the trap. Ownership runs one to two in the reader’s disfavour. Risk runs the other way entirely, because the only money anybody can actually lose on this account is the ten pounds that came from a bank. A reader supplies a third of the funds, all of the exposure and all of the thumb work, and holds none of the money the clause is drafted about.

Twelve seconds is the interval taken as given for a press throughout this note, and twenty-two minutes the length taken as given for a sitting with a handset. Neither figure was observed, timed or read off anything. They are modelling conventions, and every duration below is computed from them, from a stake of ten pence and from ninety-six returning in the hundred.

2

The two thirds that carry the whole obligation

Eight hundred pounds has to cross the reels before any part of the credited two thirds can be requested, forty applied to £20.00. Ten pence at a time that is 8,000 presses. At the twelve seconds taken as given here they occupy 96,000 seconds, which is 1,600 minutes, which is 26 h 40 min. Put 1,600 minutes over a sitting taken at twenty-two and 72.7 comes out, settling at 73 once a part sitting counts whole.

£800.00 of staking measured on money the reader never held

Nowhere in that calculation does the reader’s third appear. The multiplicand is the credited sum and the multiplier is forty, and ten pounds of somebody’s own savings changes neither. What the third does is quite different and quite unannounced: it is spent, alongside the credit, at the rate the pressing consumes funds, because an account does not label which pound it is sending over.

Thirty pounds an hour is that rate on the interval taken as given, 300 presses an hour at ten pence. Four per cent of £30.00 is £1.20, so the balance is expected to fall by £1.20 for every hour of pressing, whichever third of it is nominally being staked. The clause does not care and the arithmetic cannot tell them apart.

Minus twelve pounds is where the house formula puts a credited twenty at forty times. Four hundredths taken forty times gives 1.6, the bracket closes at minus 0.6, and twenty multiplied by it is minus £12.00. Read that as the size of the overshoot: the clause is expected to charge £32.00 of margin against a credited sum of twenty, which is sixty per cent more margin than the credit contains.

At press 5,000 the credited two thirds have notionally been used up, that being £500.00 of staking, twenty-five times the credit and 16 h 40 min on the interval taken as given. Everything after that press is funded from somewhere else, and on this account there is only one somewhere else. Ten hours of the run, 3,000 presses on the interval taken as given, are expected to be paid for out of the reader’s own third.

3

Eighty pounds of staking for each pound paid in

Eighty to one is the ratio this arrangement reduces to. Divide £800.00 of demanded staking by £10.00 of money that genuinely moved and eighty comes out. Each pound of the reader’s own commits the account to eighty pounds crossing the reels, which is 800 presses, which is two hours and forty minutes of pressing on the interval taken as given.

Eight presses a penny is the same ratio written small, 8,000 presses over a thousand pence. Ninety-six seconds of pressing follows every penny paid in, a minute and thirty-six seconds apiece, and a reader who holds that figure in mind while a cashier describes a tripling is holding the only unit in which the two sides of the trade can be compared.

1 min 36 s of pressing behind every penny of the payment

Thirty-seven and a half pence is what an hour of the obligation costs the reader, a thousand pence spread across 26.667 hours. That is half the rate the first rung of the ladder charges, and the halving is not a discount. Buying obligation at half price means acquiring twice as much of it for the identical tenner, which is the direction this ladder runs in throughout.

One and a quarter per cent is the reader’s third expressed as a share of the staking the clause demands, £10.00 against £800.00. Put the two framings side by side. A third of the account on screen sounds like a serious stake in the proceedings. An eightieth of the staking required sounds like what it is, and both describe the same tenner.

Nought changes in any of that if the pressing speeds up or slows down. The count of 8,000 is settled by the multiple and by what one press costs, so a faster thumb moves the hours and leaves every ratio above standing where it is. At six seconds a press the obligation costs seventy-five pence an hour and still runs to 8,000 presses.

4

What each extra hundred points does to the reader’s share

A half, a third, a quarter, a fifth. That sequence is what the reader’s own money comes to as the headline climbs, and it has a closed form worth carrying: the share is one over one plus the match. A hundred per cent leaves the payment at half the balance. Two hundred takes it to a third. The denominators grow by one at every rung and the payment itself never moves off ten pounds.

Two things are happening at once in that sequence and they are easy to run together. The balance on screen is rising, £20.00 then £30.00 then £40.00 and £50.00. The reader’s contribution to it is flat. So the apparent generosity of the offer is entirely the growth of a number the reader cannot touch, and the reader’s share falls purely because the other party’s grows.

Forty pounds of staking a rung is the growth in the last numeric column, and it is a straight line because the multiple is applied to a sum that itself grows in straight steps of ten. The fractions in the column before it do not fall in a straight line, since a half to a third is a drop of 16.7 points and a quarter to a fifth is a drop of five. Dilution bites hardest at the bottom of the ladder.

Two thirds of the balance carrying all of the condition is the position this note is written about, and it is worth stating as a sentence rather than as a fraction. The money that will be hardest to extract is the money the reader does not own. The money that is easy to extract is the third they do, and extracting it means abandoning the clause and whatever hours have gone into it.

5

Where an account stops being able to pay for its own clause

Seven hundred and fifty pounds of staking is what an account of £30.00 is expected to fund, since each pound crossing the reels is expected to shave four pence off and £30.00 divided by £0.04 gives that figure. Seven thousand five hundred presses, 25 hours on the interval taken as given, 69 sittings at the length taken as given. The clause wants 8,000.

Five hundred presses is the gap, one hour and forty minutes of pressing that the account is not expected to have the funds to make. That is a different kind of failure from a bad evening. It is the arrangement predicting its own shortfall before a reel has turned, and it appears on this rung and not on the one below it.

One hundred and sixty-six and two thirds per cent is where the two bars are exactly level, and the crossing can be solved rather than guessed. A balance of £10.00 plus the match funds 250 times its own size in staking. The clause asks forty times the match alone. Set 250 plus 250 times the match against 400 times the match, and the match comes out at five thirds.

Below five thirds the balance outlives the clause and a reader who presses to the end is expected to find something standing. Above it the balance is expected to be gone first and the hours after that point are hours nobody can press, because there is no money left to press with. Two hundred per cent is the first of the usual rungs on the wrong side of that line, and it is on the wrong side by only 33.3 points.

Nothing in the crossing depends on the pace. Eighty thousand seconds is where it lands at the interval taken as given, and a reader pressing twice as quickly reaches the same 6,667 presses in half the clock. The percentage is fixed by two arithmetic facts, a four pence margin and a multiple of forty, and a faster thumb alters neither.

6

What the reader’s third does for twenty-six hours

Ten pounds is doing one of three jobs across the twenty-six hours and forty minutes, and the terms decide which. Reading that clause before paying is worth more than reading the percentage, because the percentage is printed in forty point type and the clause is not printed at all until a reader goes looking for it.

First job: held and released. Nothing in the clause stakes the tenner and nothing in it forfeits the tenner, and the tenner is equally not available while 8,000 presses are made. Money immobilised is not money lost, and saying so would overstate it. The cost is the use of ten pounds over 73 sittings, which at one sitting a night runs to most of three months.

Second job: over the reels once, first. Ten pounds of staking joins the £800.00, taking the demand to £810.00, which is 8,100 presses and 27 h on the interval taken as given, or 74 sittings. Twenty further minutes and forty pence of expected margin is all that wording adds, which leaves it the one to hope for.

Third job: swallowed by the pressing, which is what actually happens under either of the first two. A balance falls by £1.20 an hour on the interval taken as given, and after 16 h 40 min the credited two thirds have notionally been consumed. From there the pressing is drawing on the third that came from a bank, and it finishes that too at the twenty-fifth hour.

Nought of the three jobs is advertised, and the omission is the point of this part. A headline that reads two hundred per cent tells a reader what the cashier is adding and nothing whatever about what happens to what the reader added. One line in the qualifying payments clause settles it, and the difference between the mildest and the harshest wording is the difference between owning a third of the balance and owning none of it.

Twenty-five hours is the figure to carry out of this part. That is where a £30.00 balance is expected to reach nothing on the interval taken as given, with 500 presses of the clause still unmade, and by then the question of which job the tenner was doing has stopped being interesting. Under every wording the answer by then is the same.

7

Duties written over money a reader actually owns

An arrangement built this way carries no Great Britain licence. The duties worth setting out on a page about ownership are the ones attaching to the third of the balance the reader paid for, since the credit answers to whatever the terms say of it, while a payment inside the British licence answers to rules the cashier does not get to write.

Nought is the figure a British licensee may enter in a ceiling over money leaving the pot a customer funded. One specimen of the forbidden wording is published, rationing payouts at fifty inside one day and at five hundred inside one week, and on a balance of £30.00 neither number would bite. That is the instructive part. The rule bars the term and not the size of it, so a ration pitched at a fifth of the specimen falls on the identical ground, and the reader’s third stays reachable by arithmetic rather than by permission.

One overlapping pair is worked through by the regulator itself, a tenner over a day set against a hundred over a week. The tighter of two governs at all times, so a system carrying both has to stop at seventy pounds in the week and not at a hundred. Counted in payments of the size this page is built on, that is one a day and seven a week, not ten.

Three durations have to be among those offered for a limit of that kind, being periods of 24 hours, of 7 days and of a calendar month. A free text box has to stand where a menu would, and the limit is the default, which a customer must take a step to decline. A reduction takes effect straight away. A rise waits out a day and then wants a positive act to confirm it, which is a deliberate asymmetry: the direction protecting the reader’s third moves instantly and the direction exposing it does not.

Cards drawing on credit were shut out as a way of funding that third on 14 April 2020, the bar extending to credit taken through a money service business and not merely to a card used at the cashier. Away from the register, what may fund a payment is a matter for the reader, the card scheme and whatever the cashier prefers, and no licensing rule sits anywhere in that arrangement.

Not one of those duties reaches a cashier holding no British licence, and every one of them concerns the third of the balance that is the reader’s. The arithmetic above is untouched by their absence: £800.00 of staking, 8,000 presses, 26 h 40 min at the interval taken as given. What changes is who decides what may be done with the ten pounds while that sum is worked off.

8

Who a two-thirds account suits

Thirty pounds of playable balance for ten pounds paid is three times the pressing a bare payment buys, and that is a real thing a reader receives. Three hundred presses are funded where a hundred would have been. An hour of reels on the interval taken as given replaces twenty minutes, and the extra forty minutes cost the reader nothing at all.

Set against it, the invoice runs to twenty-six hours and forty minutes, and the two figures do not belong on one scale. Seventy-three sittings, 8,000 deliberate presses and the best part of three months at one sitting a night, set against a credited sum the clause is expected to overshoot by twelve pounds.

One reader is genuinely better off here than at the rung below. Somebody who wants the pressing itself, who will stop long before the clause, and whose qualifying payments clause lets the tenner be withdrawn with the credit untouched, has tripled their reels for nothing. That reader should read the qualifying payments clause, press as much as they please, and treat the £800.00 as somebody else’s problem.

Three figures decide it for everybody else, and the ratio is the first of them. Two thirds of the balance belongs to the party that wrote the terms and carries the whole of the clause. Eighty pounds of staking rides on each pound the reader supplied. And the twenty-fifth hour is when the funds are expected to be exhausted, 500 presses of the requirement still to make.

A rate of 37.5 pence an hour is the final way of putting it. That is what the payment works out at, read as the purchase of the obligation rather than of the balance, and the rate falls at every rung above this one. A cheaper rate for a thing nobody wants is not a better offer. It is simply more of the thing.