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http://www.RaffleBit.com: The premier high-paced Bitcoin raffle venue, designed to accommodate as much as 1,800BTC raffled off: in one day! By limiting the amount of tickets available in any given raffle, RaffleBit.com is able to ensure that the small buy-in players always have fair odds, while there are still plenty of raffles every day for the big fish to make stable returns. This means that all players have a fair shot at winning raffles, and earning substantial Bitcoin, no matter the size of your BTC wallet!

By keeping the total pot size relatively small, you won't have to wait for weeks on end just to see if you've won something. You also have better odds of winning, and are able to play as many times a day as you want.



--> Buy-in is 0.1BTC, payout is anywhere from 5 up to 25 BTC per raffle.

--> All tickets & payouts verified on blockexplorer as links directly from the raffle page

--> AJAX user interface for watching the raffle progress live

--> Automatic winner selection and payout

--> Integrated random.org random number generation

--> Jackpot progress display

--> Total tickets bought display

--> Live transaction feed


Our winners are selected by listening to the random electromagnetic signals generated by the earth's atmosphere, converting that radio noise into a string of numbers, and grabbing one. In a way, you could say that we don't pick the winners at all: it's aliens/God/the sun/a black hole/psychic willpower.
http://www.random.org/statistics/



The first step is helping me beta test the system. Just point your browser to http://www.RaffleBit.com and play some tiny raffles. For load testing purposes, the raffles are set at a 0.1BTC buy-in and a payout of .5-2.5BTC right now, so it'll be even more fast paced than normal.

TBD:
-Ticket crediting via total btc sent per raffle instead of total 0.1btc entries per raffle
-Scalable DB system to support the above

I'm not sure what post you are going to reply to so I'll ask it here too!
 
The key part was *grabbing one*. Until people can verify, no matter how random the data, you can grab whatever one you want until its good for you. I'm sure you are trying to run an honest game, but until that number is beyond your control and the method picking the winner, you could easily make yourself win and no one would suspect anything for a pretty long time.

The raffle system would have to be modified pretty heavily. As I've designed it, the raffle is not able to be subverted in any way, and the games move so quickly that a scam-style RaffleBit would be nixed by the BTC community very quickly. Rounds are designed to sell out over the course of a few hours. If 2k people a day were paying attention, the system would get a bad reputation really quickly, and stop being used!

 ;D

You can subvert it. I bet you could take thousands and thousands of dollars worth of BTC before anyone would suspect something was up with your picking method. The more popular it is, the easier it is to continue taking money without anyone suspecting anything. Everyone is anonymous. It's to be expected that the winners are unknown.

Well, you could just look at random.org's data yourself?

Everyone will get a different number.

Yeah, I've looked into it and there's no way of doing lookups on random.org generation history. I'll continue to work on scalable solutions that don't involve using a semi-random block method, or a lotto-number-matching system. As it is, the random.org works great and it'd be nice to see some activity :)

You could just dump out the hash of a PRNG seed then after each round give them the actual seed.

see void srand($seed) (http://php.net/manual/en/function.srand.php)

Just throwing in a little bump, needs some more entries for the current round!

Excellent approach, I'll look into something along those lines.

It's worth mentioning that the first few beta rounds went off with a hitch or two, but some crucial bugs in the code got worked out. So far, the system's working pretty well. I've got a few revisions in mind, but I'll be toiling away to improve the app and we should be out of beta, and in to full 5-25BTC rounds, pretty soon!

http://www.RaffleBit.com - it's fun!

Alright, folks! Got a few things added to the http://www.RaffleBit.com system. We now have proof-of-honesty, where each raffle's winners are picked before the raffle starts and hashed, then released. When the jackpot is paid, the original string is released and the honesty of the match can be verified.

Also added a pot-splitting feature. Now, 1st place wins 60%, 2nd wins 25%, 3rd wins 15%. Everybody wins :)


So far, we've had quite a few BTC run through the system, and it seems to be functioning well. Many bugs have been squashed, and much progress has been made. Thanks for your help and patience, and we hope you continue having fun playing RaffleBit!

We have updated the pot size to help finish off the beta process. The pot sizes were to small creating rounds that were to fast and not well balanced.

New pot size varies from 1-5 btc.

Have fun playing.

We spotted a couple of more bugs and got them fixed.

Currently pot varies from 1-5 BTC.

Beta is coming along smoothly, thanks for the help.

www.rafflebit.com

Go win some :D

Things are going well for RaffleBit! Lots of BTC payouts, and awesome new features added to the system like a custom hash function for truth verifications with an amazing salt. Come check it out, the pots are getting bigger!

http://www.RaffleBit.com

Congrats to our last round's winners on http://www.RaffleBit.com!!! Payouts for last round were .89, .53, and a whopping 2.14BTC to our first place winner! Current pot size is 1BTC, with exactly 50% of tickets left for sale this round. Get in now, it's gonna be a fast one!

Current round has been a quick one with 80% of the shares already bought. Not that many left if you still want to get your chance to win!

Congrats to the winners from the round that ended this morning.

The next round is already underway, get in why you can and play the odds!

Good Luck!

I'm not sure I get what your hashing thing does. It appears you are picking a certain ticket such as the 5th ticket to win but hashing it? Then, when the 5th ticket wins you are releasing what the original text says?

http://www.rafflebit.com/faq.php

When a round starts, the 3 winners of that round are chosen. The source of the winning ticket numbers is random.org, which uses ambient atmospheric signals to generate random numbers. The winning tickets are converted to a tiger192,4 hash, and the winning ticket string for the last round released after it ends. This enables you, the user, to verify that we, the operators, aren't monkeying around!

Can you give an example from a previous round showing all the steps so I can see how it's done? I'm still not certain what the hash accomplishes or how exactly you are picking the winning ticket.

Alright, I guess I'll connect the dots for you. Although, I have to say, the site's pretty clear as far as what the hash does, and the previous round is there for you already, but whatever.

Random.org selects some numbers, encapsulates them in a string, and hashes it.
Winning numbers for next round(tiger192,4): cdec4577078b5e6f93780776bba72e9c1b4d48fc840633bc

That's the hash for next round. Write this down if you have doubts about rafflebit's sincerity.


Last round's winners: R%OlWmXVTNauE|qzdh*ZxmYMSmomClLKpAok%kx))&H/*oZtLgJiJH\T\PfMa#xWYby!Cmp+rmrYRrrCNsbN(DGisdm!kaWAsvA/(grFJYDAGluKTLxipvI)O\)qCl*/)Wulc!h%*$CVE|FO(u_D&|#Sxxz(YEhmA~*Tkm_AFONibJoqcBjyMrHjefyca)WRx$$XppPkcC$ukpaVgAt/iaKDwz)NMkVBm)y~Cmt|fL---->25<----XYa)Tx*lXFTHhqgMujG!R\QaMu!---->0<----(#M|*dBYQGB*kvMZbj%$sIciSjzVUz/$CfhV)x^T)~vZ|LaN*cOxbh_/ILfTCq|v%tr**ujcT|u&)K~deW#Nwe(dgu_*ahLu#t!_%jGVM*abbjMNxTA~)ODvA+$QFMkMek*y%WK*|cgEC~rqd#Qr_KcMReUNhwRUW+s*%uxqMT/FdBlxZbe|dP*lkk(IW*TSoDjq_WVY+gUBXf)WyKi~zPua*I*|*/ftMFYYS|)Ys#RGE&Tt*bBVi\|y\l$*MgIPcX&ljbB~AsOvOH&TaF+QQto!UGrX%qMwEQ(---->38<----fiQo*huL|aPgIL

That's the winning numbers from last round, encapsulated in a string, and released since the last round's winners already got paid out.

Hash: e436a8dd1f85cf8805c1d10ff6eca74b6a0b5a9487a10e4b

This is the hash of the above string from last round. If you had written the hash down somewhere, you could compare these two things to your record to verify that the numbers are genuine. We even link you to http://www.whatsmyip.org/hash_generator/ on the FAQ to endorse honesty-verification. And things like http://blockexplorer.com/address/1HeySQD9yMJLWcs7SEGCZrbtLh2Bf1dhJZ that prove payouts. And https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30515 that show proof from random members of the community endorsing the honesty of the platform.

Thank you. Perhaps I'm slow? ;) I was just curious if your method prevented you from knowing the winner or being able to manipulate it.

Does random.org hide what the string actually is until certain date or do you know the string for who wins the whole time?
Are the numbers used for the order based off of blockexplorer for when they paid? Would 0 be the first ticket and 5 the 6th ticket?

No problem, I'm sure the truth-verification system is confusing for most first-timers. The string/winning numbers are hidden from me and set at the start of the round, so there's no way to manipulate the system. I can change the source code to display the winners if I need to, but the display in my terminal is minimized anyway since there's so much output data, so all of the number-display functionality that was present in dev has been stripped out. I have no competitive edge, even if I was ethically unopposed to participating in RaffleBit(service op shouldn't stand to gain beyond what's disclosed to customers).

In programming terms, yeah...0 is the first ticket, and 5 the 6th. The numbers of the tickets are based on the order in which they appeared in the blockchain, but not based on blockexplorer.



This is what I'm talking about, as far as verbose output, and the priority for space over seeing winning numbers. It also demo's what my actual interaction with the backend of RaffleBit looks like.


<h1>Address to play:<h1><h2> 1Ga7XzikxLKP9uLEUTpkkiBA9PzTZ2qmEK</h2>

Tickets total/sold: 158 / 17
Purchased: 10.759493670886
<h2>1.649BTC contributed to 15.326BTC total jackpot<br>10.76% of all tickets purchased</h2>
iterations to make: 17
1FRiyXouam42Gp6K1kSJKxcL2egFeTumTo
1K6LwSi7yVCmzjUjnkMyYpXPXkvKJ7geV
1749vsy9jwHp2A8gX18AQgyyJtiFbdytYX
1JaTuMrkDnTsGMrvREwjnPEAGzswALXdvW
1Lupo4bMPgifk8kjgnghgDardYdvHgKkmC
1HcaeHuoLZ2rkGt9oj5KpcXSR4N5WzKLaz
1DdMq3aTbYvj6AUsHSPu6SmsHeWztihAFj
1C5VZ6rNSVSZNEaFHQvwVULqPfJp8r56w3
1GgsSrzjRywKNiBcJzS2GkAMAZo53CG3Qq
1AdP1P4SP7du9zkLGTEk9XVYAWpEHi6qdo
19TfyhuutTEyWxcTtiGPhAWRjjdyKNRa1w
1LMc82Yy6G3eboD2HSc11JADmgmxWFWtCx
1DdcEt46FxDMBkR5yo5b8CV6kuv1DSoJHC
1AJV5E8BYAFqm5opaeg1UbK7pWZZeSzP2F
1EG3x2hGehfM7t5vCE7femTic1RRmeRXfh
1DiP9Z8B2dRoFmLM3nGABiC1FBNf5fB1tM
1GmqvgKpb3cUb5PKZhRiCcb3eTWyX9gnW1