Hi Chancecoin!
I am just learning about the protocol. So right now the random numbers are coming from the State of New York? Couldn't hashes of bitcoin blocks be the random number / random seed for all bets over a certain size, hashes of litecoin blocks could be for smaller bets, and hashes of dogecoin blocks for the next size down. Perhaps even something like Fastcoin could be used to decide micro bets.
It wouldn't just be the size of the bet that mattered, but the total amount of all bets placed would have to be capped for each pool (bitcoin, litecoin, etc.). The amount of money at risk for each block would have to be less than what someone would be willing to alter a blocks for.
How does it work ? Multiple blockchain ?
Is there any strong opposition to moving to a faster blockchain?
Would Dogecoin be the best blockchain?
On a related note, this might not completely solve the issue, as it seems that the NY Lottery numbers have been slightly delayed recently, which also contributes to the slowness, so we may still have to consider other sources of randomness.
What about PoS cryptos, like NXT or BlackCoin? Both of them feature very fast confirmation times.
As per randomness source, I recall there was a discussion about Cha origin in some place (where NY was criticized as possible, albeit unlikely, to be manipulated), and some natural sources of randomness like seismic activity were suggested.
Yes I am for Nxt if it is possible. The Nxt devs aim to have the fastest transactions of any payment system in the world. Moreover it is protected against 51% attack and the network is really decentralized.
Let's talk more in depth about where we can make Chancecoin transactions faster. When you place a bet, the first thing that happens is it goes into "pending" state, which means that you've sent the transaction successfully, but it hasn't been confirmed yet in the Bitcoin blockchain. It takes an average of 10 minutes for a transaction to be confirmed by the Bitcoin blockchain. It's possible for us to use an alternate Blockchain (such as
Dogecoin or
NXT) for betting transactions in order to speed up this part of the process. One possible drawback is that Chancecoin users would need to have Dogecoin or NXT funds available in order to take advantage of such a feature.
Once the bet has been confirmed, it goes into the "unresolved" state. This is when Chancecoin is waiting for the next set of NY Lottery numbers to come out. The lottery numbers are drawn every four minutes, but they sometimes aren't published for up to 30 minutes. This is actually the slowest part of the betting process typically, so it should be our first priority to fix this. If we can fix this part of the process, then
Chancecoin will be as fast as Satoshi Dice, in that all you have to do is make a transaction, and as soon as it's confirmed, you see the result. (If we also use a faster blockchain, Chancecoin will be faster than Satoshi Dice, but slower than Just-Dice.)
Ideally, we would find an alternate source of randomness, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Our source of randomness needs to be a trustworthy, tamper-proof one that releases random numbers periodically, timestamps them, and publishes them. Services just like that are hard to find. One possible solution is to make our own service like this (something like chancecoin.com/randomness). Would that be too centralized/untrustworthy for you?
The other possible solution is to go back to using the Bitcoin blockchain hash as the source of randomness. The drawback here (as has been previously discussed) is that someone with a lot of hashing power could manipulate Chancecoin by waiting for a hash that is favorable to them. Note that this isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. A miner would literally have to decide to throw away a block (along with the 25 BTC + fees reward) if the hash doesn't favor their Chancecoin transactions.
I propose that we go back to using Blockchain hashes as our source of randomness for transactions in blocks where the total amount of CHA that can possibly be won (for all bets in the block) is less than 2,000 CHA. If the total amount that can possibly be won exceeds 2,000 CHA then the NY Lottery numbers would be used. This should sufficiently minimize the incentive to manipulate blocks. Thoughts?
Your friend,
Magician