Ian Goldberg wrote:

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:

[details deleted]

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).

Traditional illegal numbers rackets usually use some publicly available number so everyone knows it's all on the up and up (I used to know what the source for the winning numbers actually _is_, though I think it has something to do with the stock market, e.g., the last three digits of the number of oddlot trades, or something else that is usually essentially random. In any case, using such a "public" and daily number eliminates the problem of proving the game isn't fixed. -Pete Loshin pete@loshin.com