Here, here. I can't say I don't understand his actions, I just wouldn't take that route personally. In any case, if you don't like/trust his offer, don't take it. You can always code it yourself to understand the effort involved.

Heck, you can actually use my code or one of the others to help you bootstrap things and I bet ya even so you'll start to appreciate the effort that needs to be put in doing this

You're on! Yep, Friday. I'm on GMT+1 so so that's Saturday 5am for you EST people :p

That's my gut feeling, yes, but not what the math says, it seems A full discussion on the numbers can be found on the Lottery announce thread. Still, a Pick4, with 65536 possibilities got a winner in 181 blocks, or somewhat over one day, and had less than 100 bets on it. I would bet you this one will be over before the working week is...

But I'm preparing to try out FreeMoney's idea of having multiple picks with different sizes, say a Pick4 and a Pick5 running at the same time. We're playing this by ear, so if you have some insight on how you think would work best for keeping you interested and betting, please do share!

Updated stats:

7 accounts, 7 betters, bets ranging from 5 to 108 BC.

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.

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.

I can give you mine BUT it's not statically linking cuda, so you need the SDK installed AND it's 64bits. Assuming both these things are good for you, and you don't mind using the terminal instead of the GUI, give it a try. This is the latest version that does ~6.2MHs on my system (assuming I'm calculating correctly ) and you should try it with just one mining thread (although it works with 5, the speed actually decreases from 3 up, and if you generate, you can't be sure it was the GPU miner).

Grab it at www.datlatec.com/bitcoind.zip and let me know how it goes.

Current stats since the handout began:

4 accounts, 3 betters, 2 with 8 BTCs and one with 16.

I have no problem doing some checking. But trusting is really the better option. If someone wants to scam you, they can still, even using the lottery. But, c'mon, what are 8 coins when you can win 691+? heh

When you asked before there were 2 new accounts created. Right now they are 3... not logarithmic, but great

Yes, those 12 did arrive. Did you send the other 2x16 to the same address?

What is the BTCIN? The one you posted? Can you log in to your account there? (don't post your BTCOUT!)

omg its 5kr1p7 k1d3 all over again...

I don't miss that era, so count me in for the ney

It is not silent at all when it fails. The result is that the hash calculated is all zeros, thus passing the difficulty check. Then the client double checks the hash and dies on an assert. Still, I could just not start the cuda miner and allow the client to still use the CPU

Transfers: 2 -> yours and, I assume, sgtstein's (where's yours macdrai?)

I'll grep for accounts created in a minute and keep everyone posted

Well, I'd say the best way is to limit visibility. If people give you the address by private message, you can then keep posting as to how much is left, and I can keep track of the amounts received, confirming the process without too much disclosure. You know everything, but then again these are your coins until you give them

A new transfer and bet of 16 entered the BitPick... so much for the anonymous part, hey ?

On steroids... I want to be able to tell the client:
bitcoind collectfromkey privkey amount

And it would create the transaction with the privkey as sender, amount as, well, amount, and my own address (may provide it on cli too, of course) as recipient. It may be actually importing the private key, sure, although I don't think that would be needed technically, so as long as I can construct the transfer pdu.

Say you generate a new address on your client, its 1abc...
Now on another client you transfer to that address, so when the 1st client sees that transaction in a block, and checks it using its priv key, it knows the transaction belongs to it.

If you add that key to another client you can grab the transaction elsewhere, right? Spending it will only happen once, but multiple wallets can have that address.

What I want to do is to have the address+key so I can, without ever adding that key to my wallet.dat, create a transaction spending the value in that address+key, effectively sending it to my real address.

This would make for a proxy address schema, where you could send money to the network and then provide the key information to anyone to collect, but without actually holding the proxy key, it would be use and throw away.

Is that any clearer?

Thanks for the link! I'll be sure to try and follow as soon as I have a moment. The only thing is I don't have any linux with a cuda enabled gpu, but I can still try and build things up so others can test.

I don't use IDEs at all, I try very hard to avoid them. It pays in the long run to know and understand your tools.

As for helping in compiling, I've taken a very shortcut approach in my system, just copying the calls from the nvidia SDK template. There's a variable (is it debug or verbose?) that you set to 1 in your makefile and you'll get the calls it makes to compile printed out, so I just copied the switches over to the bitcoin makefile. That is one place I really need to improve, but didn't have time to. I don't even check if the gpu is cuda capable, for crying out load

Funny I missed that, as I actually tried the client on OSX back in the days. So there are a bunch of alternatives, only nothing maintained or production ready. I could maintain such a thing, but right now I'm so mixed up into many things that I have to balance cost/benefit, but I'd gladly support (i.e. donate to) someone picking this up. If there are no takers I'll still continue development, but at a slow pace.