Bitcoin Forum

That is TAABL for short :)

So I needed a good excuse to start scripting on top of bitcoind, as I have a few projects in mind. But them being too time consuming I needed something smaller, which is why I ended up doing this.

What is the TAABL, I hear you ask? Well, glad you asked :) It's a lottery, where you bet on the last 5 characters of a specific block hash. I take nothing from the bitcoin pool, it is all divided as follows:

1st prize - 5 characters correct - 50%
2nd prize - 4 (rightmost) characters correct - 6%
3rd prize - 3 (rightmost) characters correct - 8%
4th prize - 2 (rightmost) characters correct - 9%
5th prize - 1 (rightmost) character correct - 25%
bounty pool - 2%

I didn't just take these number out of my ass. They roughly follow the structure of a local state lottery. I can change them if you can convince me I should, though.

The bounty pool is the 'charity' part, and one must always exist to lend some sense of reason to all those that bet. But what bounty will that be? Well, you can vote on what you want to see as recipients of that. This first one will most likely go to bitfaucet, but we also have EFF, some specific bounties that appear on the fora and, if this actually becomes a thing to keep doing, maybe pay for a site facelift or server costs.

For now, everything is open. Three things to keep in mind for the adventurous betters:
- This is really alpha quality code, I tested a bit but not so much to think things will go glitch free.
- The site design sucks, and will stay that way until the server side is fine tuned. My availability to do this is limited, but I'll try my best to keep things running.
- This is running out of an office server, meaning connectivity is far from perfect. Don't be too alarmed if the server disappears for a couple of hours, I promise I'll move this to a real server as soon as I can.

So, some basic rules:
- Each bet costs 1.00
- You can put as many bets on the same character string as you want to
- There is no way to see which numbers others have already bet on... I'm of two minds as to this being a feature or a problem
- Although you put money to bet on your account, prizes are not put there, but rather sent directly to BTCOUT (explained below)
- This first round will have payments processed semi manually, to make sure everything goes ok, so expect delays. It will all be automated later, when I'm comfortable with the process

To use this system you have to register, but what about the anonymous in the lottery name? Well, no personal data is requested, or even allowed. You give me one bitcoin address to which prizes will be paid, and I give you one bitcoin address to which you can send your bet bitcoins. These are BTCOUT and BTCIN respectively. The OUT / IN are always in relation to the TAABL, so it's easy to remember.

Once you register, you can log in using the BTCOUT alone. As an almost random string of characters, I feel that using passwords is unnecessary. There isn't much you can do that is of harm if you use somebody else's account. If you feel otherwise, I'll come up with something better.

When you are logged in, you can bet on the open lottery draw, and you can see the draw details. You can also cancel tickets you bought. All of this gets locked 2 blocks from the end of the lottery draw.

Best of luck to all, and if you do hit the jackpot, you can always share the wealth with yours truly :)

Check it out at http://taabl.datlatec.com (http://taabl.datlatec.com)

Lets 'pretend' I'm not that smart. Could you give an example bet and payout for a previous block? Where can we find the winning lottery numbers?

Is this like "shake of the day" at various bars, where if you roll 5 6's you get 1/2 the pot?

I'm good at pretending :) Lets say there were 100 bets, so total 100 BTC on that draw. Now say 30 tickets get the last character right, 3 get the last two and 1 gets the last three. This means that

1st prize - BTC 50.00 - not taken
2nd prize - BTC 6.00 - not taken
3rd prize - BTC 8.00 - 1 winner, BTC 8.00 each
4th prize - BTC 9.00 - 3 winners, BTC 3.00 each
5th prize - BTC 25.00 - 30 winners, BTC 0.83 each
bounty purse takes BTC 2.00

the unclaimed prizes, totaling BTC 56.00 get added to the 1st prize jackpot of the following draw. I had forgotten to mention that, mainly because I'm not sure if I shouldn't instead add that to the total prize pool of the next draw instead, thus upping all prizes, not just the 1st... hmmm, what do you think?

As for the lottery numbers, they are the 5 rightmost digits of the bitcoin block numbered matching the draw, which you can verify using the getblock patch if you are compiling bitcoind yourself. I'm sure there are other places you can get that info from and, of course, that will get posted on the draw details page.



It's kinda late, so that may be it, but I have no idea what you just said...

I really want to know where to see what would have won block 73000.

I'm afraid to ask newbie questions:

Could anyone post a link to previous winning lotteries?
Why is the next lottery for block 76775? Wouldn't block 76608 seem more round, as this is when a new difficulty comes out? i.e. a lottery every couple weeks?

Can you generate some quick pick numbers, so I don't accidentally guess 1234z?

Whatever it is, I'm in. I'm shipping coins first and will figure it out later.

Yes I want a quick pick too lol

It's worse than 1 in a million to hit all five. 5^16 = 1048576

After 600,000 entries it'll still be worse than 50% to have hit. I think it'll be more fun if the jackpot can be expected to hit more than once a decade.

I propose

50% of the total pool for 3 perfect hits (1 in 4096)
25% of the total pool for 2 rightmost hits (1 in 256)
25% of the total pool for 1 rightmost hit (1 in 16)

Any money not paid goes into the total pool for the next drawing.

So if for example 4096 people each did a different number we'd have

1 winner for 2048BTC
15 people who hit 2 for 68.26BTC each
240 people who hit 1 for 4.26BTC each

That seems roughly appropriate.

If you really want to stick with the 1 in a million lottery, do not trap tons of money that can only be won by matching all 5, keep it all in one pool. And a way to buy X distinct random tickets would help let it be won inside of a year, maybe. At least people could throw down 200 tickets on impulse instead of having to type them all out, or even click a buy random 200 times.

Sure, they're all in the front page... as this is the first one, and hasn't finished yet, you'll find all the links were already available :)


I call open draw, and it calculates current block + 1200 (around 6 days in the future). That's because I thought one per week would be perfect, but would you rather have one every couple of days or so, at least as we start?


Thought about doing that, just didn't have time. Lets call that the next feature... Do you want me to make sure you get a random number noone picked yet, or just random?

And just fyi, the system does check the bets, so you couldn't guess 1234z. It simply ignores that bet request if you try.


Glad to know :) I've put in 1 BTC myself, and will be betting throughout the week so as to test different scenarious.

Best of luck to you

That would have been hash 00000000005936a8d5637765967ad4da3599596adf19879f5e65d6940da7fa64, so the winning sequence is 7fa64.

That's what I get for following a lottery that gets 4M€ in bets every week :)


Yes, that sounds much better. So bets will get trimmed to 3 characters and prize would be 50 / 24 / 24 / 2 (bounty purse).
The money going into the total pool also makes sense, seeing as we are a small community and chances are the jackpot will just grow bigger and bigger... We can also have a "special" draw every 3 months or so that just distributes the total including all jackpots by all the winning bets, even if they're all 1 hits.

But your odds seem off. Isn't 2 hits 65536 variations, and 3 43046721? It just adds to your point, though. edit: Of course you are correct... nibbles, not bytes.


The random will go in soon. I don't want to keep the 1 in a million, that was just my first guess. I want bitcoins to be distributed and with those odds... lets go with the 3 characters instead.

Thank you!

Updated the TAABL to move to the new prize schema, which is 3 character bets, prize distribution 50% + 24% + 24%.
Also included a random bet generator, as requested.

That's great! I'm buying a few more.

It would be good to a permanent link bar somewhere so people can easy navigate between rules, buy tickets, make a deposit, etc.

There was an issue with the random generation, with a buggy bias towards lower numbers. Sorry about that :)

Should be all fixed now.

Yes it would, but the buying of tickets needs the open draw context. If I always keep one, and only one open then it should not be a problem. I need to write rules, faq, thank yous, etc and make a bunch of visual fixes and improvements to the site, but this has been a learning experience for me, and my attention has been elsewhere (bitcoind jsonrpc integration, new web engine, new template lang, new db).

I will improve site navigation next, though, just because you asked first :)

IMO, login should not be required.

At a bare minimum, ticker buyers should only need to provide a bitcoin return address.  You provide them with a unique bitcoin address for deposits.

Assign each ticket a randomly generated URL for people who wish to track status of a ticket.

How would you see which tickets you had previously bought? Or cancel them?

The login is only a return address. It's the easiest login possible.

Haha thanks.

Visit the per-ticket, randomly generated link.

Ah, that is a no log-in solution. What is the downside to the easy log-in he has now?

At least to me, it's less anonymous because it encourages repeated use of the same login token.  In the real world, we can just walk to the nearest convenience store, hand cash to a clerk, and walk away with a lotto ticket.

Lotto tickets can be given to others, etc.

So, a single ticket gets bought by the buyer providing an address, I'm with you so far...

But what happens to that generated url? I will not be sending emails, as the thing is, you know, anonymous, and for a single ticket I can copy/paste, but imaging it's 200 tickets... or I could have a form where you enter the address and I give you the ticket status... but wait, don't I already do this??? It's the login form!

Truth be told, the disposable address was the way I initially implemented this, but I tend to loose these addresses and, yes, if you add labels to the addresses you can recover, but it's a LOT of work for the regular joe, imho.

You can, however, create as many accounts as you want. I'll eventually have a close account feature, that gives back whatever bitcoins it holds to the user address and then break the link. Lots of possible ways to go around this, but the one I have is, I believe, the best balance between anonymity and usability. I'm open to changing it, of course.

If you use a new address of each ticket you have the same anonymity as the link generating way, right?
I get what you mean about encouraging repeated use, I already did that. But anyone who really cares can just keep track of many addresses instead of many links.

I really don't see this as a feature, usability wise, but lets pretend for a minute I do. The difference between what is there now and the proposed 1 ticket / 1 address is that you have to send as many transactions as tickets you want to buy, each to a different BTCIN address, and provide as many different BTCOUT addresses to make the pairs. How would the UI work? Is this really worth the effort?

On a different approach, I could force a different address pair for each draw. So when the draw ends, outstanding coins are returned and I delete the link on the inside. But then you'd need some reference to the individual tickets to be able to track status.

How much can we do here without breaking the ease of use?

To be clear, I think it's good how it is. I was just trying to understand what jgarzik wanted and why.

People, I've added the btcout edit and coin withdrawal, but I'm having second thoughts here... The reason I left the login based on btcout alone is because even if you can hack it, you won't be able to do much about it.

That is no longer true, so if I hacked into some account by bruteforce (maybe try all addresses in the block chain? Probably someone is reusing addresses) I could now change btcout to something mine, cancel all open tickets and grab the dough. How can I avoid this? Ask for a password on register, and use that password to change btcout? Don't allow changing btcout at all (but them, if you make a mistake on register you are screwed unless I manually help you out, there goes the anonymous part).

Help me out!

The new look is great!

How can you mess up on register? If you put in a bad BTCOUT? Can you do the parity test or whatever to verify that the BTCOUT is a valid address? What else mattes? If they accidentally give you their grandmother's address I guess she gets the winnings.

Yeah, I make zero effort of asserting registered address is correct, and other than trying to send bitcoins over, I know not of a method to assert it... probably could patch bitcoind to add an rpc method for that, though.

I can also check string length, I've just been lazy. But if I understand you correctly, it would be ok to deny changing the btcout so we can recover the account safety?

That is what I was thinking when I wrote that post, but now I realize that if the user lost a wallet, perhaps because they thought it was empty because it was, they would lose their eventual winnings because they no longer control that address.

I don't see a way to recover accounts. How would you even do it manually? Trust whoever PMs you? Oh, I guess you could be fairly sure if they knew the address, but needed to change it because they no longer controlled it. But if they forget it all together (whole computer dead)?

It is called the TAABL though, so I guess you can sacrifice forgetful user friendliness to maintain ease and anonymity?

Or maybe there is a solution I cannot conceive of.

It just occured to me that you could have an optional password to allow someone to change their BTCOUT. Or even three options! No change allowed, change with passphrase and original BTCOUT, change with original BTCOUT only.

It lets the user choose their level of security from error vs security from attack. Maybe it's awkward or too much work, I dunno.

It's not too much work at all, but it is a little daunting for basic users... I think asking them to provide a password on register, but allowing it to be kept blank (thus allowing BTCOUT to be changed just by knowing the original) would be a good trade-off. And then you can change that in the account page by changing or clearing the password, I guess.

Will try that, thanks.

I think that's good.

Right, so here's what I did:

An optional password can be set on register or in the account page. When set, you'll need it to change the BTCOUT address. You can change it too. That password is not needed for login, the BTCOUT is still the only information required by the system.

There was another unrelated change that was logging people out when they changed BTCOUT. I've fixed that, but now everyone must log back in :)

what i noticed when i registered yesterday was
that it didnt send me to a done-page, but instead still showed the enter BCOUT to register,
i just ignored that, but it was kinda confusing ("am i registered now, or what?").

not sure if you changed that already.

Yeah, well, kind of :)

It does not log you in automatically, but it does tell you 'Registered!'. If you then log in from that page, you'll stay on the page and get a 'You are already registered' which is only slightly less confusing... but as it is working, that's low on my priority.

@nelisky

Perfect!

Thanks for the quickpick. :)

For all of you doing random bets, right now I make sure these bets don't repeat themselves *within your tickets* but would it be useful to make them unique on the whole draw? Luck is luck, there's no real statistical gain for the individual to do it any other way, but we would cover much more betting space, thus making it more probable for the high prizes to be hit, if I were to spread random bets that way.

What do you think, which do you prefer? And, if I do change this, you can always cancel all your tickets and buy them at random again, if you want unique bets system wide (unless someone else manually enters bets matching yours after you did that, of course).

If you share a number you share prizes. I've been making sure my bets add coverage to make sure they are unique. Of course they could get stepped on afterwards, so I'm not really safe.

I realized also that you need to make the list of tickets public, it's the only way to be sure the operator isn't adding tickets after the draw.

"I have a plan..."

So you say you want the random to be unique, right? It just sidesteps a bit from 'random' when we get picky, but a subset of random should be random enough, I guess.

As for the list of tickets public, I didn't want to do that while the bets are on because, well, it felt wrong. But I can't find a reason in logic to substantiate that, so if there are no objections I'll make a list of *all* taken numbers.
Remember that 2 blocks from the end the bets are locked, and that's when I though I'd be introducing the list, but I can do it before.

What more information do you need to make sure I (or any other future operator) am not stealing? Knowing the numbers provides you with enough knowledge to block me from stealing a top prize but not from stealing a lower one. For that you need a list of bets *and* how many tickets exist on each bet... How should such data be provided?

I'll start by just posting a list of bets to a page, a big ol' dump, and then I'll think about something on the likes of a csv file that gets generated as the draw is locked.

Random bets are now unique on the whole draw, until there's only 5% of bet space left, at which point it just takes any number.

You can see the bets for the draw in the details page. I added a blank when bets are not in sequence or duplicated, to indicate a 'hole'. I'll try to make that downloadable once the draw is locked, so everyone can verify the prize distribution when the result block gets issued. I think that's as much disclosure as it is possible, but if you'd rather have some more information, speak up.

If I deposit 1btc 4 blocks before the draw, and have a ticket pending, will there be an issue? Not sure of when tickets become final.

In theory, when there are two block to go to the draw, all is locked up, including the pending ticket acquiring. So it should be safe. If confirmation of the deposit comes after the draw is locked, it simply goes to your account balance, and the pending tickets stay that way.

I'm very impressed by the speedy improvements.

The claiming a duplicate is a pretty easy fraud still. Maybe just put the number purchased in parens after the ticket number if it is not 1.

Another thing:

ArtForz may have up to 20% of the power which means he would be able to know the winner 2 blocks before about 4% of the time. As other people get good code for GPUs it'll be less of a threat. I don't have any reason to think he'd do this, just trying to help make it robust. Making it 5 blocks would be pretty solid vs 20% power. In case it's not clear I'm suggesting he could solve 76774, not release, work on the 76775 early, learn the winner, bet, then release both 76774 and 76775 and win. Wait, even if 76774 is solved while he's working, if he gets a 76775 based on his 76774 then when he releases them it will be longest and accepted. So does he get it 20% or 4%? Either way, not so secure.

Edit: if bets are locked when you hit 76773 then an attacker needs to build a 76773 also, that makes it 4%.

Right now duplicates appear twice, meaning you can assert exactly how many tickets have won by keeping a copy of the bets from before the result is out. I've now put the numbers you own in bold (I'll add an underline later) so you can easily see if there are dups amongst your bets.

If to that I add a download link once the draw is locked, would that be enough to prevent me from cheating? I don't see any other safe way taking advantage (bar stealing the actual bets).


I didn't think that was possible. As the difficulty makes the average ~6 blocks per hour, even holding 20% of the CPU power you can be pretty sure that without those 20% the network would still resolve ~5 blocks per hour. But I'll take your word for it, and honestly I added this locking not to avoid that particular race, but to prevent people from canceling all their bets just before the result, something that would be very hard to explain to other betters: "I don't know where all the money went, it wasn't me, I swear" :)

Having said all that, I'm targeting one draw per week so holding back 3 hours / 18 blocks would be just fine. I have this idea of, once the system is tuned, making a lower bid, faster turnaround set of draws, say .05 per bet, 2 days, to allow people that just get some from faucet to at least feel a little thrill, but its all about critical mass. The site has been having wonderful reception, but it needs to hold a good number of "returning gamblers" to make it fun.

Yes, it is 'unlikely' because he only has 20%. According to my (very suspect) calculations freezing 2 blocks before gives him a 4% chance. So it's not like something he can just do and it'll work, but if he tried all year he might get it to work once. I'm just saying freezing an hour before isn't unreasonable and that makes it more like .0064% instead of 4%. And this will be reduced even more in the future by the dispersion hashing power.

Oh, 1btc is small enough imo. If you go much lower than a nickel I won't get excited ;-)

If the value of BTC increases by a lot then obviously revisit the issue. You could even have different size drawings occasionally. Though I suppose it would get weird with the rollover pools and whatnot.

It's looking so good!

I'm getting excited for the first draw. 600 blocks to go if we average 9/hr from here out that's only 3 days!

The faucet is a good idea. I think we should do MtGox on a big one, or for several or something. A tight market is pretty much the most important thing for bitcoin right now. And we're only getting it because he wrote good code and takes PayPal risk for no profit right now.

What he said

I just made a 5 bitcoin bet for the charity. All proceeds from these bets go to the faucet:

fff
ffe
ffd
ffc
ffb

If you created a charity acct with random picks, I'll do that in the future.

Hmmm, I could get a BTCIN that would have a BTCOUT to whatever charity, but that would only pay if one of the bets wins. That's what the bounty purse is all about. The more we bet, the more goes to the recipient. I unilaterally decided for the faucet on this one because that's where my first 5 bitcoins came from. And I have worked closely with mtgox, made a little profit I must say and have put an ad to them because I like their work very much. So next up is mtgox, I guess.
Also, because the default client doesn't allow checking the block hashes, I asked Bitcoin Watch to add that to their services, and that is apparently going forward. An independent way for users to check the hash I post as lottery result is the correct one. So they are next in line for the bounty.

In a nutshell:
- Bitcoin Faucet
- MtGox
- Bitcoin Watch

I would really like your input on two more things:
- Is the 6 day (1200 blocks) between draws a good choice? If I make them daily, the prizes will probably be too small. If I make it monthly, I guess people will loose interest, but I could make it every 500 blocks, or 1000, or whatever... what would work best, in your opinion?
- The 2% for bounty arrangement was just a number. I actually wanted to go 10%, but thought that would take too much of a slice from the prizes. Given people's inclination to donate, maybe I could go up? Or as an extra provide, I don't know, 50% of the unclaimed prizes to the bounty purse, and the other 50% are added to the next draw?

Keep in mind that if we start having big bets I'll need a real server, and that costs money, so unless someone donates a VPS somewhere we'll probably need to considers factoring that in too. I can keep the system as it is indefinitely, but there will be regular downtime (yesterday it was off for an hour, due to an IP change). I'll gladly donate my time to keep the thing running and updated.

This has been a lot more fun than I thought it would be :)

Tricky questions

I'm kinda anxious to get to the next difficulty levels. Bets on the 2016 and 1008 would mean an extra something for me - and an extra couple bets. 1-2 weeks seems to pique my interests. It is perfectly fine as is. Maybe a special lottery for block 100,000 then 125,000 then 150,000, etc.

If it was a 10% bounty for charity, I would bet less. Personally, I will donate more in bets if its 0%-2%, as I feel more in control of who's getting what.

Introduce a 'bet for the site' address, or let me check by each bet if I want that bet to go to the house / charity?

The site is great as-is, I feel awkward giving my opinions on what I'd do with your site. Just shoot for the most bets and adjust accordingly.

I strongly agree with MtGox as a charity - I see that site as a major breakthrough.

Right. I don't think we can hold the 3 character bet for long, if this ever picks up. That's a 4096 values bet space, so if we ever exhaust 50% of that, I guess it's time to move on. I would probably go for cheaper bets, less probable hits, but I can understand that not everyone thinks like that.


Yep, I think alike. But I didn't make the lottery so people can donate, it's more like touching the greedy bone of people (even if they then get the rewards and distribute to whoever, it's their bitcoins). Everybody likes to win, and while greed is a big problem in the world today, that is only because it's misdirected. There's nothing wrong with wanting to win the lottery, and if you do, what you do with the prize actually tells more about yourself that "it's better if I just donate my 10 bitcoins to someone". In my personal opinion, that is.


I don't know if I understood your proposal, but I don't care for it too much. If you win the bet you get the prize, so then you can give it to anyone, it's up to you. Why should that be part of the framework? Unless, of course, I was to get rid of the bounty purse and just use that, but I honestly am very fond of the bounty purse :)


This is not 'my site'. I designed it so I could try some new stuff, specifically mongodb and the tornado web server (*) and it is just fun to keep. The problem is I take my pet projects very seriously and I don't just want to put my own view of how things should be in there. Please keep giving your opinion, I need it!


(*) Yes, there is no sql injection path here. Just thought people should know as someone lost some time trying that a couple of days ago. There are other paths into this system, as it is not secured properly, so have fun trying :)

I love this idea.. but, the site is down. :(.

Not any more, right? I'm experimenting with mongodb replication, which implied a db server restart, sorry about that.

I don't know how much various actions hit your server. Maybe before going to 4^16 bet space you could do 2-5BTC tickets, that would keep the number of tickets in your database low, while still being affordable for pretty much anyone to buy a few.

I think 2-5% to charity is good, and I prefer cycling through the best ones as opposed to choosing less and less worth ones over time (like someones blog).

I like a draw every 1000. You could make it longer when there is no rollover. Tickets are a better deal when there is more in the pot, so it will attract bets faster when there is seed money. It might make sense to let it grow for longer whenever it starts from zero.

It could be synced up next time to go at block 78000 then every 1000 from there, but go 2000 if the pot was emptied out after last draw.

I'm a bit confused. Why do you say it isn't secured properly? Isn't that kind of an important thing to fix?

Maybe if there is no 1st place winner, the 1st place win pool goes into the 2nd place win pool. If no 2nd place winner, down to 3rd place, etc. This might get more people in invest in the lottery in the early stages, rather than just wait until there are thousands of btc up for grabs, and not such a losing proposition.

That's a pretty good idea, I think I prefer it to the rollover.

Right, in a nutshell keep the 3^16 until we exhaust most of the betting space. Raising the ticket price is actually a great idea, funny how it didn't ever cross my mind. I thought about lowering so people would buy more tickets thus improving their chances of winning, but the pots would invariably be smaller.

I'll adapt the code to cope with different ticket prizes, and open the next draw. I'm inclined to go 78000 / 5BTC *if* the first prize gets moved over, and 78000 / 2BTC if someone wins it.

For now it's ok to experiment, but I want this automated so I need to get a set of rules down. As before, everyone's help is appreciated:

- make draws at 1k block boundaries for primed pots, 2k for empty ones
- 1k draws @ 2BTC, 2k @ 1BTC
- If the pot reaches *SOME_NUMBER_HERE* a special draw, at the next 0.5k boundary is held with tickets @ 5BTC, where the total pot is guaranteed to be distributed like this:
  - For every prize without winners that amount is distributed by the prizes with winners, keeping their relative proportions
  - for example a 1000BTC prize pool would pay 500 to 1st, 240 to second, 240 to third. If there is no second the 240 get divided 162 / 78 added to 1st / 3rd.
  - with the same base as above, no first prize would add 250 to each 2nd and 3rd prize pools

What do you think? What could the *SOME_NUMBER_HERE*? Should we do time span instead?



Was just trying to be sarcastic. No web server is ever fully secured, and in this particular case I only have the basic walls, I'm not being paranoid. Well, not about penetration, but the hardware failure does get me kind of nervous, after the story of the lost 9k BTCs, so there I'm maybe a little over the top, with RAID10 + on site backup + off site backup. But hey, today it's 120 BTCs, which I can cover from my (virtual) pocket, but tomorrow...

But what about in the long run? You don't want to see very large jackpots there?

You are the ones in charge though, if you prefer blend down to rollover I'll just do it... but read my previous post, might be a good middleground.

I guess we do lose that building excitement factor. Now I don't know what I like. I'll think a while.

That last thing you suggested is a bit complicated, I'll read it again, but you don't want to put people off with overly intricate rules. (Maybe I'm just slow too, I'll reread)

Bitcoin Watch has implemented a way to check all details of a block, including the hash we will be using for the lottery:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=928.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=928.0)

This is a good way of confirming the result is correct for users that don't wan't to/can't recompile bitcoin with getblock. Now you don't have to take my word for it :)

Major thanks to Bitcoin Watch.

Yeah, i'm back to leaving as-is I think. This is fun and charitable for me, not hoarding my precious coins. A large jackpot would grow the bitcoin community much faster. 360 to go!

[need signature of lottery details]

It's not as complicated as it may seem at first read. Basically it's just making sure the whole cake is distributed on that draw, regardless of there being no 1st prizes.

I like the 1000 / 2BTC + 500 / 5BTC for those 'guaranteed jackpot' idea... would that deter you from playing?


sig of lottery details... hmmm, that's a great idea. /me pushes sig to top of todo list

I guess in my excitement I didn't ever worry about how bad of a deal buying the first tickets is. When there is no pot you are essentially buying a small chance of getting your money back or less. That's fine right now when we buy tickets out of novelty and lack of alternatives, but it will wear off. This leads me to think we need to return all or almost all of the money to users each time. Maybe hold back ~5% each time and let that accumulate or something.

So until I change my mind again (coming soon) I'm in the "pay it all out" camp. This should still cause pots to grow over time since winners will throw back in, and stories of great bit-riches will get spread around.

Lotteries are all about masses. Lots of betters == more for the winners.

I guess I couldn't expect a flood of bets right from the start, so we need to get the word out. I didn't want to just spread the word like wildfire because this is very experimental and I can only cover for so much if things go bad :)

But lets get some numbers out: The largest better has 26 BTCs in the draw which is 20% of the total bets, the 2nd and 3rd prize pools are at 28, so that doesn't make it very interesting. First prize is 60, for less than 1% chance of getting it, not very interesting.

I'm guessing a tenfold increase in the bets (so for 1200 total prize pool) things would get interesting. This would only happen if we see a tenfold increase in betting, which at this point is not very much likely, or we get some from the previous draws. I can, and will, make the pool of unclaimed prized blend in to the current pool if everyone really just wants to get a cut and be done with it, but I really think it would be much better to let the prize pool for the next one grow, this all assuming noone gets 1st prize, of course :)

With all that, I'm going to bet an extra 150 BTC and any prize I get from that I'll use to bet again on the next draw, just to kick up interest a notch. I will need to make a decision on the unclaimed prize distribution today, so speak up now. I'm still very much biased to moving unclaimed to the next draw as initially planned.

Totally.

A lottery with 1 person buying 1 ticket is boring no matter what.

I'm just saying that from the perspective of early ticket buyers it's a pretty terrible deal. For simplicity pretend it is winner take all. You buy a ticket for 1BTC that has a 1/4096 chance of getting you like 1 or 20 or 100 or even 1000BTC, it's not anywhere near even money. Now this just means that money will probably roll over making future draws more attractive. As long as you have an ample supply of people buying when it's a terrible deal, there's no problem because once they get it started it turns out not to be a bad deal. I'm just mentioning the possibility of everyone saying, "eh, I'll wait to see if this is going to get big at all". Now with the ability to unbuy tickets like you have it is less of a commitment so maybe people will say "I'll grab some numbers now and just cancel if it seems too small" then other people see it is growing and 'ta-da' we have a good pot.

These are just some thoughts, all that really matters is what people actually like. And that is hard for me to guess.

Thanks for the 150, I'm totally going to win it. :-)

Well, it's well deserved if you do. Your help, and that of TTBit has been most refreshing.

But... you do realize that now, with the added 150, the odds are totally on my side, right? :-)

I've still got a few days to throw some more down ;-)

I just noticed you can buy 10kBTC on MtGox and only move the price 2%. Sick market.

question:

If I bet  'ABC' and it hits, I win the 1st place prize. But do I also get a cut of 2nd and 3rd? Same thing if I bet 'FBC' and the winner is 'ABC', I get 2nd and 3rd or just 2nd?

I vote 1 ticket 1 prize if easy to implement.

That is the way things are implemented :) One ticket, the highest prize.

It has just occurred to me, should I not lock canceling bets in the couple of days that precede the draw? I mean, I could put 2000 coins in just to drive people to bet more and then retract 1950, which would lead to a much lower pot, but eventually much bigger for me than it would be without the bait.

I would still allow bets to be put up to 6 blocks (~1hour) before the draw conclusion, but would lock canceling maybe 25% through the draw? say 250 (~1.25 days) blocks for a 1000 block draw interval?

I won't do it on this draw, as it is almost up *and* I hold most of the bets, which I will not retract, but for the next one?

yes. retracting bets stinks. But I think you'll run into the problem of people being upset if they find out there are 4 bets on their number, and can't retract. If retraction is out, consider a blind draw, just make all picks public 6 blocks before the pick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the canceling of bets is a safety feature... for me :)

It was never intended to be used in the spirit of "I will bet, because I can cancel", but rather as a fallback if you happen to have 1000 pending tickets and instead of sending 10 BTC you send 1000... this way I don't have to manually go and fix it for you.

Now, I can completely remove the bet cancel, or I can put a timer on it. Bets can be canceled up to 100 blocks from when they were registered? so you have a margin, but there's no analogy to 'chargeback' behavior in the lottery.

How about instead of a blind draw, I still allow you to see bets, and those that you made BUT not duplicates? Each bet appears exactly once. Then, when the draw is locked, full bets appear and are downloadable for auditing.

My idea here was; I'm waiting for 2 confirmations, which can take 20 minutes or so. A new user comes in, makes the transfer and wants to play, but can't coz the coins are in transit. He can come back, sure, or he can bet (random 10, in your example) and as soon as the coins arrive the system places the bets. This was supposed to be part of a bigger plan, an auto better, so you can leave an open bet to be played on each draw, if you go on vacations :)

But I see no harm in removing that, sure. I would then remove the pending and the cancel, is everyone ok with this?

Another possible lotto variant is a pick-3 or pick-4 or whatever, where you require 100% match, but have a drawing for each bitcoin block.  Jackpot keeps growing, and all tickets remain valid, until a winner emerges.

Somewhat like "sudden death overtime" in sport, where you keep playing until someone scores.

Hey, I like that! I'll put some thought into it and maybe we'll have a test fest soon... Great idea!

Alright, I propose we vote:

a) Cancel tickets:
  1) remove completely
  2) allow for 100 blocks after ticket registration
  3) allow till draw locked

b) Other bets visibility
  1) only show when draw is locked
  2) show but don't state number of duplicates
  3) show everything, all the time

c) Unclaimed prizes
  1) Just roll over to the next draw
  2) Just add to the prizes actually won on the same draw
  3) do 1) but when pot reaches 5000 (or some other number) do a special "Guaranteed Jackpot!" which is just 2) above

d) bet price
  1) 1
  2) 2
  3) 5
  4) depends on the pot that rolled over (assumes c:1) or c:3) )

e) draw interval
  1) every 1k
  2) every 1k
  3) every 1k, but if c:3) the Guaranteed Jackpot happens in 500 blocks, just to force people to pay attention to the site :)
  4) every other 0.5k

Share your thoughts!

a) 1) Maybe only allow 5 bets at a time, so no 'whoopsies I bet 500 coins'.
b) 1) Don't allow duplicate bets? If its crowded, up to 4 chars.
c) 2) No unclaimed prizes.
d) 1) 1 btc
e) Every X draws, 1k seems about right. Or, wait until the pot gets to 500 btc, then announce a draw in 150 blocks (can still bet until 6 blocks)

again, great work.

Ok, ran some numbers, made a few bogus attempts with past data, seems like a good bet, but I have one problem I need some help with: How am I going to give the better some assurance I'm not cheating?

In the lottery I give out all bets before the result is known, so I can't make up numbers after the fact, but here I don't know... I could just show all bets all the time but that would still not prevent me from adding a winning bet a second before the block arrives... don't know what I can do here, other than say 'trust me', which is all fine but, I don't know, feels weird.

if current block is 76602, say 'bet will become active block 76608 forward' And if someone hits block 76605, don't pay out that bet.

Right, that and the full list of *active* bets should be all the disclosure needed... thanks!

There is lots to think about here. Don't forget that showing number of dupes keeps operator from claiming there was a dupe on a winner when there wasn't. Of course you could release that after the lock.

I couldn't find anywhere on the website that said you can only win 1 prize.

If you pick 3 do you also win the prizes for the pick 2 and pick 1 since you must have done so?

Well, the rules haven't been written down, and all my extra time has been spent testing and fixing. But that particular scenario has been mentioned a couple of times before... 1 ticket = 1 prize. You don't get on second and one third if you get one first...

Is this something you'd like to see changed? If so, why?

I'm just mimicking the local state lottery on this one, really. It also makes prize calculation easier, but only marginally so :)

It's not that important, imo, but it should be written one way or the other. Just pick a way, it's all subject to change of course.

Oh, I noticed a tiny thing. [ home] [ bet] [ draw details] [ account ] [ log out ]

The spacing is off, missing the end space on home, bet, and draw details.

a.3   allow till lock
b.3   everything, all the time
c.2   empty the pot
d.1   1BTC for now
e.1   every 1k

a) Cancel tickets:
  1) remove completely

b) Other bets visibility
  3) show everything, all the time

c) Unclaimed prizes
  1) Just roll over to the next draw

d) bet price
  1) 1

e) draw interval
  1) every 1k

Almost there!

Remember, this one will not pay up automagically, as I need to double check the numbers first. So have some patience if you do win....

As for the poll so far, consensus on ticket price (1BTC) and draw interval (1k blocks). That much is settled for now.

a) Cancel tickets:
  1) remove completely - 3 votes
  2) allow for 100 blocks after ticket registration - I would vote this one
  3) allow till draw locked - 1 vote

I'll remove the ticket canceling for the next draw, and we can discuss if its better for most that way

b) Other bets visibility
  1) only show when draw is locked - 2 votes
  2) show but don't state number of duplicates - I would vote this one
  3) show everything, all the time - 2 votes

Well, it's a draw, so I decide :)
We will go with 1, but with the knowledge that random bets will not repeat numbers already registered. So if you choose a number, you choose a number, your call. But if you buy one ticket, you buy one unique ticket at the time, which might become a dup if someone manually selects your number, but only that way.
The exception to the random uniqueness is when 95% of available numbers have been taken, to avoid taking too much time going for the holes.

c) Unclaimed prizes
  1) Just roll over to the next draw - 1 vote
  2) Just add to the prizes actually won on the same draw - 3 votes
  3) do 1) but when pot reaches 5000 (or some other number) do a special "Guaranteed Jackpot!" which is just 2) above - guess what my vote would be?

I still feel that 1 is better than 2 in the long run, but I get that you don't feel the same way. The only way I can see this keeping interest by high pots is from human intervention :) I am going to try and keep at least 50% of the total bets for as long as I can (just like I do right now) to up the pot, and we do 2). All donations made to the address in the site will be used for betting, I'll try to keep a log of what I bet and earn, just for kicks. If anyone wants to do that instead of me, that is also fine... I'll post that person's address on the site with an explanation of what is happening.
We'll revisit this at some later date.

All good? I'm going to quickly code the blend in of unclaimed prizes real quick, and hope it doesn't break everything :)

+1


+1


+1


I would prefer that a ticket for number NNNN cost at least one BTC, but any number above that will buy MMMM tickets for the given number.

Example:  I pay 1.23 BTC for ticket number fff.  Or 12.99 BTC for ticket number aaa.

This is equivalent to buying 1.23 fff tickets, or 12.99 aaa tickets.



I say every block :)

Good eye you have there. Fixed on the development version, will be up for next upgrade. Thanks!

Huh? I don't get it, can you expand on your reasoning here?


And you will get it... but not on the 'classic' lottery. There will be, when I get around to finishing it, a parallel 'pick 3' game on the site, on which you buy a number and that number is in play until someone hits first prize, taking the whole pot. The 'number' (it's a number in the hexadecimal form, so I guess it's safe to call it that) will be matched against every future block until there's a winner, as proposed.

How about its free to change your pick, just not retract it.

20 blocks to go until I'm stinkin' rich.

As I run the final tests to the prize distribution without the unclaimed rollover, it occurred to me: If we let the unclaimed prizes be evenly distributed on the claimed pot... should we not go back to the 5 characters bets? Yeah, chances of hitting all 5 are 1 in 1048576, but the prizes are split down, so it just adds to the distribution of prizes. Can I get the next one on 5 chars, people?

The prizes could then be, as initially proposed:
1st prize - 5 characters correct - 50%
2nd prize - 4 (rightmost) characters correct - 6%
3rd prize - 3 (rightmost) characters correct - 8%
4th prize - 2 (rightmost) characters correct - 9%
5th prize - 1 (rightmost) character correct - 25%
bounty pool - 2%

open to discussion :)

I'll open a quick, 3 digit draw at 77000 (that's 225 from the one open now!) just to even out the numbers, we can discuss till then. After that, we'll be at every 1k as decided.

It's basically an easy interface for buying multiple tickets for the same lotto number.  Maybe this already exists, under another name?

If I want to buy for ticket "fff", I can do
     1) buy 1 ticket for 1 BTC, number "fff"
     2) buy 1 ticket for 1 BTC, number "fff"
     3) buy 1 ticket for 1 BTC, number "fff"
     4) buy 1 ticket for 1 BTC, number "fff"
     5) buy 1 ticket for 1 BTC, number "fff"

or we could simplify that to
     1) buy 5 tickets for 5 BTC, number "fff"

and if you permit that, why not also permit fractional tickets, e.g.
     1) buy 5.5 tickets for 5.5 BTC, number "fff"

Calculating winnings for each person is a simple algebra problem, at that point.

Aha, yes, I get it now! :)

Well, sure, why not. The way the thing is coded already supports this, though the interface doesn't. I'll run some tests, I'm sure I can put this in soon.

Sounds good. I like the every block 'pick 3' too.

Here-WE-GO. Come on block 76775 hash's give me some love.

I'm actually quite nervous about my code handling the real thing :)

I'm a veteran at these things, why does it still happen?

And obviously I failed at the most important snippet of code in the whole system: I'm comparing drawblock < currentblock, meaning we need to wait for one more block :)

sorry guys, next time it works as expected.

I'm looking at Bitcoin Watch data, is the winner 667?

Indeed, and congrats to all the winners!!!

I got 3 x 3rd places, which means I lost a whole bunch of bitcoins, and yet I feel like a winner :)

So, 8 winners, a single 2nd place takes the large slice. What stats would you like to see appearing? I'll show you what you won on the finished draw details, and keep the ticket list for downloading indefinitely. Anything else? Any statistics? Just name it ;)

Now, payment, I'm going to bite the bullet and run the payment script, which will deposit the prizes in the taabl accounts. Next time it will send the prizes directly to the BTCOUT address, as part of my strategy of making this very anonymous (you don't need to log in and withdraw, thus leaving your IP address behind, just paranoia 101). Anyone objects this?

I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback, so bring it on!

Interesting to send automatically for security. Leaving them in probably increases play on the next game though.

Also it defeats the purpose of letting people change their BTCOUT. If my hard drive tanks while I'm out I don't want to come find that I won the lottery and the winnings are at my now unaccessible BTCOUT.

 

And that is why you have those backups... you do backup, right??? ;)

Yeah, I backed up at one point....

80% of my coins are actually on sites I trust more than my computer atm....

Here's the thing though. My security scenario is going to be "Spending cash" on my main frequently used computer, with no backup because I don't want to do it 5 times a day. My "Savings" is on another computer which will be backed up after every transaction.

Oh, I could just use a BTCOUT from my savings computer. Eh, but I don't want to have to re-backup if I win like 11 coins.

Maybe make it an option?

Ok, fair enough. Lets leave it manual for now, I'll add the option in the near future. So this means you get 0 warning that you won a prize, or that the draw has ended. Given the 'anonymous' thingy, I'm not asking for emails... I can implement ways of giving that information out, though, like RSS or IRC bot. But that's very low on my list for now, hit refresh often :)

I've been spamming refresh for days, but I guess some people have shit to do. ;-)

There was rollover for this one, right? I don't see it.

No, rollover was removed as explained in a previous post. I will add to the next one what would rollover from this though... if you check http://taabl.datlatec.com/details?blocknr=76775 you'll see that the sum of 2nd + 3rd + bounty equals 330, all the bets.

Oh, right, I see now. I thought we were switching for later, no problem.

No rollover makes this lottery far less desirable to me.

I feel the same, really.

How about the rest of you, what do you think?

I'm torn.

I like the rollover, but in order to make neutral EV bets you'd have to cover the whole field. I envision a few hundred bought, jackpot missed, someone(s) buy all tickets and monitor to remove dupes in order to pick up the free EV. I'm afraid it's going to go small, small, totally covered, small, small... instead of what I think you guys want which is a gradually growing pot. 

I think the big lotteries combat this by throwing in $1M or something, or keeping a reserve jackpot.

Maybe this:

8% of every ticket goes into the JACKPOT which accumulates when not won.
40% goes to match 3 if it happens, but gets distributed no matter what.
25% goes to match 2 if it happens, but gets distributed no matter what.
25% goes to match 1

Now no unique ticket will be worth less than .9BTC even when there is no money in JACKPOT, but we will still get growing pots.

I just think with the possibility of 50 or even 75% not getting paid, the tickets are a terrible deal when the pot is empty and it will be hard to bootstrap up again after each JACKPOT pays.

Ok, this is becoming a little daunting for me :)

I know there will always be different opinions, and it's hard to find a solution that is agreeable to everyone, but I feel like the current plan simply sucks, so we need a better one.

The 2 problems we are facing are:
- Make sure people want to bet, even though there's no added pot
- If there is a jackpot, how to make sure the ones that bet *only* on the jackpot don't gain an unfair advantage over all others, whose bets make up the jackpot

The former was supposed to be solved by not having rollovers, but that didn't really work out. I think the only way to to solve this is to have rollovers, and probably to have an initial pot.
The latter is somewhat more complex, and the only way I see this going is for guaranteed jackpot games (the ones with no rollover) to have a longer bet string, thus making it hard to cover the whole bet range. This doesn't deter you from buying 4096 ticket spread such that you cover all 3 char possibilities, but because 1 hit prize percentage in the 5 hit draws is almost 4 times the 2 and 3 hits, the jackpot gets distributed in a way it doesn't really pay off doing so, while giving you every reason to at least buy 16 tickets :)

I think that will make the system run smoother, but on top of that I would do a side jackpot, taking some 20% of every rollover. Once the big jackpot is won, either by 3 hits or by guaranteed jackpot, the side jacpot is used to prime the next draw.

There are 2 things open, one is how to decide when to do guaranteed jackpot, my gut feeling is when the rollover is bigger than 4096, but we can also do time based, like when the block count crosses the 10k boundary (every 10 draws effectively).
The other thing is the fact that we are dealing with 20 people betting, and that number needs to at least be tenfold so to make this interesting, but once that happens, is the 4096 possibilities enough? I'm guessing yes, until we see one single better take more that 50% of the bet space, but that is something to worry further down the line.

This next draw, completing soon, will be just like the first one, but the next should have new rules set. I'm going to start it based on the same rule set, just because time is short, but I really think we need to do something in the lines of what I've described.

Oh, and I forgot, the buying of all non duplicate tickets problem will be addressed by me removing the bet cancel, and only showing the bets after draw is locked. But when you buy random you are guaranteed to have unique bets at that point in time, at least until 95% of the bets are taken.

Eh, then the only way to be sure to get unique tickets is to wait until near the end and do random.

Right, if one is on this to try and make a buck, I guess one can do that. But I brought this on myself, by trying to build a community lottery, where there's no one owner that takes part of the cake for its own benefit. I try to disclose as much as possible because I like numbers and stats, but most of the issues would not appear if I had decided to hide the information from the start... I deserve this :)

But I guess that if everyone buys random (I'll probably change the interface to do one click ticket buying) then the bets are spread correctly. If you like one particular number, well, then you can buy it. If we were on the million possibility scenario, I could make it so you can't repeat bets, period. But 4096? I hope we'll see more bets than that soon, especially with jackpots.

However, I can easily make it so you can't repeat numbers, and add the possibility of setting the price on tickets, as was asked before. That way, if you like a number *and it wasn't taken yet* you can buy 100 BTCs of it :)

Hmmm, I like that, no repeating numbers could work. I'll try that in for the next one, maybe?

Because there were no repeating numbers I decided to go ahead and make the unique bets on this one. I'll still keep the no rollover rule, but the next one will be different :) Now, because we'll have almost one full week up to the next one, I'll be happy to change that in the mean time if you convince me to do so.

Here's what I've changed:

- No more ticket cancelling (you can still cancel pending bets though)
- Bets are unique, no repeating, limit 4096 bets on the draw. Will add a fourth character to the bet if we exhaust this, and will also add the 'set your own price' on the tickets sometime in the future.
- You can see your earnings (if any) on the closed draw details page.
- Roll over of prizes is back... but am working on side pot and limit for 'guaranteed jackpot' draw.

If any of the betters of the current draw disagree... PM me your BTCIN and I'll cancel your tickets :)

PS: this current draw is not on automatic pay yet, as I've done extensive changes to that code. So, while your prizes will be advertised promptly after the result is known, the actual prize will only be distributed to the accounts after I double check the thing.

Hey, I won the lottery!  Got 161.70 BTC from my 10 BTC in bets!  Minus my 10 BTC gratuity, of course.   :D

Quick buy some more, you are on a roll. The 77000 draw will be locked in 5 blocks.

Too late! Ok, it seems to have gone fine regardless of the fact that I was sleeping during result processing :)

10 3rd places, 3 winners, me being the big winner this time (I was the big looser last time, even though I won :) ). Got myself 7 x 3rd places, for a total of 82.32, which will go directly to the next draw. Everyone else, thanks for playing and for those who won, congrats!

Lets make the next one a big one, shall we? ;)

I feel very torn about how to best move forward, and I don't want to get into the "pick 3" until I leave this one running on its own. So, my thoughts right now are that we need to make sure that prizes are interesting for new draws, rollovers exist to increase capture of new betters but guaranteed jackpots are needed to share the wealth. Also, if jackpots increase we need to make sure that it doesn't pay off to just buy all the tickets and walk away with guaranteed profit...

My only defense against that latter part is the 2% bounty (unless the bounty recipient is the one doing this, of course :) ) so the jackpot must always be smaller than the 2%, making sure that if you buy all the tickets you end up with a loss. This is supposed to be about luck, not good math skills!

So far, I have:

- No duplicate bets
- Rollovers of only the 1st prize, all others get paid in the draw
- 20% of rollover goes to side pot, used when jackpot is won
- Whenever the side pot reaches an interesting level (say 1000 btcs) there's a guaranteed jackpot draw, where the 1st prize is also divided.
- 5 character bets with prize distribution:
5 hits: 25%
4 hits: 10%
3 hits: 12%
2 hits: 16%
1 hit:  35%
bounty: 2%

You'll notice that I reduced the 1st prize in half and upped all others, effectively distributing 73 percent of the pot in every draw, thus making it worth it to play right from the start. And for someone to guarantee 73% of the pot they'd have to spend 65536, 1310 of it going to the bounty, and 16384 going to 1st prize slice. Assuming one does not get first prize (although chances are 1 in 16, which is not too bad) the accumulated jackpot would need to be around 20k to be worth it. Because 20% of rollover goes to side pot, that pot reaches 1000 when the jackpot reaches 5000, thus eliminating that chance (we could go higher with the side pot, but for now that would mean too much time between guaranteed jackpots, I guess).

Would this work for you? I locked the current draw as only my 100 BTCs are in so far, but will unlock if you rather have things as they are, but I really think that we need a better plan, and I like this one :)

Since we're back to 1 in 1048576 chance of winning the jackpot per ticket this is essentially always going to grow until you do a guarantee. So now you'd just have some lotteries that are a little -EV and some that are a little +EV, my buying will be something like 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 1000. Which is fine with me, but I'll probably only get excited about 6 times a year or something.

I don't know how you are going to remove math skill without just making it -EV all the time by raking it hard. Well, someone could back it and the payout could be static. That's 4096BTC with 3 digit, 1BTC tickets. The backer takes substantial risk though and would porbably have to be paid. I'm not saying you should do this, I don't think that it's important to eliminate skill, we just need to find a way to not make it a raw deal to get the ball rolling.

Maybe you are onto something though, the only issue is the fact that 5 will only get hit once a decade if we buy 1000 tickets each time. Maybe keep it 3 digits and pay out every time in the 75-80% range? Roling over the rest. There will still be incentive to cover the board and lock in profit in the amount of the jackpot.

This is actually pretty hard to design. I'll keep thinking.

I just read the New Jersey Pick 3 lottery rules over. They have a simple system:

1) 50% of the ticket sales go to the prize pool
2) (they have a bunch of ways to win, but I'll unitize them all to a number of 'Wins')
    They calculate Ticket intake * .5 / # Wins => Prize Share
3) Each Winning bet gets a prize share.

To compare, the powerball system
A) seeds the jackpot with an amount, ($10mm), advertises twice that as the 'annuitized jackpot', and proceeds as follows:
B) 50% of the ticket sales go to prizes.
C) Roughly 58% of the prizes go to the jackpot, won maybe once a month. The other 42% are for the smaller prizes.


As noted by the powerball website, powerball is designed for people who are motivated by a  big jackpot. Presumably Pick 3 is designed for people who are motivated by a small, frequent (it runs twice a day) payout.

So, either of these seem like fine setups -- hard-headed expected-value-discounted-cashflow-type people only play powerball when the advertised annuity is up in the $250MM+ range, and everyone else plays when they like the sound of the jackpot size. No math people play Pick 3, I'm sure.

My takeaways:

I) I think your lottery needs to choose a personality: is it going to be a big prize, monthly-ish win type situation, or a frequent small-scale wins one? I don't mean monthly drawings, just likely 'big' wins at once a month.
II) You probably should have a minimum pot for jackpot winners: this ensures people want to play more often. You would fund this out of your own funds to start, and then whatever you decide your rake should be, eventually.
III) An out of the box idea I had is that you could write some sort of rules algorithm and allow anyone to run their own lottery; you'd take, say 10% off the top, and lotto designers could choose their own payouts, jackpot rollovers, etc. Natural selection will tell you the most successful lottery designs quite quickly, I imagine.



As a sample 'powerball'-esque lottery: if you had a jackpot minimum prize of 10 BTC and two drawings a week, 100 people playing per drawing, odds of winning say 1 in 1000, then you'd see the following:

Week 1, Drawing 1
20 BTC goes in: 10 covers the jackpot: 10 BTC goes to rake
80 BTC goes in: 40 goes to rake, jackpot is now 50.

Week 1, Drawing 2: Jackpot 50
100 BTC goes in: Jackpot is now 100 (no winner)

Week 2, Drawing 1: Jackpot 100
Odds of nobody winning so far: (900 / 1000 ) ^2 = 81%
More people get interested: 150 buy. Nobody wins.

Week 2, Drawing 2: Jackpot 175.
Odds of nobody winning so far: 69%

I don't know if this would be appealing to people or not. I bet if the jackpot were 1,000 BTC, odds of winning say 1 in 5,000 to start then it would be appealing. The simplest way to keep math-oriented speculators out is to keep the expected value down, except in rare  circumstances.

It's gotten too late for me to add more to the conversation, so I'll summarize a TL;DR -- Copy some successful lotteries! Use the rake to provide a guaranteed pool! (Possibly: let people use your software to host their own lotteries).

Remember the side pot, or rake or whatevery. After you do the 1000, and the whole of the 4000 BTC pot gets distributed, there's a 1000 pot priming, so it's not back to square 0.


I know the math skill is always there, and the math simple enough for those so inclined, so my only defense is to make it too expensive to have a guarantee of profit. This is fun for me, and if I had 10k coins I'd certainly be able to bootstrap this is a much more appealing way, but I don't. And I'm not asking anyone to do so when there is nothing to give in return :)


Keeping it 3 digits will prevent the pot from getting interesting, basically, as you state there at the end. There are other ways of preventing that (like securing 10% of the tickets to myself on opening a draw) but frankly I'd want this to be as independent as possible...

I was considering a much simpler 'winner takes it all' setup, as taabl doesn't take absolutely nothing from the lotteries. But that may change, I could make it sponsor a server eventually, in which case a seeded pick 3 with a set prize could be interesting... I'll read over the rules and try to make sense of it :)


I) Not yet, right? We're still playing with possibilities
II) That's what the side pot would be in my latest plan
III) That's actually a great idea! Once the system is stable and running on its own (and on a real server) I'll certainly take a stab at that!


I copied the local state lottery, but they do two things differently:
- keep 40% of the prize pool for themselves :)
- Have millions of bets every week

It's very easy to perceive value when you look at a million euro first prize, even though the chances are 13,983,816 to 1, with bet repetitions allowed. But they do prime the lotteries with a big first prize, and only the others are number of bets dependent.

The lottery is up again!

New rules page, just a basic draft at http://taabl.datlatec.com/rules (http://taabl.datlatec.com/rules)
5 hex char bets, unclaimed rollover only for 1st prize, all others blend in. 20% of rollover goes to side pot.

Shall we try it this way? I have put 100 in, and anyone wanting to help bootstrap this lottery is thus invited to put an outrageous amount of bets in the system :) Only 25% will be used for jackpot but still.

Okay, I put 20 in. Once confirmed, I'll bet them all. :)

UPDATE: I bet. Then I realized that I could (and should) get total coverage for the last number in the block. Then I learned I can't rescind my bets.

Can I request either a 'full coverage' option, or else just a 'remove this bet' button? I think you had 'remove this bet' at one point.

Also, seeding the lottery with 100 bets of your own is different than putting in a 100 BTC jackpot, by the way. : ). I think it will be more appealing to people if you take a cut, and seed, regardless of the underlying math.

I manually gave you your coins back, canceling the tickets. I'll make the coverage based betting soon, and you can then go ahead and bet again.


Yep, it's quite different. But I don't want to be an active part on the lottery more than I need to be. It has to run on its own, or it is just too high maintenance. As such I seeded this one with 100 bets, with the promise (as before) that all gains will go right back to the lottery as new bets. But if I quit at any time, because I lost everything or whatever, I need to know all my work wasn't in vain :p

And I still need to find out how I'm going to get this to pay for its own server, but that's for later, when there's enough traffic to justify so.

We/I don't mind if you take the bounty however often you need it.

Well, thank you :) But it's all a question of scale. for 2% to cover $20/month (~300BTC) then I'd need to take 75BTC from each weekly draw, which would only happen when we start getting 3750BTC bet pools in!

Of course I can dilute this by putting other services in the same server, but it's a psychological thing, I either see it as paying for itself or as a fun personal project I pay to keep. It's the latter for now, the future may change that.

Oh, wow, it'll be awhile before we get that size. Maybe take 5% out of the pool, 2% of a different nice site every time and 3% for you.

Or, take 10% of the excess above like 1000 for a jackpot. So 1200 -> 20; 2000 -> 100; 4000 -> 300

It wouldn't be as regular income, but psychologically it's the least painful place to take it. It's kind of a fallacy, but everyone seems to be happier when big winners do the paying.

Thanks for the bet return!

Re: hosting -- I think you could host it on google app engine for free at low traffic volumes.. Of course, you have to like python or java.

I love, live and breath python, so that would not be a problem. But I'd still need the bitcoind on another server, and the matter of the fact is that I developed this to learn some new things, and these will take considerable effort to port to app engine. Frankly, I could save some dough, but I'd loose many other advantages, so I don't think I'll take that route.

You now have a slightly over complicated version of the 'full coverage' requested. On the bet page you can, in addition to stating how many tickets you are about to buy, define a 'sequence base'. What this does is increment that base sequentially as the bet's rightmost characters. So if you enter '0' as sequence base and '16' as 'number of bets' you'll end up with 16 bets where the rightmost character will go from 0 to F (thus covering 100% of 1 hit) and the other 4 characters random for each bet.

If you do more than 16 for a single char base, it will continue throughout the 2 char sequence (10, 11, 12, etc) and if you enter 5 chars as base, there will be no random part, it will just be a sequence, thus '00000' and '16' will do '00000' through '0000F'.

I hope that helps everyone's betting pleasure!

A small caveat, though. If any of the random bets is already taken the system does not try another for that particular point of the sequence, it will just ignore that one and do the others, thus you can end up with holes and less than requested tickets, but you will get a description of which bets failed so you can do just those. If you want I can fix that, I'm just feeling lazy, really.

Awesome! I'm in and sequenced. Thanks!

Ok, another one is done, this time it was a slow one. I was in for 116 bets, got 10 x 1 hitters. 3 other betters got 1 x 1 hits each.

There's a little side pot now, and a little jackpot too. The jackpot, I just realized, may actually shrink between draws, as it is divided amongst all prizes. The division is good to make betting more interesting, but this may need to change eventually.

Anyway, I am doing final tests on the pick 3 system, which I'll describe here soon, to see if everyone is in agreement with the rules and prizes.

The BitPick

Still an early version, lots to do, but functionally should be good. Here's how it is set up: I put a value, some value, in to bootstrap the draw. First time around, it's 100BTC. This is the initial pot for whoever guesses the 3 rightmost chars on one of the following blocks.

- No dups, maximum 4096 bets, sure to have a winner in the next block
- Bets are only activated after 6 blocks from the time they are submitted, but that bet is immediately removed from the available pool
- Only one prize, only one winner. Every block from the start of the BitPick is checked (even if the server goes offline for whatever reason, the block order is always maintained)
- Not yet coded in, but any bet not yet active at the time of the winning block gets returned to the better, i.e., that value is not part of the prize pool
- For every 10 bets in, 5 BTCs are added to the prize pool

I'm taking a 50% cut of the bets, but I'm also advancing a value. The largest Draw was 330BTC, over half of which was mine, so I feel that targetting for break even at 200 bets is realistic for the moment. If for some unseen reason we get a lot more bets than that, well, I'll pay for a real server :) And I'll put more BTCs as initial pool for the next one (not automated yet, when one ends a new one will have to be created manually by me, which may take a few days at worst).

I'll be updating the server now, so share your thoughts as to what should change and, as always, bet your bithearts out! I didn't put a bounty recipient on this one yet, I don't know if I will at all, but first I need to get a feel as to how interesting this is for you and how lucrative it is for me... My lottery is probably the only one in the whole wide world where the house keeps loosing more and more :p

I bought some pick3 tickets and the pot did not increase, it has been a few hours.

That is expected, seeing as I up the pot by 5BTC every 10 bets. It's a psychological thing, I didn't like the 0.5 or 1BTC increases in my tests, and honestly would go as far as 10 each 20, but I thought I'd be stretching the rope there, there's not enough betters yet.

Good luck!

Ah, okay.

I think I won the pick 3, but I haven't been credited. If you seed the next one too I'll buy even more, it's a damn good deal right now.

Heh, congratulations! So it was you who took all my seed btcs :)

Yes, you haven't been paid yet, the pay script was horribly broken so I'll fix that today and then open a new one. I just hope more betters come in on this one before we get a winner or I'm better off just giving the seed money away :p

Other than the fact the house looses too easily, this Pick 3 schema seems very interesting, so I think that as long as I can afford it, I'll keep it up.

Cool, I hope it ends up being sustainable.

I'm going to do a little math and try to answer questions like "If one ticket is purchased every block what is the operator's expected value?"

I'll let you know if I get anything that might be of interest to you.

I just noticed my winnings! Thanks.

I did this quick, so no guarantees on accuracy.

If one ticket is purchased between every block the chance that you will break even or better (sell 200 tickets before a winner is chosen) is only .0068 = .68%

Half of the time you will sell more than 75 tickets and half of the time fewer.

Keep in mind the exact path of purchases does affect your expected outcomes. For example selling 3 every 3 blocks until a winner is found is better for you than 1 every one block.

Selling 2 every block gives you an 8% chance of breaking even or better.

tickets/block -- chance of even or better
3 -- 18.3%
4 -- 28.1%
5 -- 36.1%
6 -- 41.2%
7 -- 46.9%
8 -- 52.4%
10 -- 59.3%
15 -- 67.6%

Now this is not really the most relevant info. What you want is expected value. This is kind of like me telling you that in the game of Heads you win 10 and Tails you lose 1 you are 50% to break even or better; It is true but not the whole picture at all.

I've been drinking some, but maybe I can figure out an easy way to calculate or estimate that in a minute here.

Again, this could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Kind of bad news:

If you seed 100BTC and take .5BTC per entry you need 7 tickets to be purchased between each block in order to profit by 1BTC/cycle. This seems quite an unlikely level to reach anytime soon.

And your upside isn't that great either. If you get to 20 tickets bought between each block you will profit only 66BTC/cycle. Though the cycle length will decrease by a lot, so maybe that isn't so bad.

Actually that is a pretty large redeeming quality. When you are bleeding money cycles will take much longer than when you are raking it in.

At 20 bought per block half of your cycles will last fewer than 16 blocks and 99% will last fewer than 40. So it would be a cash cow at that point or even a bit before.

Now if you drop your seed amount to 50BTC you can profit by 5BTC/cycle while only selling 2 tickets per block.

Selling 1 ticket per block will cost you less than 10BTC (the accuracy is bad on this one because of the long tail I'm cutting off), but 10BTC is the most -EV it could be.

If there are people who buy chunks all at once early this will help you too.

Ah, I just remembered that the pot is often rounded down a tad by the increments of 10 required to bump the pot. This is in your favor of course, but I am not going to redo the calcs right now.

So all things considered putting out 50BTC is probably going to be a very small outlay compared to putting out 100BTC which will be a loss until you get quite large interest. Obviously having a small seed amount will draw fewer players too, but I can't tell by how much and that is not accounted for here.

Thank you! You saved me a bunch of number crushing, although I had the empirical feeling that the 100BTC seed was probably a bit too much. I'm not trying to get rich out of this, obviously, but I'd really rather not loose all my bitcoins to it either. As such, I'm going to seed the next few pick 3s at 50BTC, which seems like a great compromise. If we get a lot of people betting, great, if I'm in profit the seeds will increase. If I loose it all, well, tough, I'll just stick to the other lottery :)

Glad to help. I think 50 is wise. It is important to keep projects from burning out so we can hit a critical mass of things to do and buy. Getting automated is a good step in that direction, I think you have the right idea.

This is just getting silly :)

I can't automate the Pick if it closes in 6 blocks! Either this is just one of those really unlikely events that will probably not happen again, or I need to add another character to the bets...

I'm opening another one, and use this to exercise the 'give back bets that didn't get confirmation blocks'.

I don't understand why you need to give back any bets.

Bets close block: 994 (any bet that is not in by this block is not in the draw.)
Winning number comes from block: 1000

Any bet in block 995-1994 gets included in the draw for block 2000

That would be annoying if someone was trying to play immediately and didn't want money locked up for a week, or if they were trying to be part of a big jackpot and the next one was small.

But that isn't what he's talking about, he means the pick 3.

I had bets canceled, does that mean it was won within 6 of my bet?

I say you turn off the wait of 6 and make only random bets accepted. Then no one can game it and you don't need refunds ever. It was not a fluke it will happen all the time if this gets big.

Yep, exactly. No bets are returned on the lottery, as there is no wait period. Bets are not accepted within 6 blocks of draw.


The reason for this is not to avoid people doing crazy things, but to prevent me, as the lottery operator, to cheat on the betters. There's a buffer of 6 blocks (roughly 1 hour) where you can download all the active bets, so if you take a snapshot of the bets every half hour (just to be safe) you can verify if I'm not putting false bets after the result block is known.

If people rather not have this wait period and just trust me, so be it, but I don't want to even have a chance of cheating, be it on purpose or due to bugs in the software. Also, if my time runs too short I may hand this over to someone else, but I'm a better myself so I'd rather be able to make sure that person will not even have the chance to cheat on me.

It's not I don't trust people, I just think that if trust is not an issue everything goes smoothly :)

And another pick went by, another chunk of bitcoins removed from my personal wealth... Come on, people, we need critical mass here! Go on and bet!

On a side note, the payment for the pick was automated and a new one should had been created on the fly, but there was a small bug preventing that... should be good for the next one.

Why doesn't the pick3 pot update quickly? I thought it was the 6 block thing, but I think it's been longer than that now.

You can double check by looking at the details page. Under 'Total Bets' there is the count of confirmed bets, and the unconfirmed ones are gray and italic in the bet list (underlined if yours).

Right now there are 10 bets unconfirmed.

Ah, cool, thanks for explaining.

Ok, I'm done with Pick3, lost almost all of my coins on it... it worked out great... for other people.

So, say hello to Pick4. It's 1:65546 instead of 1:4096, maybe this way enough people will have time to bet. It's all about the number of betters,really. It seems that the bitpick didn't become the automatic success I thought it would be.

Also, I've been thinking about the lottery prizes and for the next one I'm getting rid of 1 hit prizes. 1 in 16 is just too easy and it dilutes the total pot too much... I'll run some numbers as for the new pool division percentages, but share your mind if you have an idea of what these should be.

I'm a TAABL Luck Box! I keep putting in a few coins and hitting.

I don't understand the payouts. I thought:

Person A places 20 bets, pot is 20.
Person B places 50 bets, pot is 70.

But this doesn't seem to be the case, as the pot was 50 with zero bettors? I think I see your problem ;P

What is the house/charity edge?

Is there a way I can deposit 50btc, and auto-fund 10btc at a time when the pick 4 is hit? Otherwise, I have to keep checking when the lottery ends and resets to zero.

Maybe you could give me your address and I can just send you all my coins, saving us both some trouble ;)


Yeah, I never got around to putting that in the rules page. There's an initial seed, which is free for all (is 50 currently), so if you bet 1, you can get 50.

Further bets will increment the pot 5 btc for every 10 bets. So 50% of the bets go to the pot.

There is a confirmation period for bets, and that is why you see 20 bets and a pot of 50. After 6 blocks (roughly one hour) the bets are confirmed and the pot raises by 10, moving to 60.

This confirmation period has nothing to do with bitcoin confirmation blocks. It's to make sure the total bets for a block are known an hour in advance so I can't just put in a known winning bet after the block comes out and cheat on everyone :)


I get 50% of all bets minus the seed. So the theory is I can get a truckload of coins, and reality is I'm bleeding coins. The earnings I make on this, if I ever do so, will have an impact on the seeding of the next pick, so if I make 1000 coins, you'll see a much larger seed on the next pick, probably on the 500 coins area, so I can keep a buffer.


Not right now, no. The auto betting feature is something I have on my to do list, but don't have time for... if there's generalized interest on this, please speak up.

Thank you for playing, and the (continuation of) best of luck to you.

No...... pick3 is gone!

I liked how it went off frequently. Maybe put just 1BTC in for seed and 100% of all entries? This would actually make every bet the tiniest bit +EV, and I could justify buying pretty much any amount I desire.

Oh, I guess there is a problem with that, I could buy all tickets and snap up that 1 coin constantly. You could cap it though at 3000 tickets or something, it would be won within 3 rounds of hitting the cap for sure so no one would be locked out for long.

Ha, there were only 3 people actively betting on pick 3, hardly justifying the cost it had to me :)

If eventually we get enough people on board, there's a lot that can be done, but for now, while pots are small...

And capping, that I cannot do for 2 reasons:
- Against my principles
- Completely impossible, you can open as many accounts as you want

Please go ahead and try the pick4, I'm sure that if the bets get high enough it will be really frequent too. And maybe I'll find a way to do a super seed!

But if enough people request it, I'll drag Pick3 back, with either seeds completely gone and bets at 100%, or smaller seeds and smaller cuts. But really, I think a Pick4 with a 1000BTC starting pot would rock :)

I get it.

To be clear, I meant selling at most 3000 per draw total, not per person, instead of 4096 just to avoid the unaesthetic (to me) situation of a guaranteed win.

Ok, thanks to TTBit for showing me the math stating "there's no way I can not loose" with the BitPick as I had it. Pick3 and Pick4 are just too easy to win, and not enough people bet on it fast enough, so we are moving to Pick6!

Also, the pot seeding + 50% for the house on bets is also something that will only work when I have a lot of coins to seed this. As that's not the case, I'm dropping the seed completely for now and moving the house cut to 5%. C'mon people, get it while it's hot!

I like the idea. Hope everyone ships a few coins to the lottery. The concept of the Pick X is a lot of fun.

Good luck to all, but I'm on a hot streak!

Okay, the pick4 went off faster than average. I understand not wanting to love money, obviously.

But if you aren't going to seed it why do you want it to take so long?

A pick 6 with 1000 tickets will be won after 10k blocks only 45% of time. That means (roughly) that with 100 tickets it will take 100k blocks on average.

I'm following TTBit's clues and formulas. I don't want it to take long, but I do want the pot to grow so as to attract more betters, and when these get closed so fast you can't really raise much interest.

If the site ever gets very busy, or I get to put the auto bet feature, then maybe it's ok to have 4 picks close in the same day.

Would a Pick5 be more to your liking?

I'm not interested in a pick 5 or 6.

I don't think it's going to get any more action than the smaller ones did, I mean over the same time period.

I don't think people are coming to the site and saying "oh, just 100BTC, I'm not interested" I think they are just not coming to the site at all. Mostly because there aren't that many bitcoiners yet. I like to check all the time and see if someone (or myself) has won. I'm not going to lock money in to something that could take 4 months and also get less enjoyment from being able to constantly check it, and maybe buy a few more tickets since I'm on and checking it anyway.

You can't do much about the small universe of customers. But you can keep them interested by giving them something to check on and do frequently.

 

The whole TAABL ecosystem right now is composed of 25 accounts, of which 3 (this including myself) are actively betting :)

Not much to see here, really. I know this will change someday, I'll keep things running until it does. In the mean time we keep bouncing coins amongst each other and hope others won't grow tired of the process.

I think the lottery framework is pretty good now, it only needs, ya know, people betting. The BitPicks... well, there's the automatic better feature that would really increase usability, so I guess I'll do that and move back to Pick4 or even Pick3. In fact, removing the seed and adding the auto better (where I'm a seeder in the form of bets) is a great plan that was hinted by TTBit. I'll try and cook something up this weekend.

wife's car broke down, have to leave. quick message. 1000 bets will take 11664 blocks to be 50% in picks 6. So, at least my math agrees with yours. This is 80 days at 144 blocks/day.

From my understanding, the lottery was more about large paydays few and far between, not 100 coins 2-3 times a week. A 2500 lottery appears to be 50% to hit once a month. The way it stands now, I check the TAABL every couple days and see if I have credits and if the lottery was won. Turns out I won the last 3 by the way.

I want to articulate more, but cannot. Good work nelisky, I am behind whatever you do.

nelisky was kind enough (by surprise) to implement my lottery. If you have an acct registered on the forum before this post, post an address and I'll ship 4 btc to you for you to put in the lottery. Honesty counts. giving away 100 btc total, 25 total.

will credit in 12 hours.

GOOD LUCK!

Maybe we'll get 1000 tickets eventually, but right now what is being offered is a smallish pot that is won very infrequently. I trust you and I have a long time horizon and I still don't want to lock coins up for months. I am guessing that newish people will be even more wary of doing this, I could be wrong though.

 

Okay, I'm getting you current problem: it's volume.

Typically what lotteries do to drive volume is advertise the winners:

As in, "Hey everyone, SO and SO just won 100 BTC with a 2 BTC bet. In fact, everyone who bet one since there are so few bettors! Come try your luck!"


You could also advertise it more generally and allow people to buy BTC from you on the TAABL site at say a 50 or 100% markup over Mt. Gox, if they aren't inclined to go open an account and download the client. Then you could advertise the lottery more generally.

I'll bet more later, promise. Although for now, I'm down about 11 BTC. Sigh. : ).

Yeah, you're right. And I really like the idea of allowing people to buy BTC directly from the lottery, but that could get messy. It's not an exchange site, and all logic is bound to the bitcoin client, so I don't really want to get into that right now :)

I could build an EUR based exchange client, hook it up to mtgox with automated transaction sharing, and people could just send the coins to the taabl address. Or they could do that right now from mtgox site!

In the end, volume is the key, but I can't advertise winners and call the lottery anonymous, now can I? :)


I stopped counting my losses, but I can tell you the grand total of losses I suffered in the state lottery to date are embarrassing. I guess that when the pots get to 5K you say "I only lost 100 so far but I can still get rich"...

We are just about crossing the 300BTC pot on Pick6! Woohoo...

So, statistically speaking, what is the correct bet char size to have an average of one pick per day, at 1000 bets per pick?

The pick 4 would be too fast and the 5 too slow. Maybe pick 4.5? ;-)

Getting 1000 daily is still pretty optimistic though, so the 4 is actually going to give you a few days at any likely volume, the first one just happened to go quickly.

You cannot have huge pots in relation to the size of bets without having tons of bettors or a wealthy backer. I think it is best to be content to run 2 on different time scales and let it grow over time as bitcoin grows.

Is this 500 draw a guarantee?

Run 2 on different time scales? What do you mean?



Again, I don't follow. Sorry if I'm just being dense. Are you asking if we are going to have 500 block intervals from now on? I'm experimenting, it feels like 1000 is just too long.

Sorry, I mean run two that will take different lengths of time, a pick4 and a pick6 or a pick3 and a pick5


Previously I read something about doing a special that would empty the cumulative pot, it's too soon I think, I was only verifying that.

Aha, ok. Well, haven't thought about that possibility... in fact have coded the thing in a way slightly incompatible, but can fix. It's a great idea, certainly worth trying. I just hope I'm not diluting the (3) betters too much :)


Yes, the idea as I remember (I didn't read back the thread) was as soon as the side pot reached 500, but can also do on the first prize reaching 500, or whatever.

I also intend to change the draw to get rid of the bounty and instead get a cut for the house, probably the same 5% I take from the pick. I need to get a little stash so I can seed a bit jackpot not too far away from now :) You guys cool with that?

For sure, gotta pay the bills.

Website is confusing me.

On the main page,

On the Left:
Next Draws:
Block: 8000
Blocks to go: xxx
Pot: xxx
Side Pot? xxx

But then on the Right:
Pick6
Current Pot: 908
Last Block checked: xxx

Are these 2 different lotteries?
Does the pick lottery just keep going until it gives out 1 first place prize?

I could not find any information on the 'pick' lottery on the site.

You are right, I have dedicated all of my spare time to coding the lottery, it left very little to make it user friendly :)

There are 2 types of game, as you assumed;
- Lottery - A block number is defined as the one carrrying the result, a number of prizes are distributed based on how many hits you get on your bets (this one is fairly well explained on the rules page)
- BitPick - Every block is checked, only one winner. You buy bets, but they only become active 6 blocks later (to prevent me from cheating), from then on if your bet matches the most recent block hash (rightmost characters) you take the pot home. The number of characters to match are defined by the type of BitPick, so Pick6, currently active, matches 6 characters.

Hope that helps getting you going, I'll take some time to put this on the site soon.

Ok thanks.

How long do your pick bets stay active? until they win? forever? until somebody wins?

Hey, I'm writing the rules page as fast as I can! :p

BitPick bets stay active for the duration of that pick, i.e. until somebody wins. Only one winner on the BitPicks.

Ok, the server code went through a major refactoring, so if you find any glitches please share asap. Not much changed visually, except now I can run multiple picks concurrently! A Pick4 will be appearing soon, and these tend to end very fast so take your chances, people!

If all goes well I may add a Pick5 too.

Thanks, everyone, for supporting this idea! Fun, fun, fun :)

That's great, good work. I see the pick 4 already. 

bad link: clicking on 'Pick 4' in the bet management page brings up all picks for the pick 6.

looks good.

Fixed. Nice catch :)

I've been meaning to get rid of the bet page and drive bets out of the details page instead... been a little busy though ;)

More picks - great idea!

Bug(?) - The [pick details] link in the header seems to only link to the pick 6.
I'd expect it to take me to a page where I can choose which pick I want to see the details of.

Not really a bug, but a left over... that used to take you to the active pick, when there was only one, now takes you to the first one :) It'll do the right thing when inside the pick betting page, but all that is going away in a future version.

Just wanted to mention that while the Pick3 hits at least once a day, we've finally had a good pot being given out on the Pick4! If you had bets there, check the site, one of you walked away with 286 coins just now :)

And did you notice the announcement for BitcoinSportsBook.com (http://BitcoinSportsBook.com)? :)

I was just always logged in before, now I am not. I should be trying to get in with the address that you send coins too, right? That doesn't work though.

Happened to me too. You need your BCout, not BCin.

Would you guys rather have a login/password pair instead? It was just me being paranoid about the anonymous bit that got me to develop things like they are, but that can be changed...

I like the bcout. If I lose it though, am I screwed?

Hmmm,it depends. Will you know anything that allows me to retrieve that information for you? If you know your bcin it's pretty straightforward, and assuming you didn't loose your wallet.dat (*that* would be pretty bad) you'll have at least one transfer to it. But even without it, if you can give me enough information so that I'm sure it is your account, I can probably get it for you, say you password (of which I only store a digest, obviously) and the amount in your account, as well as the number of tickets you bought on some draw.

I think you'd be fine :)

I prefer the login/pass way, I don't really see how using a bitcoin address is more anonymous than a username.
I made a new address and labeled it lotery so I can find it back in my address book, but I would prefer just to log in when I want, where I want. And because I can't memorize a btc address that's not possible at the moment.

something else:
Pick6   1643.00   81563

Nice pot, I hope I have the right tickets  ;D

Sorry for being dumb. We log in with the address that we sent coins to? I tried a few that I thought were at the right time/ right amount, but no luck yet.

Nope, you log in with the address you provided as the one you want withdrawals to be sent to. Did you have a password set? PM me the password (you can later change it) and the bcin (or a list of possibilities) and I'll dig your bcout.

Consider this; you set  up an account as things are now, and I'll see '1NiXpzvWedn6iu514oLUxhpeF7cagu6Gw

Okay, apparently I forgot that I made two accounts  ???

I really didn't think so, but my account is empty and there seems to be no record of bets, but I did get coins sent to the addy. I'm confused.

Good people of the bitcoin world, I'll be moving taabl across servers either today or tomorrow, so don't be alarmed if it goes out for a while. It is for everyone's benefit :)

And if you are itching to bet, why dont you [shameless plug mode] try your luck or skillz at bitcoinsportsbook.com (http://bitcoinsportsbook.com)?[/shameless plug mode]

this TAABL is so great.

Congrats to the creator!

Since I just had 1 single bitcoin in my wallet, would anyone donate  a few so that i continue betting?

I have updated taabl to support login usernames. If you don't have one, you can add it in the account page. This means that if you had a password set up you'll need to enter it to log in, so if you forgot it PM me and I'll clear it out, so you can log in and set a new one.

Hope this helps making the site more user friendly. Best of luck to all, prizes are accumulating very nicely! Getting more interesting every day.

great. thanks

this is perfect!

Consider this-- bitcoin generation (the classic kind) is a lottery of sorts where the price of the ticket is the fixed cost of the hardware and software plus the electricity to generate X khash/sec.  Currently this price is measured in dollars and the winner of the "lottery" is rewarded in 50 bitcoins.

I know it's not in the spirit of bitcoinery (?), but what about designing a real lottery similar to TAABL where tickets are bought using dollars and the winner of the lottery is rewarded in bitcoins?  

If I'm thinking about this correctly, if you designed the rules of the jackpot correctly, the price of tickets for a 50 BTC payout should converge toward the cost of generating a block minus the edge paid to the house.

I don't get it. So people would buy in to collect the 50 BTCs from each generated block by the "lottery" site? If not, where would the 50 BTCs come from? One of the features inherent to taabl, as I designed it, is to become as insulated from "money" as possible. It deals with bitcoins, and nothing else, because otherwise we are talking about a full blown gambling site subject to whatever laws and regulations exist, and that is one mess I do not want to get into :)

i appreciate your unwillingness to step into that pile of legal dogpoo.  i love the TAABL as it is.  i'm just looking for a market solution to the answer "how many dollars does it cost to generate a bitcoin?" and i think the type of lottery i'm describing would answer it.

the host of the lottery i'm suggesting would offer, say, 1,000 of his own BTC.  doesn't matter where the host got it from.  he's just the host.  tickets would be sold in dollars to willing customers.  the host could even require that a minimum number of tickets, or revenue in USD for that matter, be generated before continuing with the lottery.

That's an interesting idea.... :) Do they have extradition to the US where you live?  :D

Dear betting friends,

The last draw had no winners, second time that happens. And the side pot is larger than the average pot now so, time for a guaranteed jackpot? What this means is:
- All the prizes, including 1st prize, are merged down if they have no winners, nothing gets moved to the next draw.
- Side pot is emptied and added to the pot of the next draw.

You guys up for it? I was thinking the running draw would be a jackpot (that's for block 85500), but can also do for 86000 if you want time to collect all the bitcoins you can get to bet :)

No opinions whatsoever? Then it's settled, only for block 86000 instead. Let me put this clearly:

The draw for block 86000 will be paying the full pot to whatever prizes are awarded. No first prize rollover on this one.

Also note that

The next draw, for block 86500, will get primed with the side pot, at 408.11, but that one will be running under the common rules of first prize rollover.

This, assuming the never tested in production rollover prevention and side pot priming code is working as it should ;)

Cool.

Cool, i'm in again this time :D

Would be nice on your site to have a little chiffred example of what is a pick 3, pick 5, etc, and how are gain redistributed.

Something like the first post of this tread, but don't know if the mentionned values are still up to date (didn't read all the posts)

It is all a question of time... values have changed through time, but every time they changed a post was made, and for now you'll just have to parse the whole thread :)

But I'm confused; bitpicks are winner takes all, as explained in the instructions page. You mean the lottery draws, right?

Just a quick note to say that The pick6 has been awarded to whomever had a bet on b1be69 with a total pot of 2250 BTC.

That's US$216 on mtgox, but who cares about non p2p currencies, anyway? ;)

Resolved! Thanks Nelisky.

I can try and help, but I need more details.

PM me your bcin, at least, and tell me if you mean the lottery or some bitpick

It was turned off. Lack of time to fix some bugs, lack of time to secure it properly so I would sleep easy if someone would transfer serious bitcoins into the system and general lack of user interest.

It had its prime, was a lot of fun, I have plans to bring it back...

For lottery, I've been trying different projects and possibilities even on the blockchain technology. If recent, my attention has been shifted to Gexan and it's looks like everything is fallen in place. Make some couple of bucks and I think I'll stick with them. Got any better, let's discuss