Hello everybody,
This is a follow-up for
Royse's excellent topic about helping forum members with financial problems due to the novice coronavirus pandemic. Royse is working hard for establishing a trusted group of community members in charge of overseeing the fundraising process.
Meantime I'm trying to contribute by initiating a
lottery with good faith here, please refer to the main thread for more discussions of any type, about the main idea which belongs to @Royse777 and stay focused on the lottery mechanism I'm proposing and avoid discussing anything other than this lottery proposal here, thank you all.
Before proceeding any more you need to understand that the financial transactions both for buying the tickets and paying to winners will be managed by the same project board that Royce is working on. I won't engage in transactions just helping out the main project as a volunteer!
Big picture1- This is going to be a weekly lottery drawing and by weekly we mean every 1008 bitcoin blocks.
2- Bitcoin blockchain is used both as the source of randomness for drawing this lottery and as a sorting mechanism (with a minor twist) for assigning the ticket numbers.
3- It is not a
fair lottery. The total income coming from ticket sale in each drawing is split among four pools:
- 20% will go to the Mega Jackpot Pool for full match events.
- 30% will go to the Proportional Pool which will be distributed among tickets proportional to their relative match
- 20% will go to the Best Match Pool and will be awarded to the ticket(s) with the best match for the current drawing.
- The remaining 30% will go to the Royce project just like a normal donation to be supervised by the board for supporting qualified forum members impacted by the pandemic.
This way, for each drawing round, half of the sales are re-distributed by drawing among the ticket owners, 20% is reserved for incentivizing future drawings and the remaining 30% will be donated to the Covid-19 Aid Project, proposed by Royse777.
How does it work?A) Almost 24 hours before the bitcoin blockchain is expected to reach #Head block:
- Starting a thread named "Covid-19 Aid: Lottery Drawing X", I'll sign and announce a hash value generated by sha256(SatoshiSeed|RandSeed) called SeedHash as well as #Head (the block height that will be considered the start point of the round) and #Tail (the block height that ends the round, typically 1008 blocks away from #Head). SatoshiSeed is an English phrase quoted from bitcoin's White Paper and RandSeed is a number between 0 and 10,000,000 represented in ASCI decimal comma separated format (like "3,476,990") both picked deliberately and randomly by me for each round as a temporary secret. They will be kept private during the round and will be disclosed and used as part of the drawing algorithm later.
- The Royce Project Board will sign a message containing a (P2SH) bitcoin address, the Round Address, for selling tickets of each round, at the same time.
B) As a donor/player you are encouraged to participate in each drawing round by following this procedure:
- 1- You send (a whole number of) between 1-100 mBTC to the (above mentioned) Round Address. Sending any amount more than 100 mBTC is considered as a direct donation to the initiative. IOW: a maximum of 100 tickets are allocated to each transaction, one for each 100,000 Satoshis, and the remaining satoshis, if any, will go to the donation wallet of the project).
- 2-As soon as your transaction is included in the blockchain, using the basic property of bitcoin blockchain as a sorting mechanism for transactions, I'll calculate your Raw Ticket Number(s) simply by starting from the last assigned Raw Ticket Number+1 up to the number of mBTCs you have paid; transactions are prioritized by the blockchain already.
- 3- You claim the ownership of the tickets by sending me a signed message using the same key of (anyone of) spending input(s) of your transaction. I'll approve and forward your claim to the board immediately. You are free to announce your contribution in public as long as it is approved or select not to disclose it in public.
- 4- For each Raw Ticket Number, RTN, Applicable Ticket Number, ATN, is calculated using RandSeed*, as: RTN = (ATN+RS) mod 10,000,000
ATN is the number used for evaluating your ticket(s) in each drawing
* Please note that RS is not disclosed until the round is over.C) Once #Tail is reached and six more blocks are piled-up we go to the drawing event as follows:
- 1- I disclose both the SatoshiSeed and the RandSeed for the round, people are free to examine the consistency of the disclosed information with the SeedHash commitment I've made at the start.
- 2- Raw Ticket Numbers, RTNs are mapped to Applicable Ticket Numbers, ATNs, using the above formula, and newly disclosed RS.
- 3- The decimal representation of the four rightmost bytes of the #Head block hash considered as a little-endian unsigned integer is taken and another mod(10,000,000) operation is performed to generate the RoundKey.
- 4- The round prizes are scheduled as follows:
- The Mega JackPot is awarded to the ATN with a full 7 decimal digits Match with the RoundKey. The winner is excluded from the list.
- The Best Match Pool goes to the ATN(s) with the largest number of matched rightmost decimal digits with the RoundKey. Note that the lucky winner of Mega Jackpot is already awarded her price and excluded from the list.
- The Proportional Pool (30%) winners are selected as follows:
- 25% of the Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNs with matching last 3 digits of the Round Key.
- 50% of the untouched Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNs with matching last 2 digits of the RoundKey. The winner(s) of the previous step, if any, are excluded.
- 100% of the untouched Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNS with matching last decimal digit of the RoundKey. The winner(s) of the previous step, if any, are excluded.
SummaryThe bitcoin blockchain is used both as the source for random number generation and sorting lottery ticket numbers sold with an additional entropy designed to prevent very unlikely collision between pools/miners and players (a totally fictional situation for a lottery of this scale and a blockchain of bitcoin's scale
).
Half of the money is re-distributed by luck to the buyers in each round, after deducting a 30% lion share for donating to the Royse's Covid-19 Aid Project under development, another 20% part goes to the jackpot which lasts until a 1/10,000,000 chance of a full match is hit by a lucky ticket buyer.
