Yup, Kais is an honest trader

I have money in Mt. Gox that I want to get into Paypal. I'm willing to pay $21 on Mt. Gox in USD for someone to send me $20 on Paypal.

I'm having trouble logging in using Mashedlife. If I copy and paste my username and password into the boxes and click login, it works fine; otherwise it just goes back to the login page. I think this has something to do with Mashedlife not actually clicking the button (does it work if you hit enter?)

Is anyone else having problems?

I'd be interested in betting on the upcoming Canadian election. It's on May the second. Is this possible?

Thanks.

I just want to point out that most private trackers have rules against selling invites. I do not know specifically if either of these sites do, but many sites will ban you and the person who invited you if you buy an invite.

Okay, a winner was chosen and they were sent 5.40BTC.

If I were to make the proposed changes (using the bitcoin block to determine winner, winner chooses charity), would anyone be interested? I just set this up to play with bitcoin, so I won't set it up to go again unless there's some interest.

You shouldn't need to create a paypal account, they'll let you checkout with a credit card directly.

Yeah, I guess you're right about the incentive to get in early. And, the more tickets that are sold, the smaller the chance difference will be. I'll go with that then.

Also, as for voting on the charity, how's this: when you buy a ticket, you a url to a web page page of a charity that will accept donations with bitcoin. The charity chosen would be the one on the winning ticket? Or would it be better to have a poll to vote? I'll do one of these starting next month, I don't want to change it now that I've already said where the money is going.

Would you prefer (and this goes to anyone) that I increase the amount going to charity or to the user, when I lower my cut?

That's my current plan, but there's no way to verify it. If I base the winner in a predictable way off the blocks that show up later, anyone can verify that it's fair.

My math might not be correct here, so if someone could correct me if I'm wrong, I'll gladly use hashes, but my problem is that they cannot be used to create an evenly distributed number within an arbitrary range.

If we assume that the hash as a whole is fairly random (which I don't think there's any evidence to doubt this, and there's probably evidence to support it), we can't use that directly to give us a random number in an arbitrary range, the way you'd do that is to take the hash modulo the number of tickets you have sold, the lower numbers would be more likely to come up (there would be a cut off point where numbers below it would be more likely to come up than the numbers above it). For example, if your hash is in the range [0,10) (I'll use a low number here for space constraints, the same thing would happen with any number), and you have six tickets sold. If you take the hash modulo the number of tickets you have, you would end up with {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 0, 1, 2, 3}. You can see that [0,3] is more likely than four or five if you randomly picked one of those (the one you pick would be equal to your hash). This does work though if the range of your hash is a multiple of the number of tickets you've sold.

While writing this though, I realized that I could probably use the hash value as input to a random number generator in the range of the number of tickets. I don't know too much about random number generators, but if someone could give me some more information on what algorithm I'd want to use for that purpose.

And then while writing that last paragraph, I came up with another solution; if I took the hash value of the first n blocks after the end of the month, where n is the smallest prime factor of the number of tickets, and added them together, I'd get an evenly distributed number in a range that is a multiple of the number of tickets sold. Is that mathematically sound?

If I did anything like that, I'd make sure to keep a list of all tickets currently sold at all times, so that anyone can verify I'm not inserting my own tickets at the end.

Hmm, you're right. Not announcing the charities is a bit, off. I'll post that at the beginning of the month (I'll edit the site later to reflect that, but I'll tell you now that it will be torservers.net). The reason winners are drawn manually is because I wanted it to have a solid ending time, instead of when block xx appears. I could do something like the last block to appear, but I could still be accused of cheating because the block was not chosen beforehand. The other problem is that I cannot think of any way to use that information to choose a random number in a range of possibly anything, the other sites I've seen that use this have a specific range they use, which it can use to get an evenly distributed random number. The bitcoin lottery solved the problem by requiring you to pick a number for your ticket, like a normal lottery. I didn't want to do this, mainly since it's already been done for bitcoin. But if anyone has any suggestions on how this could be more fair, I'll listen.

And I don't think 10% is too much, but if a few people have objections, I'd be willing to reduce it.

Alright, sounds good. If you want, you can change my order from 3BTC of stickers to exactly 20 stickers, if that makes keeping track of this stuff easier.

Alright, I have an essay due next week (3-4 pages double spaced), I'll send it off to you if I get it done with enough time left. What format do you like? I'll probably be writing it in LaTeX, so either plain text with LaTeX or DVI/PDF.

How will you comment on it? Will that just be a separate document? If you have a Mac, there's a PDF reader called Skim that lets you annotate PDFs, and then export them, something like that would be good for this. If you don't have a Mac, there might be a multiplatform reader that has similar features.

http://bitdraw.nfshost.com/

All information needed is on the site, but a quick summary:

- You buy tickets at 1BTC each
- At the end of each month, a winner is chosen manually (ie. it is not based Bitcoin blocks like some other contests)
- The winner will receive 80% of all ticket sales, 10% will be given to a charity that will be chosen at the end of the month and 10% will be given to the maintainer (me).
- Although the charity will not be known at the beginning of the month, I will try my best to choose either charities whose actions are in line with the Bitcoin mentality or charities who support a cause that most people should support.
- This means that it won't be something like Right to Life, political parties, or anything of that sort.
- Charities supporting getting help to those who need it should be safe, assuming they are not strongly allied with a religious organization.

What sort of editing are you looking at? Professional? This would be good for me if you could do school papers (highschool/grade 12) level.

15USD for shipping? That's quite a bit, would ~20 be able to fit into a standard sized envelope, and how much would that be? I can have them sent to either Michigan or Ontario.

Thanks, I decided that it would be a good idea either way in case of bugs or something that cause pending transactions to not actually be bought (never get to mybitcoin). It'd still be nice to get something official, though.

Another question, I understand that transactions time out if they're not paid in 24 hours, will the SCI tell my callback script when that happens, or do I need to deal with it myself?

I'll buy 3BTC worth as well.

I may be able to sell you a first generation iPod touch. It has a name and an email address on the back that I'd scratch out first, but since you're using it for testing, shouldn't be a concern.

Also, I'm in Ontario as well, so shipping should be decent. PM me if you're interested, and I'll make sure I can sell it (I'll post here if I can verify it before you reply).

e; Yes, you can have it if you're interested. Also, my dad (who's email is engraved on the back) is okay with it not being scratched out, so you can do that if you want, or put something over it, or nothing at all.