Show HN: Stellar Jackpot

[floatrock]

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?

Oh, and for providing this service you automatically lose 2% off the top.

There are far better ways to waste your virtual disney dollars.

[knd775]

I'm pretty sure the poster (thijser) is Mathijs Vogelzang based on his username. His HN profile is a few years old and he says where he works on his profile. I'm not saying whether people should trust this or not, but I think you may be being a bit unfair.

[thijser]

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).

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.

[dreamdu5t]

Don't listen to people trying to pressure you on how you spend you money. People love to shame others.

You made a lottery. Nobody has to play. Do whatever you want with the money. Don't give it to charity because someone else told you to.

[fela]

I think giving the margin to a charity would be a great idea. I was thinking of implementing a stellar charity lottery, but you have been faster it seems :) As an added benefit people might be more likely to play if they know they are doing so for a good cause. Everybody wins! :) I think there are a few charities on stellar already

[gojomo]

"…redistribution game…" – what a lovely euphemism!

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.

[mful]

I can't decide if this is fun, but fiscally pointless, or kinda brilliant.

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.

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.

Anyway, food for thought.

[knes]

I just won the last jackpot of 37682.96 stellar. Not sure what I can do with it hehe.

[fela]

play again :P

or give it to a charity, I think there are a few that have a stellar account, for example miri

[chrisfosterelli]

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.

Any mathematicians want to chime in?

EDIT: As fela, zck, and thedufer pointed out below, this would not work in fact. Thank you guys for the math lesson!

[thedufer]

If you exactly double the pot right before a drawing, you'll have a 50% of losing 50% of the pot (what you put in) and a 50% chance of winning 48% of the pot, with an expected value of, you guessed it, losing 2% of your money each time.

It's not a coincidence that this 2% is equal to the cut taken. That will always be your expected loss. Unless it does not behave as advertised, you can't game it.

[cissou]

Well no matter how you look at it, the expected value is .98 of whatever you paid. So in the long run you're certainly going to lose 2% of what you invested.

[Egidius]

Is there any way I can get str's by buying them somehow? It seems like I'm a bit too late with registrating my Stellar account

[gst]

https://justcoin.com/ would be an option (appears to currently have the largest Stellar volume out of the few exchanges that trade it). Here are the current prices: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/

[hrjet]

Just for fun, what would be the optimal strategy to play this game?

If you have x amount to spare, you could either put all x in one round, or spend x/N in N rounds.

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.

Further optimisation of the N>1 strategy could be to stop entering into a round after winning and making a profit.

[fela]

The expected amount is always 98% percent of what you put in, so the optimal strategy is to not play at all :)

It depends what you are optimizing for. In most cases playing multiple times will make you win very slightly less in the median case, countered by the fact that you can win multiple jackpots (obviously not too likely an event)

And stopping strategies usually mean having a big probability of winning little but have a small chance of losing a lot. Basically a reverse lottery, but you still lose on average.

[joshdance]

Take 2%. That is almost a standard credit card fee. We are trying to get away from those level of fees with new types of currency.

[desireco42]

Apparently I won. :) So I know it pays back.

[knes]

Awesome idea., I just sent some Stellar to it.

[jdietrich]

I take it you have a lottery license?

[davidjgraph]

I take it he lives in a country where one is required?