Been thinking about how to set up a decentralized lottery without going crazy on on-chain transactions or needing complex scripts like HMAC-SHA512. The idea is to let users throw their coins in via transaction fees. This means we wouldn’t need extra payments for running the lottery. Just collect fees and then reward the winner from the coinbase transaction.
Decentralized Lottery Proposal for Miners
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But what’s the point of this? I mean, what even is a lottery system in crypto? To my understanding, it’s supposed to be verifiable and fair. Like, using block hashes for randomness... is that right?
There’s definitely a problem with using like OP_LOTTERY to kick off this system. Take the HI-LO game your deposit is basically the transaction fee. Everyone plays except the miners who are just doing tiny transactions. Getting random numbers from 0-10000 or whatever would be tough without a specific opcode for that.
I feel like I read somewhere that the lottery needs to hit a certain fee threshold before it can even work. But what if it never reaches that threshold? Wouldn't that just kill the engagement if it drags on? Plus, isn’t the whole payout system kinda dependent on the miners? They could hold up payouts and that seems like a centralization risk.
If we hit a block with all fees under 1000 satoshis, that’s a clear sign people aren’t using the network. No point in running a lottery if there’s no action, right? Also, think about it what if someone wins like 110 satoshis? Miners can handle it, but how does a regular user cash that out?
This is actually pretty clear even for someone not super techy about Bitcoin. So basically, the script could let users benefit from transaction fees by gathering those tiny amounts of satoshis... But will the fee threshold be fixed or changeable? And who gets to decide that stuff?
Nah, it’ll have to differ between mainnet and testnets. Mainnet runs on that "satoshis per virtual byte" deal, where 1 sat/vB is the minimum. That’s worked for Bitcoin, but it’s not great for new networks starting from scratch. A lot of altcoins screw this up by just mirroring Bitcoin's model without thinking.
Yeah, the testnet4 faucet is currently going on this address. When fees hit 1000 sats or greater, new coins get created. Then there’s the coinbase maturity bit that stops them from vanishing right away. It’ll be a lottery based on how the network spreads it all out. If users start using full-RBF to claim, they’ll probably pay some fees and refill the faucet for the next round.