The Amazing Anonymous Bitcoin Lottery!

And it may be ready for prime time... maybe
taabl.datlatec.com
Thread at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=896

Hmmm, it's interesting and I'm interested but:
- Who are you again? When was this up before, so that it is up "again"?
- Anyone did business here that can share the experience?
- Why didn't you even bother to use secure http for credit card info form?
- Are there any fees on credit card / paypal, or are these accounted for in the exchange rate?

I want a good chunk of these, but I'm afraid to step forward without more information...

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!

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

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.

I obviously can't. The reason I stated that was because the RECEIVING address was the same *slaps head*.

In my defense, your honor, that happened before my first cup of coffee, and I can't really be held liable for my actions before my first cup of coffee, can I?

So, playing a bit more...

'I' call, 'he' raises, 'I'... don't get any action buttons, my time starts counting and I time out. The hand is closed with 'he' winning (everyone folded) and the next hand simply doesn't start. Sound plays fine, messages work fine too, just a lost hand that was actually quite good and no more cards. Good thing it's the micro stakes table!

My stats so far: received 3 times within 2 days (including initial tx from noagendamarket), paid it forward 3 time within a few hours of receiving to all 5 addresses that were around at the time (excluding my own, of course). The last transfer I made forward was on the 26th.

Today I received 5 (!) transfers from the same generous party... I wonder if that was for real of it's an experiment to see if he can get 5 forward threads going on

Values were not discussed on purpose, as they should not matter for whatever this experiment is for. Ok, it's pay back time.

Well, it might just be me, but walking into the (insert favorite large surface store here), standing in line for 10 minutes and, already having 10 other people behind me I head to the counter and they say: "that will be 5461BTCs please, sir" to which I reply:

- Wait, I'll just log in in my android phone, how was that 64 random characters address again? 'T' or 'D' again? Can you write that down, thank you.
- It will just be 10 minutes now, sir...

Ok, maybe it doesn't have to be this way, but this check / note/ scratch ticket thingy will still need to be confirmed online, or else there's really little you can do to avoid fraud, and that will do more hurt to bitcoins that one initially imagines. Sure, completely offline secure transactions would rock, but I just thought this would be a great middle ground solution. Easy to create, hard to copy without physically stealing, easy to assert if used before. I personally think it would rock

And it would make it much easier to sell this idea to local shops, while also allowing offline transactions between parties with some trust level, as in the 'neighbor kid moans the lawn' scenario.

Although with this sticker style coating thingies, it gets much easier

But I was only considering an online transaction, as in debit card style. For offline usage, I'm not sure I have read of thought about a single system that would work, without some central issuer and physical material that is hard to counterfeit and/or more expensive to copy than the actual value it holds.

Scratch-offs are an amazing idea. They could have qrcode to a mybitcoin address, and the password be used as 'PIN code' like in an ATM machine, thus loosing the card would not mean loosing the coins.

Also, you could pair a bunch of same address cards that you hand off to (physical) merchants, and have another scratch off with 10 BTC worth codes, each one single usage. you could easily see if someone used your codes as they would be scratched off. So you hand out one qrcoded scratch off, and you use your own multi pin card and scratch as many as as 10BTCs you need. If they where those 'easy rip apart' things you could actually hand over the codes too

You would then carry only as many pin codes as you wanted to carry around, reducing the possibility of loosing them. But if you did loose them, you could completely cancel all unused address/pin code pairs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The lottery is up again!

New rules page, just a basic draft at 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.

Just been playing. The general sensation is good, but one small thing kept bugging me, as setting the raise amount manually in the text box would never assume the changed value. If changing using the slide it works ok, though.

The other thing I got is once Insti, which was already there, left while I was playing against LINKOU which had joined after myself, the whole thing slowed down to a crawl eventually killing the flash plugin with it. Might have been unrelated, but hey...

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.

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 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