Topic: delete please (Read 1217 times)

I've been running a provably fair^* Lottery giveaway inside a trusted online casino for almost a year, and recently stopped it due to lack of people who join. Even if it's EV+, it's hard to get many people to join. It's still running, just not as a forum giveaway anymore. That Lottery has never earned anything, as it was a promotion. If you want to earn from a Lottery it will be even less likely to find players.

Meeting IRL in Amsterdam is still no guarantee that it's not a scam, you still may or may not be a scammer after having a coffee.

Another reason why a Lottery doesn't work on Bitcoin now: fees are relatively high compared to ticket values. At 50k satoshi per ticket, the required fee will be about the same as the ticket price. And, if 10 people bought a ticket and you have a 500k sat pot, you'll need the entire pot as a fee to be able to pay the winner.

Not many Dutch guys make 200+ euro net per hour, you're talking 400k euro per year, which puts you at the top 0.1 - 0.01% richest in the country. I highly doubt that.

^* nobody ever challenge the implementation

This sounds workable yes and agreed its provable

I do believe you to be honest, and the idea of a trip to Amsterdam sounds nice but way too expensive  . The fact is that you have to change the way of thinking of a whole community that doubts just everything. I don know if you have heard about freebitco.in, but it is the longest running faucet... blaablabla and people still don't trust them even though they are quite active in here and you see (they have a provably fair system too), they are not trusted at all.....

No, "the players" are just bitcoin transactions. So everyone would have the same list of players in the same order (for example: confirmed transactions between block x and x - ordered alphabetically by transaction hash.) Then the result will be based on that block hash of that specific future block x. This way everyone can run a (simple) script to verify the results and be sure that the winner is selected fairly.

Your opening statement says otherwise:
If the game is provably fair, you don't have to wonder if the results are "legit" and you don't have to trust the site owner (for the bet/lottery result), because everyone can calculate it themselves This is way superior than just "trusting you to pick a random winner".

I think if you google a bit on PevPot or "dabs lotto" you might find some previous provably fair lotteries (that stopped already) for their exact calculation methods.





And like hilariousandco says, unfortunately there are just too many scammers here - even for tiny amounts. It's not a personal attack to you just really how anonymous internet works. Not interested in meeting up in Amsterdam lol.





The "bitcoin casinos" that mostly have traditional non-provably fair games and sketchy licenses with unclear house edges that unfortunately do score high in Google - are indeed bad. But there are plenty of good bitcoin gambling sites around, mostly dice sites and some sites like bustabit. These sites actually have a better payout than your lottery (mostly only 0.3 - 1% house edge) and are provably fair too. Most of the bitcointalk audience seem to prefer these sites over those "sketchy bitcoin casinos" afaik.

Really, I havn't. So people dont applaud new lottery/games but yet want to stay and bitch about the dodgey payouts some bitcoin casinos have? I will meet with anyone IRL in Amsterdam area this week and sit down. I will pay for coffee and will show them I have no need to scam. Thats my offer.

You're probably just wasting your time trying to get this going. I've seen many people try things like lotteries and raffles for coins on here and they've never got much interest. With a newb trying it it's even less likely. You need to find a way that the draw is verifiably fair and you'll also need a trusted escrow to hold the funds, which kinda defeats the purpose of you doing the lottery as the other trusted person will just be doing all the work or could just run it himself and cut out the middle man. I would find other ways to try make your cut because this almost certainly wont take off.


People scam for literally pennies here. Lost count of how many times I've seen people run off with a couple of dollars after someone has stupidly trusted them with it and that's why most people here wouldn't send money to anyone else without an escrow.

Seen people kill for less....

Hi Nico,

As far as I know, random is quite random I could hash with a certain block for security and prebuild code so anyone can compile and run the lottery outcome themselves, but still I could manipulate the players pool so that would not give you any guarentees that it would be fair. Imo random is fine.

And do you really think a half German, half Dutch guy will scam people here for a couple 100 euro? I make more than this an hour with my job. I thought this would be a great way to fight the real scamming bitcoin casinos out there. You sound very Dutch with your NL, we could meet irl if you want I am near Amsterdam the following days. So we can sit down and talk and hopefully convince you that i am not a scam artist. I will pay the coffee

Thats why the entry is only 50.000 satoshi, which is maybe like 1 euro?

The idea sounds just too murky..., just having people deposit BTCs on your account is too risky as there is no way of knowing you wont run away with the funds. Besides, you claim that the current price pool is of 0.05BTC, but when checking the account you have provided balance is complete 0. Let's see if this works out to other members but I dont think this is going to have any future (maybe I'm wrong). And apart from that, your activity is a complete 0 too

Actually not. For starters random() is not a cryptographically secure random number generator. But more importantly, it's not provably fair. Eg: we cannot see that you didn't just selected a specific winner (for example: yourself!) A provably fair way of doing a lottery is to use a future defined bitcoin block hash (so at block number x) to generate the outcome (and publish the list of entries before that... in this case that's already in the blockchain from the "deposits".) This way we know for a fact that the result is random, not cherry-picked by you and we can verify the outcome.




Besides that, truthfully, even if you fix your "result calculation".. still no one should play your lottery IMO. You are a complete newbie here, creating an account is literally free and just running with the funds is too easy. Nothing personal. And this thread should be in "Games and rounds" as it's a forum-based game. GL though

Edit: Closed for now. Noone transfered anything yet so noone lost anything.

OP can delete this thread thanks.

Just wanted to run a honest lottery but I think too many scams (by others) in the past have made it impossible to start a new forum lottery.

Thanks for the pointers!