Hi!

I have an idea of a lottery-based provably fair game. I invented a provably fair algorithm for this game, and I made a little prototype with command-line interface. And I stuck on what to do next. Behind me is a team of developers and support guys and three companies (not related to gambling) operating in USA, Norway and Russia. I have a passion to implement this game, but I want to check if the game ever could be popular and will have interest to play by you, BitcoinTalk people! If it is true, we'd be glad to implement it and to give investors nice opportunity to take their piece of sweet pie.

I have already played this game with friends, but they say that all this stuff with SHA256 hashes is really hard to understand and/or to explain. On the other side, I have and idea of casual setting to make all this stuff easy to understand, while keeping it transparent and fair-checkable by anyone.

I'm in very strong need of your feedback about the idea!

The game is dead simple:
1) draw starts when server shows it's server hash, bet size (B) and number of bets (N) to accept in a draw
2) every user who wants to take part in a draw, sends transaction (amount of B) and provides a server with some SHA-hash (it doesn't necessary to be unique) and BTC address he'd like to receive payouts to
3) when whole number of bets accepted (N), bankroll for the draw is N*B, an algorithm (Algorithm) makes a score table of all users/transactions took part in a draw, and server exposes it's secret
4) The first user/transaction in the score table takes all the bankroll (so, odds can be extremely high, like Nx, considering N is a dozens or thousands)
5) During the draw everyone can see a list of already accepted bets and hashes along with corresponding transactions.

The security and fairness of Algorithm relies on "avalanche effect" of hashing function being used internally, and I will show it later.

I'd like to invite you to internal testing! Any feedback is much appreciated.

P.S. And yes, it is a probably scam. The topic starter has no positive nor negative reputation or trust level.

What I see in this area, that we need very accurate, clean to understand and to implement specifications for "provably-fairness".
If you can generalize provably fairness, please try to make such specifications! It's better than code, because to make code and to make reference implementation you can ask software communities.

Specifications, describing entire aspects of communication of parties during some games or some activities, where "provably-fairness" exist.

For example, in cryptography there are well-known buddies Alice, Bob and Victor. There is a load of beardy math behind them. And they love to hang out as true crypto anarchist. They do strange things and draw for us great math problems, having practical purpose in lots of areas of human activities far beyond just numbers and integral arithmetics. Lots of cryptography protocols described and specified using the story. But try to find easy to read and to implement specs, or at least some visualizations. But nobody ever seen Alice at least... *joke*

If a provably-fairness would keep looking as strange as Alice with Bob, we won't get much.

Mentioning Primedice is not a good idea. You contribute to the brand mentioning them, but if you try some boundary cases, then you will see that they are not `so fair'. No, I believe that they aren't scammers or what.

I'm joining to the answer of just_Alice. I can't understand what is so fun in hitting buttons and looking at spinning reels. Dice sites are not much interesting, but there you know your chance, watch your luck and have an illusion that you can execute some tricky strategy and get huge winnings.

Answering the topic question from a subject, it depends on your goals. It's a big issue if you try to grow your capital using gambling. The same thing with investing: if you invest for fun and pleasure, you will lose easily.

You should know the difference between investing and gambling.

IMHO, "investing" on dice sites is nothing but speculation.

Real investment is a making or buying some financial asset that have some capital and generates some revenue for you. For example, if you buy "blue chips" stocks, you owns a part of real existing companies, those able to produce some goods and generate some profits. In this way, you have (relatively) little risk, because every separate share is provided with company resources and materials. So, buying miners does look more like investment, neither the speculation.

There is no difference between HYIP/cloud mining or investment on dice sites: you can't prove that what you buy from them has value and has ability to produce dividends.

So when you buy/sell "promises" instead of "assets", chances that you speculate and/or took part in Ponzi scheme.

Hello, kripod and everyone here!

What is the practical purpose of such packages? Is it a thing for players or for developers? For casino of for whom?
I prefer your idea, because I'm going to create my own provably fair games. But I can't use your code as is, because it is practically useless for me as a developer.

Another problem, that I will as a developer never trust your implementation, if it would contain such strange code: https://github.com/kripod/provably-fair/blob/master/packages/primedice/src/index.js#L22

The original provably fair dice game just use few bits from hash and converts it into "the hidden" random number, which isn't known to anybody before "dice roll".

Your idea looks very optimistic, when you say that such algorithms could be generalized. The theory behind "provably fair" games takes it's roots from cryptography and math problems called "Mental Poker" and "Coin flipping by telefone". It took years to design and to find proven solution for such problems.

For OpenSource project, if you expect some contributions get done by the community, please create at least the road map of your project, or fill the issues list with features/ideas you want to be implemented, explain your idea and motivation.

Hopefully my answer is helpful ))