Hi,
As a potential investor, I am very concerned by what I have seen looking at your lottery algorithm. There are 2 glaring issues that undermine the legitimacy of your lottery and are astounding given the millions that will soon be raffled on the site.
1) Any customer who has purchased a ticket using number 49 has been cheated. Your algorithm uses modulo 49 which makes it so only numbers 1 through 48 are drawn.
2) Your algorithm discards repeated numbers and moves to the next 4 character section in the hash. This is inherently ok, but there are no safeguards to prevent a bitcoin block hash that generates duplicate powerball numbers exceeding the unique hash length. This may not happen for a long time, if ever, but there are already 18 prefix 0s on the bitcoin block hash, reducing your available seeds for the drawings, and this will only decrease in time. When it does hit, your algo will crash. For a lottery based business understanding the impact of ' small odds', this should go without saying..
https://github.com/TrueFlip/prizecounter/blob/master/algorithm.pyedit: 4 character, not 4 bit
edit2: this also applies to the golden ball with modulo 26
Hello,
Bitboi1. You are right, and we have this bug found & fixed by now. The proper code is on GitHub (we try to publish the updates there as often as possible). All the following Draws will use the correct algorithm.
Also we decide to enable a permanent Bug Bounty program after the ICO. As you’re the first community member to blaze this trail, we are pleased to reward you with True Flip tokens – just PM us for details!
We will give an extra free ticket to everyone, who had played for free using number 49 from the main list or number 26 from the Powerball list. Also 2 paid tickets are provided in compensation for each paid ticket which had played using 49/26 numbers. Frankly, these days our whole resources are used to conducting the ICO, so we’ll do this in the nearest future.
As for the second issue, we’re aware and don’t consider this to be an issue in the present time. The code will be improved rapidly in case the hash starts shrinking. According to True Flip’s roadmap, we plan a massive refactoring with third-party consulting involved – after the crowdsale ends, so we welcome you and everyone interested to help us improve the code.
Again, we are open for any feedback that the community members are ready to provide us with. We will definitely encourage all useful inputs with with rewards
FandangledGizmo Frank37
Best regards,
Trueflip.io