Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone,

I would like to hear your feedback on the following.

This will be like a raffle or lottery, but with a twist. It will be based on smart contracts. The contract works like a traditional lottery. You buy a ticket to participate, and if you're lucky, you win a share of the pot. The ticket price could be set, for example $10 worth of coins. The lottery runs in rounds, each lasting 10 minutes. At the end of each round, the pot is distributed among a random number of winners. The contract is designed to be fair and transparent. The random number generation is based on blockchain data, so it's impossible to predict or manipulate. There are also some safety measures in place. The contract owner can add funds to the pot, but they can't withdraw them. This is to prevent any potential scams or misuse of funds.

Let's say in 10 minutes, a 100 people buy tickets, $10, pot is $1000.

Then we select random winners, like 36 person.
Instead of distributing 1000/36, we will distribute randomly as well.

Any thoughts? Is there any similar projects out there?

There’s no known lottery project here that has a mechanics like this which distribute prize on random user. It’s more on a raffle than a lottery since user is not betting on a picked numbers but rather the smart contract is just selecting entries as winner.

L0tt0.com is your nearest competitor for lotto based game. The only problem on this kind of game is every round can be useless whenever there’s no participants aside from one user who place bet compared to a regular lotto games which the casino provides prize pool for players to win with their bet. This game is more on just PVP.

There should be similar projects although I’m not entirely sure, but that’s not the issue here.

The issue is; how will those that will take part in this so-called lottery be able to trust their funds with you? And how are you going to prove that the system won’t be rigged? That should be more concerning at the moment because AFAIK you’re just a newbie with no reputation whatsoever and I for one wouldn’t want to risk my money with a stranger.

Yeah it's more like a PVP. Well I was trying to search but I can not find any projects like this. Maybe this system will be flawed? Anyway if there is only one participant, when the round is over, he gets his money back. Everything happens automatically. It's written in the smart contract. Only if the contract has not enough balance to pay the gas plus the user's share would be a problem. But for that, we could add a function that everyone can topup the contract's account for gas fees.

I don't like to sound pessimistic, but I don't believe there will be enough incentive for gamblers to buy tickets for such a lottery. There are just too many unknown factors. It might be more interesting if it were some sort of player-versus-player (PvP) game, where competitors battle each other. Just my thought.

The whole app would be decentralized. It means the smart contract is deployed, the source code can be read and it will be verified (green tick mark in network explorers), so basically it will live forever.
Basically to deposit, you just call the deposit function, and there will be a distribute function when the round is over. So let's say even I would create an UI for this app, but for some reason the project is abandoned, it would still live forever on the blockchain. Verified mechanics, everything is handled by smart contract, which is open source and can be verified to rule out malicious code. Actually a contract like this is super simple, so ordinary people could also check if nothing malicious is going on.

Yeah, I also heard this kind of projects before, maybe you have to comb this board: Project Development. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=12.0) And I'm not sure if we have seen a lotto project that become successful regardless of the twist or just a regular lotto game because there could be a lot of trust issues like how is it not going to be rigged or stuff like that?, specially coming from a newbie like you. But if you think that your project will be successful, then just go ahead and see if others are willing to participate in your lotto game, so best of luck to you.

Maybe a good concept but since this is a PVP scheme you need to establish your reputation and promote your project to gain more players, I don't think it will gain a lot of followers, gamblers are more convenient to play on regular casinos because they are guaranteed of payment since you mention that it will run in smart contract I don't think the majority are convenient to play a game connecting their wallet in a contract.
You will have a hard time convincing people here to play without solid plan that the game will not be rigged, trust is one of the problem of newbies coming up with a game like this.

Godsake, the 36 users won already yet they still have to be shuffled to lose. You can really assume no one yet made something like this because the emotions of players are going to fluctuate from high and drop to zero. I would certainly avoid playing such game especially if $10 is just one entry. Not sure what others would think but I'm already one that will not join.

From 36 down to?

I see what you mean. Most people are not technical enough to see that the smart contract is not rigged. Maybe if it got audited by some reputable company, they would trust?

But anyway another concern that I have, let's say in the 10 minute round, there was 5 participant, but a user deposited 4 times from different addresses, so he will have higher chance to win the deposit of that 1 user? Or maybe actually he takes more risk because if that 1 user is in the winner list, he could be screwed. But since the distribution is not equal, it's fine. I am thinking about this logic.

I believe you misunderstood his example. The prize distribution amount is being distributed in random not the quantity of the user will be countdown. Example some user will receive 500$ and so on randomly. This is both good and bad based on the reward that you will get if you are within the lucky 36 users.   :)

Smart contract games is always a good idea for transparency issues. The only problem is it’s not popular anymore since gambler preferred games that can give result instantly and without any fees for placing bets which centralized casino offers.

If it's a smart contract it should be audited I have participated in a project that did a rugpull and it has become a big lesson for me and for many of us here not to trust smart contract-based platform that is not fully audited.


If you're serious about creating a game like that you should do a lot of testing for possible loopholes, and you need to spend money for marketing and its quite costly.

When we choose the random winners, should it be distributed equally, or we put randomness on the winnings too? What would users prefer?

The idea is quite good ‘coz in such way there’ll be more players to win on it, however this could be unfair to some especially those who are used to lottery mechanica wherein only a few if not a single individual would take all of the pot money. Bottomline is to test and see it for yourselves whether which concept would be more popular to gamblers.Given that it will use smart contract then this could be exciting to web 3.0 players. Alao not that far from the typical lottery set up or concept so I guess players won’t be having that much struggle to adjust.

The concept of the rug pull does not apply here, because there is no liquidity pool, coin pair.
It's a contract, that is deployed. The contract handles the deposits, the rounds, and the payouts. Everything by code. It's immutable, so it can not be changed. Actually if it would become successful, new copy's would appear so fast, because it's open source, so everyone can just launch their own in the matter of seconds.

This is more like entry for the lottery is randomly selected which amount to lesser numbers of players from the original pool of those who signed up. Also for winners or those successful, the reward is yet going to be shared by random if I get the mechanics correctly?

So for me regards to those selected for rewards, I believe there should be a lucky deep for them assuming they have to be physically present but if online, there should be another mechanics that could get them involved like another number selection on variables available like first, 2nd , third etc, I think that would create addiction excitement rather than a monotonous contract random selection.

Honestly, I think there's a similar concept to that one here in this forum. I forgot when but there's a kind of lottery that when you get the last digit in block explorer you will get a bitcoin coin in physical I also forget who that person who conducted that event. But when it comes to a lottery with a prize I think there's none as of now, it could be cool and entertaining I will participate if there's a gaming site that offer such game.

it should be equal. Random winnings get worse. Nonetheless, I would stay away still. You get lucky the first time and you'll need to be lucky once again on the random selection. Do they need to once again bet $10 to increase their chances in this random selection? Why not, see if the users double down?  There's another idea.

Seeing they have yet done anything means there is no plan in place. But I see this is going to be a decentralized casino?

I believe the biggest obstacle such idea has is the volume which would be necessary to fulfill the time requirements you are talking about.

Even in large and popular casinos lotteries are set up as weekly events or daily events, so on order for your idea to actually work, you would need to secure enough users from the beginning, so people won't have to wait too much for a smart contract settlement.

You would also need to do such thing using a Blockchain which is fast and with low fees, because if someone likes the service they will try to buy tickets several times or many times in the day.

Yeah, let's say in this round there were 10 participants.
We select a random number between 1 to 9 accounts who will be the winner.
Then we can distribute equally, or randomly. (Not sure yet)

There's no such concept as online, because once they deposited, the smart contract handles the payout. So even if they are not online on the website, they still get the winnings distributed to their account on the blockchain.

When you are talking about the random selection, do you mean the random selection on the prize distribution?

Random selection 1 (winners)
- We select the winners

Random selection 2 (Prize distribution)
- We select randomly how much each user get from the pot

We could see if a user double's down, (I assume you mean if he won, he would have less chance in the next round?) But this would not work, because it's super easy to generate a new address, and this user will be a "new better" in the system, easy to abuse.

Actually we could deploy multiple contracts, 10 minutes, 30 minutes window, 1 hour window etc... But maybe if there are too many, it would be not good, because it would split the market, and yeah in the beginning it's not popular so it's just a waste.

Maybe a 1 day rounds window contract could be deployed first.

I was thinking deploy this on the BSC network, because of the low fees. Although it's compatible with ERC20 too, just the fees are too high there.

In my opinion, even though a lottery idea is very good, it will not attract many people consistently unless the lottery site has more other casino and sports betting games or also has bitcoin and altcoin price prediction games. But if you just make a website that only has lottery, then your website won't last long, it will soon go bankrupt. and the reason is very simple: people play with the hope of making a profit, even if they are not winning, they still play with the hope of making a profit and most people know that the lottery would be the worst way for them to achieve this.

Just ask yourself why this forum doesn't have a lottery-only site that has been successful for years? the reason is that there will be no customers and the site will go bankrupt, in other words, despite there being ideas to have a good lottery, the main problem will be how to ensure that there are constant customers for the lottery site, which is why some lottery sites They feature many games of chance, including the lottery, so customers who are attracted to games such as indexes will also see the lottery and will buy a ticket. This, in my opinion, is the only way for people to buy lottery tickets constantly. I don't know how you intend to get constant customers for your lottery website

Smart contracts, like any other form of code, can be vulnerable to exploits, and even well-audited contracts have faced challenges in the past. The concept of a "rug pull" may not directly apply in this case, but vulnerabilities can still exist within the contract itself.

Regarding your idea, I do not think the concept of lottery-style games is particularly popular in the crypto world. In fact, not sure if it is even popular among younger generations in the real world. The appeal of such games likely depends on demographics; generally, younger demographics tend to lean towards high-paced games with a significant adrenaline rush involved. That said, there could still be niches or unique features that could make your idea stand out and appeal to a specific group within the crypto community.

while this is a novel concept that has not been tried and tested yet, there are a few challenges that this concept might encounter which I speculated in once I read your idea.

1. If you're looking to do this via Smart contracts, how would you combat exploits, bug abusers that would do their best to one up your system and win as much as they could?
2. The appeal in lotteries is that it gives you the chance to win stupendous amounts of money based on luck. Diluting the prize pot to give more people the prizes isn't going to be a lottery anymore, it's a raffle.
3. Lotteries don't sell like hotcakes cause they aren't that appealing anymore, there are way more people now that know the ins and outs of lotteries so it's way hard for them to be convinced to stake their chances.

if you're able to really solve these issues at hand, you'd have a successful concept and a profitable business venture, but as it stands today no one has reinvented the lottery wheel, which says a lot.

This is like more on a raffle and not lottery, maybe a raffle with a twist.
Anyway, you have your brilliant idea OP and I’d hope that you continue to work on this and what I can suggest is to have a good site, and a great marketing promotions so you can attract more. Again you have to distinguish the difference between lottery and the raffle system, what you discussed here is more about the raffle system.

The lottery win will be the unexpected one,only the lucky person can able to share the pot.The rest gambler should need to find the slot in the next lottery,the number of the winner from the participants is like 0.1 percentage of the ticket buyers.The correct in your post was not the entire pot money was split to the winner,then what the gambling site will get on the conduction.Most the 20-30 percentage was move to the gambling site owners,the remaining 70-80 percentage of the pot was splinted among the winners.

I'm not so sure a crypto lottery is the way to go.  Doesn't seem like that kind of gambling really catches on with the crypto crowd, or even younger folks nowadays. Folks into crypto seem more into things like DeFi, NFTs, trading, investing. Stuff where they can roll up their sleeves and potentially make some money through working it.  The crypto savvy probably wants more action than just picking some numbers and hoping luck's on their side.

but hey, never say never. and  Youd definitely need to do your homework and figure out who your audience is. Even if a straight up lottery isn't so hot maybe you add some twist to make it so. There's always niches to tap into, so don't write off the idea completely.  But Id think the crowd seems more drawn to having some control and using their brains with this stuff.

Why would the prizes be at random rather than split into the number of winners? Wouldn't that be 'unfair' even if the system you have installed revolves around fairness? The first parts of your idea is okay, and it's as simple as can be. It rings more of a raffle than a lottery to me. Anyway, as for the prize, I don't think there'd be a lot of people willing to play the game if they find out that their bet could return 1x in an event of a win. That means they just wasted their time and would be frustrated even if it's a win.

This doesn't sound like a "unique" project. I am sure there are lots of such smart contract "lottery" out there. There are even blockchain based decentralized casinos, but they never were popular. There are reasons though. Why would someone want to play in such a casino when there are already lots of well known casino that offers lottery? I doubt any casino would rig or cheat in lottery games. There are even third party services that does the lotto draw so everything remains fair and the owners won't be able to "preselect" winners. You can even verify those lottery draws.
The smart contract based lottery does sound interesting, but does it offer or solve something that current casinos can't?

For the fact that this os coming from a newbie account shows that we have to do some extra due diligence and also ask enough questions that help us to secure our funds if we consider using this platform since smart contract lottery is not so popular here in the forum,  and if ops give this idea some great thoughts then he should or may get some members who may want to try out how this lottery selection works and how lucky they can be using this platform.

So we must expect a few replies from the ops and as a matter of fact, the ops need to already address some of the emerging questions that are coming up gradually from the thread.

I definitely agree with your statement,

This is not lottery perse- but more on the spirit of a raffle where winners are chosen on a given time-frame. Unlike traditional lotteries where numbers are being picked by the minute, these follows more on the side of a raffle.

While this kind of proposal is decent, I do not think that people would try and spend $10 on a given ticket due to the circumstances involved. In our country, the ticket for the lottery costs less than a $1 with the chance of winning a huge amount of money in the end.

it may attract some players in the beginning, but i don't think, he can sustain the interest of those players. so high likely that such endeavour is only short-term.
well, he can try running this and see for himself how many people will try to join the game. but the longevity is usually the dilemma here.

OP should consider the cost and the profit he's going to make, he needs an auditor to audit the contract not just a small auditor he needs a reputable auditor he also needs a platform to embed the smart contract and the hardest part is promoting it, if he has the budget and he is ok with whatever result then he can proceed at least he created something unique in the casino ecosystem.
Promotion should not be on this forum only there are other communities, he can promote but having it here in Bitcointalk will give it a good takeoff, so the ball is in OP's hands now if he wants to proceed or not.

How would the winners be chosen? Randomly?
I think something like this could become interesting if you could include an oracle (or something similar) to visualize the result of a football championship, for example.
So that, instead of people simply choosing a random number, they can bet on the victory of certain football clubs, and after the result is announced, the oracle would look for the winner and the contract would distribute it among the bettors who guessed correctly. victory.
I was almost sure that something like this already existed, but in a quick search I couldn't find anything.

Hmm, random distribution huh.. shouldn't there be a minimum and a maximum instead? The allure of a lottery is that they pay for a ticket that is a hundred or thousand times lower than the maximum prize that they can get, so there's actually something to look forward to, regardless of the chances that you'd get. If the prizes were random, it may come across to them that the price isn't anything big at all, especially since the prize is split instead of a single (or two, three) winners.

There's the issue of trust and stuff like that, but you should probably fix the idea first imo. Adding twists is fine, but leave the thing that most lottery users want alone. You'd probably lose more than gain more.

I like sharing a portion of the prize pool with everyone because most gamblers would likely lose against the big players who always buy the most tickets. It's the less punishing type of lotto or raffle for the losers, while the real winners are forced to take the hit due to how the prizes are distributed. Maybe there should be an alternative prize for the losers because the reduction in winnings could push lottery players away when they can get a better payout by playing the regular lotteries.

I remember there were micro payment wallets (related to faucets businesses) working with hourly lottery rewards like this. People could add money to the pot and the platform also added money to it proportionally to the traffic and income it was making along the day. It was a great concept for active users, but not very profitable, as you weren't forced to put any money in to join the raffle.

I think it can work nicely, but you still have to add an attractive feature to make gamblers active every 10 minutes for new rounds.

It must be quite challenge to boost a new lottery service like this from zero with so many competitors in crypto gambling industry right now. Good luck!

Indeed, I've always wondered why many lotteries, including national lotteries, that offer huge jackpots have only one winning combination or ticket. The prizes are beyond life-changing. They could be divided into, say, 5 and still be life-changing. If only there's this mechanism, many might be encouraged to join because the probability increases, and they'd also be of help to more people.

But I don't think this mechanism, just like what OP has in mind, will protect small players against big players. After all, there's no limit as to how much combination or ticket you'll buy. If there are 10 available slots and there'll be 5 winners, it could still happen that 3 of them are the same participant. So it's still the same rule that the more tickets you have the higher probability of winning.

From a gamblers perspective, this will be nonsense.
Why? Where is the enjoyment part where I get to pick my numbers and test my luck? You say its random which I believe is true and can be done but like I said you are taking away the part where gamblers enjoy thr game, its taking the risk at their own picks and not just because the system picked It.
This aint gambling but more like a raffle and I doubt it will last long because if one gamblers doesnt win for like 5 to 10 rounds then without a doubt they will leave and just pick another game where it looks like they are in control by picking their own numbers.
But I do like the idea although I think it cannot be ran on a daily basis or worse every 10 minutes.
Perhaps there are other ways to make this more fun, a bit of a twist

Thanks all for your feedback.

Here's a new idea.

We pick a number from 10000 to 99999.

There are 5 participants.
Player1: Buys a lottery ticket $10, picks 12000
Player2: Buys a lottery ticket $10, picks 23450
Player3: Buys a lottery ticket $10, picks 69990
Player4: Buys a lottery ticket $10, picks 52123
Player5: Buys a lottery ticket $10, picks 73234

We draw the number: 54321

Now, we will distribute the whole pot among all the players.

1. Rank the players based on how close their guess was to the actual number:

   Player4: 1 (closest)
   Player3: 2
   Player5: 3
   Player2: 4
   Player1: 5 (furthest)

2. Calculate the inverse of each player's rank:

   Player4: 1/1 = 1
   Player3: 1/2 = 0.5
   Player5: 1/3 = 0.33
   Player2: 1/4 = 0.25
   Player1: 1/5 = 0.2

3. Sum up all the inverse ranks: 1 + 0.5 + 0.33 + 0.25 + 0.2 = 2.28 (harmonic series)

4. Calculate each player's share of the pot:

   Player4: (1 / 2.28) * $50 = $21.93
   Player3: (0.5 / 2.28) * $50 = $10.96
   Player5: (0.33 / 2.28) * $50 = $7.24
   Player2: (0.25 / 2.28) * $50 = $5.48
   Player1: (0.2 / 2.28) * $50 = $4.39

In this system, we always distribute the pot, and the closer you are, the more you get. You even have the chance to break even.

Payouts with 100 players

Let's calculate the shares until we reach a share that is $10 or more: (to check break even)

Player1: (1 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $192.78
Player2: (0.5 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $96.39
Player3: (0.33 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $63.62
Player4: (0.25 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $48.19
Player5: (0.2 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $38.56
Player6: (0.166 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $32.01
Player7: (0.142 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $27.37
Player8: (0.125 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $24.11
Player9: (0.111 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $21.39
Player10: (0.1 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $19.28
Player11: (0.09 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $17.35
Player12: (0.083 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $16.00
Player13: (0.076 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $14.65
Player14: (0.071 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $13.68
Player15: (0.066 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $12.73
Player16: (0.0625 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $12.05
Player17: (0.058 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $11.18
Player18: (0.055 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $10.60
Player19: (0.052 / 5.18738) * $1000 = $10.02

This could be based on the The harmonic series. The pot distribution could be calculated on this function.

The harmonic series for 100 is:

H(100) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/100 ≈ 5.18738...

In the harmonic series distribution the key factor is the accuracy of the guess, not the quantity of guesses. The distribution of the prize pool is still based on the rank of each player's guess, not the number of tickets they purchased. So, even if a player buys many more tickets than others, they would still need to guess closer to the drawn number to receive a larger portion of the prize pool. This aspect of the game could be seen as a form of fairness, as it rewards accuracy over quantity.

The point is, everyone will be a winner. But the winning amount will be based on how close you are to the actual drawn number. You can earn more, break even, or earn less than your initial guess. Thoughts?