I am proud to announce the launch of
BitDraw, the Bitcoin community's new premier raffle and lottery site. BitDraw provides both ongoing and one-shot raffle and lottery style games for your enjoyment. Create an account, deposit some Bitcoin to receive gaming tokens (TKN), and use those tokens to buy tickets to the games. Cash out your winnings at any time by converting tokens back to Bitcoin. The exchange rate for BTC to TKN is 1:1000.
To celebrate the launch of our site, we've scheduled some promotional one-shot raffles for the following prizes over the next month or so:
2012.08.13 - 2012.08.20 :
Casascius ฿10 Silver Round (10 BTC 1 Troy Ounce .999 Fine Silver Round with Gold Bitcoin Logo) (
Raffle)
2012.08.13 - 2012.08.24 : 1 Troy Ounce .999 Fine Silver
Liberty Dollar (historical, discontinued, and rare!) (
Raffle)
2012.08.20 - 2012.08.27 :
Casascius ฿25 Coin (
Raffle)
2012.08.27 - 2012.08.31 : 1 year subscription to
Bitcoin Magazine (
Raffle)
Multiple Raffles (
check the site!) :
Casascius ฿5 CoinCome on over to the site, create an account, and enter the raffles! In addition to the promotional raffles linked above, we have both daily and weekly raffles and lotteries that pay out in the intra-site virtual currency, tokens (TKN). Don't forget, you can increase your odds of winning by buying multiple tickets to a single game!
"But Dustin", you ask,
"how do we know this isn't some scam and you're some evil scammer? How do we know the drawings aren't rigged? What about SECURITY???" Good questions!
First, you know who I am. I'm very public on the Internet. You can find out all about me at
my personal website or follow me on
Twitter. The account I'm posting this under is in my real name. Look, that's my real face over there! I'm also known by the handle I)ruid, under which
I have an OTC rating. The domain bitdraw.com is
registered in my real name. The SSL certificate authority that issued our site certificate has verified my identity.
Second, the random bits of data used for our random number generation is pulled from
random.org, an unbiased, independend third party who's entire purpose is to provide truely random data to the Internet community. True randomness is important because machines are
notoriously bad at being random. In fact, with enough data to analyze, they can be quite predictible in their "randomness", which is very, very bad for certain purposes like raffle and lottery drawings. Therefore, instead of using a potentially predictable pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) like is provided by most operating systems and programming languages, we use a proven source of truely random data for our drawings. Further, the winning raffle ticket or lottery values, as well as a list of all of the tickets purchased, are displayed on each game page for your own verification after the game closes. While we don't disclose identifiable user information on who purchased tickets and the winners, there is enough information for each user to determine which tickets in the pool they purchased and whether or not theirs was the winner. We also invite winners of the games to post here in this thread if they do not mind identifying themselves. We will build the option for winners to identify themselves directly into the site in a future version.
Finally, we know how important security is to the Bitcoin community. With the last couple years' track record of service site hacks, scammers claiming to be hacked and running off with the users' funds, password database leaks, and the like, we have taken a number of significant steps from the beginning to ensure that our service has as much integrity as possible. Some of BitDraw's current security features include:
- The entire site is wrapped in SSL, all the time. This ensures that you know that your browser is connected to the legitimate site and that communications and data in transit such as your authentication credentials are protected from prying eyes on the Internet.
- The site employs an entirely offline Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoins deposited at BitDraw are sent to an offline wallet and withdrawals are processed manually and only after the withdrawal is confirmed by the user via response to a PGP-signed email. While a bit slower than instant withdrawal, your Bitcoins themselves are completely safe in the event that the BitDraw site itself is hacked or becomes otherwise compromised.
- BitDraw stores passwords securely and enforces a strong password policy. Our password policy requires passwords to be 12 characters long and have at least one upper case character, one lower case character, one number and one symbol. Passwords are stored as a salted SHA-512 hash.
We hope that these initial disclosures and security precautions allow you to comfortably game with our service. If you have any questions, would like clarifications on any of these points, or would like to report a bug, please comment in the thread below or email us directly at the addresses listed on our
Contact Page. To report a security issue, please contact us directly via email to security [at] bitdraw.com. You can also follow us on
Twitter for status updates and announcements.
We hope that you enjoy BitDraw, and good luck!
