In article <199511291640.IAA28114@infinity.c2.org>, sameer <sameer@c2.org> wrote:

Any enterprising cypherpunks in gambling-friendly jurisdictions interested? I figure it would make ecash take off.. and you'd get rich.

Does anyone know what jurisdictions allow lotteries/gambling? Here's an off-the-cuff idea: [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.] Anonymous email lotteries: Advertise the lottery (and include a public PGP key) through some remailer in one of the above jurisdictions. Use a remailer that allows pseudonymous replies. In the announcement, include a secure hash of the next drawing's winning number (appended to appropriate amounts of random noise). Advertise to a mailing list or a newsgroup, like alt.anonymous.lotteries.announce. People pay by sending: { A payment made out to "@" (the ecash wildcard) Their choice of lottery ticket number A PGP Public key } encrypted with the lottery's public key, to the remailer address. A lottery consists simply of displaying the winning number and random noise, whose hash was previously posted (so the participants know you're not cheating). 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. The lottery pays out by replying to the winner's pseudonymous messages with their payment (made out to "@"), encrypted with their PGP key. There can be other variants on the lottery. For example, the participant whose ticket is _closest_ to the winning number wins all the money in the pot (minus a cut for the house). A problem with this, and various other forms of the lottery, is that it's hard for the lottery to prove that it's not cheating (either in the amount of money it took in, or that the losers of the lottery actually lost, etc.). In this model of payment, no participant knows anything about any other participant except a remailer's Reply-Block, and a PGP public key. However, using the features of ecash (from what I know of how it works, which isn't all that much (yet)), a payer can, in collaboration with the bank, identify the payee. This may be undesirable for the lottery operator and/or the participants. If (when) details of ecash are published (by Digicash or by someone else), it would likely be easier to work out how to achieve all-way anonymity with ecash. I seem to recall some mention of how this would be done here a while ago, and Lucky said he was going (before he started working for them) "to write some scripts that will lay the groundwork for some of the more unusual applications of Ecash". Follow-up thought: The lottery operator, instead of depositing the coins he receives from the participants, stockpiles them, and forwards them on to the winner(s). If a participant complains to the bank, and the bank traces his payment, it is likely to merely identify another participant (who is not doing anything illegal, AFAIK (IANAL; it's illegal to _run_ this sort of thing inside the US, not to _play_ it, right?)), and the lottery owner can even claim he is merely a participant, in the chance event that he _is_ the one identified, and he happens to be in the US... As far as I can tell, then, with this sort of method, the only way the lottery operator could be caught (technically; he could be caught in non-technical ways, say by being overheard bragging about it (Don't laugh; it's been done.)) is by having the remailer (or remailer chain) compromised. So; is there a problem with the implementation outlined above? If it were implemented, would people play it? - Ian "Still not sure he wants to get an ecash account"