At 1:20 AM 11/30/95, Ian Goldberg wrote:
[Disclaimer: The following post is a gedanken experiment. It should not be interpreted as condoning or encouraging anyone to break any laws, no matter how stupid the laws are.]
I, on the other hand, have no compunctions about "condoning or encouraging" various kinds of actions. When condoning and encouraging becomes criminal, I hope I'll be gone. (Wiseacres will cite hypos in which encouraging a crime, such as a rape, makes the encouragers culpable. A far cry from condoning and encouraging tax evasion, gambling, etc.) On to Ian's proposal: ...
Now: there's likely no Web-of-Trust to the various PGP keys involved, so the lottery's Reputation will have to be built up. A good way to do this is to have smaller prizes being won fairly often (e.g. by matching the last digit/few bits), so that it's obvious the lottery is not just collecting money without awarding prizes.
Have to be _very_ careful here. A variety of scams can be developed which show lots of "small" winners, but which fail to show any large winners. The lottery operators can make a lot of extra bucks by simply not paying off the large winnings, in various ways. More robust protocols may be possible. In particular, I recall that Eric Hughes was working on something he called "encrypted open books." While banking was the obvious domain, it seems plausible that the same methodologies could be adapted for lotteries (some isomorphisms between accounts/balances and tickets/winnings?). I don't follow Ian's proposal in enough detail to comment on it, but thought I should point out the scams over nonpayment of winnings and the "encrypted open books" notions (from sometime in '93, as I recall). Personally, I have long had great _hopes_ for using crypto for non-sanctioned gambling, but I'm pretty skeptical that many people will do it. For one thing, anyone knowledgeable enough to be comfortable with the crytography knows that gambling when a house cut exists is a lose. (And gambling with no house cut is, at best, a wash.) --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."