Bitcoin Forum

Hi Everyone,

I have been a keen BitCoin user for some time now, however I have kept it quite down low on the forums. But I have decided to break out and start using forums to chat to other BitCoin users and hopefully more merchants. I have also wanted to apply my programming skills to a BitCoin based product. So I decided to start my own BitCoin lottery at http://bitlottery.robertputt.co.uk (http://bitlottery.robertputt.co.uk). I have priced the ticket prices low so hopefully everyone can get involved.

Ticket Price - 0.1 BTC
Weekly Draw - Saturday Evening 8PM GMT.

There are no numbers to pick or roll overs, because we know the exact number of tickets purchased we can pick 1 distinct winner each week. To find our weekly winner we will use the PHP rand() function to pick a row from our tickets database.

Where does my ticket money go? - 90% of your ticket purchase is put towards the weekly jackpot. 5% is donated to charity, and 5% is kept to help keep BitLottery running. It is hoped that after sufficient funds have been secured to host the website for the forseable future that we will give 10% to charity and remove our share.

To start playing visit the website at http://bitlottery.robertputt.co.uk (http://bitlottery.robertputt.co.uk).

Any queries just send me a PM or discuss on the forum.

Please enjoy the lottery I have produced, if you are interested in starting your own BitCoin lottery site or indeed any other site or project give me a shout, I am programmer fluent in PHP and MySQL, Java & C# and in some circumstances open to working for free on worthwhile projects or for a few BTC.

Good luck, I will announce the first winner on Saturday 14th January 2012.

Interesting. I may give it a shot. Which charity do you intend to donate to?

This has been toying on my mind alot. At work I am running 2 racks of servers for BitCoin mining and I am currently donating to Cancer Research UK via Cheque. However I can understand a UK charity is not the best for a global audience. One possibility is that the winner chooses the charity on a weekly basis. Or the charity is rotated every 6 months to one that users vote for. What do you guys think?

The very first question that comes to mind, when it comes to BTC lotteries:  how can you pick the winner so that everyone can know for sure that you did not cheat (pick your own entry or pick you buddy's entry)?

I really like the way they pick the winner at http://bitlotto.com/ (http://bitlotto.com/) because anyone can verify exactly which ticket should be the winner from the publicly available algorithm and publicly available information.


You say you pick the winner at random - but how can we know for sure?

I for one will not buy a ticket from a closed system where I cannot personally verify exactly which entry should have won and exactly how much they should have gotten.

Well maybe if we publically display the database IDs of each of the tickets purchased. We then place all of these into a big box and pick one out at random live on webcam? This would help the randomness and also add a different interactive sort of scope to the lottery. But on the whole basically it is a trust thing, and I'd like to think there is still a little trust in the world. I am not here to rip people off or to take the piss. I just want to learn a little and make a little and create an enjoyable BitCoin Lottery. It is like anything with BitCoin, if you buy a cardigan on BitCoinClothes.com how can you be sure you'll ever receive it? You have to have some trust and accept not everyone in the world is out to get you. It is the same with BitCoin mining, how do you know the pool owner won't run away with all the coins? I don't know enough to be able to replicate what is on BitLotto, but the joy of BitLottery is you can pay out to an alternative wallet, great if you use an online wallet, it is small and friendly, and the people behind it and hopefully the players too all have good intentions.

Ok then, enough said.

Wohooo. The first BitLottery ticket has just been sold, bringing our jackpot this week so far to 0.09 BTC. Ok not a big one, but if we sell a few more tickets the odds will be pretty good and you could win some BTC.

I like this Luck thingy game.

How do I buy a ticket? I logged in, but I can't find where do buy a ticket.

Thanks

Hi Simon,

Once you are logged in go to your account. Deposit some BitCoins using the deposit wallet address. Once these have been transferred and confirmed 6 times they will appear in your account. Then you can purchase a ticket. If you win your winnings will be placed in your account which then need to be withdrawn using the withdraw tool on your account page.

Regards

BitLottery

Is this another one of these ponzi / pyramid scams / schemes ?

Hi,

This is in no way a ponzi scheme, pyramid scam or scheme.

Why?
Because we are not promising you a return on your investment. We are clear and open that this is a complete gamble. Just like a normal lottery and relies on chance of being the ticket that is drawn. It is like any other raffle or draw, and the prize is the money paid in from all of the players. And there fore this isn't a ponzi or pyramid scheme. If this was a pyramid scheme or a ponzi it would literally say "Invest in our amazing scheme and we will guarantee a payout and you just can't refuse... Buy Buy Buy!!!!". But we are not. It is a clear defined game which involves complete chance and is a complete gamble.

How many people are entering each draw at the moment?

Hi,

Well it is the first week we have run the lottery, and so far we have sold a grand total of 3 tickets, so although the winnings would be quite small, you'd be in with a good chance so far.

WOW. So the odds of winning right now are 1/3 ?

Nice !

Hi,

Yes the current odds for winning are 1/3, but, at the same time the prize is 0.27 BTC :-).

But feel free to signup for an account and give it a go!

Hi All,

If you have made a deposit today and it hasn't appeared in your account yet please do not panic. Unfortunately the daemon stopped running on the server randomly earlier today, I have restarted it now and I am waiting for the blocks to download (currently 19% and incrementing quickly). Once this has been completed and any deposited funds have been confirmed they will appear in your account. I will post again after this has completed.

 

Hi Again,

Blocks are all updated now. Get involved still only 3 tickets sold, good odds!

For transparency, you may wish to consider posting your code up. I'm not sure what other reassurances you can offer to others though.

I think, I would be more than happy to post the code on how the winner is selected. And some documentation about the code, however I would be hesitant of releasing all of the code in case somebody created a rip off of the site. But we all trust our local game shows / lotteries in our normal currency, and also draws in our own currency, so why shouldn't it be trusted in a crypto currency. As I previously said I am here purely to provide some fun and a members of the public a chance to win, hence why would I want to cheat the system? The cost of the lottery itself is covered by the 5%, that is good enough for me.

As I stated above:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57175.msg680818#msg680818 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57175.msg680818#msg680818)

the first and repeated question you are going to get is "how do we know you are not selecting your buddy's ticket to be the winner".   

Even if you release the code that selects the winner, or even if you released all of your code, this does not prove you are randomly selecting the winner.

It looks like you may be kind of new around here so you many not know that due to the irrevocable nature and relative anonymity of Bitcoin transfers many members of the Bitcoin community have been personally ripped off or seen others be ripped off in many different and creative ways.  This means that the customer base you are dealing with, your customer base, is a lot more skeptical and paranoid than the general public.  You really need to know and understand this and take it into consideration in any new Bitcoin venture.  Your points that people generally trust and believe certain things in the general population, while possibly true, have no purchase within the Bitcoin community.

Your competitors have found ways to get around this by having an external publicly available and publicly verifiable way to select the winner.  You are and will continue to be at a huge disadvantage to your competitors until you solve this issue.