Neat. You're trusting a website that doesn't list who runs it (whois says it's a guy named Mathijs Vogelzang out of Paris) or what their intentions are to provide a fair lottery to anonymous addresses. Given enough lotteries you could backtrace the results and make sure the distributions are probabilistically random, but what's stopping the owner from entering a sufficiently large pool and 'randomly' selecting an address he controls as the winner?<p>Oh, and for providing this service you automatically lose 2% off the top.<p>There are far better ways to waste your virtual disney dollars.
I'm the creator, thanks for the insights.
This was really just a fun project to explore the Stellar API (which is really good, and I hope they will reach their goal and transform international payments).<p>It seems the attention on hacker news drew quite some payments into the system, whereas I had thought that it would just stay in the play money range forever.
The lottery aspect I hadn't thought about. I'm eager to transform the model to make it less lottery like as I certainly don't want to violate any laws, but am a bit unsure about exactly how. There could be a small chance that 100% of the money goes to a charity, or that there is somehow a matter of skill involved in the exact amount you send.
(FYI, the only other piece of information that can be sent along with a Stellar payment is one 32-bit integer ID).
Any suggestions are welcome.
"…redistribution game…" – what a lovely euphemism!<p>And finally, a website to directly address the problem that anonymous lottery operators have too little wealth, and credulous altcoin lottery players have too much.
I can't decide if this is fun, but fiscally pointless, or kinda brilliant.<p>It looks like a pretty simple app, which I doubt took too much time to put together, and is likely incredibly cheap to run. Assuming the most recent two hours are more representative of engagement than the previous two (not a given by any means, and no I haven't been tracking this before then), it looks like it's producing several hundred Stellars an hour minimum for the creators.<p>Stellars aren't worth much right now, and may never be (I'll leave that sort of speculation to those with more knowledge of the subject), but this seems like a cheap and quick way to build a stockpile.<p>Anyway, food for thought.
I wonder if you could game that jackpot. Statistically, with even-odd tickets the net value of the ticket is always less than the ticket cost -- meaning statistically you loose money (ex: a $2 ticket, on average, has a return of $1.50). If you could monitor the jackpot and, at the very last minute, more than double the current pot then you'd have over a 50% chance of winning. You'd win some and loose some, but statistically over time I think you'd end up positive.<p>Any mathematicians want to chime in?<p>EDIT: As fela, zck, and thedufer pointed out below, this would not work in fact. Thank you guys for the math lesson!
Just for fun, what would be the optimal strategy to play this game?<p>If you have x amount to spare, you could either put all x in one round, or spend x/N in N rounds.<p>I guess, the probability of winning might be optimal for some N > 1, but I am not able to come up with a formula for it.<p>Further optimisation of the N>1 strategy could be to stop entering into a round after winning and making a profit.