UltraYOLO — First Truly Trustless Lottery
On January 13, 2016, Powerball mania reached an all time high, distributing $1,586,400,000 to three lucky winners. However, there are two important questions we have to ask that are now more pertinent than ever thanks to blockchain technology:
- How much did the three winners walk away after the government takes its swipe?
- Who are the three winners?
The answer to the first question is $187.2M each. That’s 39.6% lost to federal income taxes that the winners couldn’t even touch.
The second question is a trick question… The three winners decided to remain anonymous, and for good reason: it would be a shame if some miscreants utilized their identities to harm the families of the three winners. In the current Powerball implementation, their identities are not truly anonymous and are known by the World Lottery Association (WLA), USA government employees, and the store owners that sold the winning tickets.
This is where UltraYOLO comes in. First, no entity other than the winners can even touch the winnings — and that’s simply due to how the Smart Contract is written (available on github). UltraYOLO also has a team of legal advisors to make sure that all this complies with all legal requirements, but due to the nature of crypto, lottery winners can be sure that their earnings are safe in their wallets before they themselves decide to give the government a share. UltraYOLO also utilizes DAO governance, so the identities of any winners (and any lottery participant for that matter) are completely anonymous and untraceable.
The UltraYOLO protocol uses a novel proof mechanism called “Proof of Randomness.” The comparison with Proof of Work and Proof of Stake is shown below.
The most important part of the protocol is the emphasis on the random number generation. Current crypto-lotteries use a pseudo random number generator because a hardware random number generator cannot be hosted over DAO. This means that without Proof of Randomness, a lottery is subject to cheating. Proof of Randomness uses BLS cryptography to ensure that the signatures of each node are provably secure after random number generation. This also means that Proof of Randomness will require masternodes to validate the blockchain, which also introduces another investment opportunity. Masternodes are also able to earn YOLO token for staking and keeping the network up. In the whitepaper, it is estimated that there will be between 2,500 to 5,000 masternodes in the UltraYOLO network shortly after ICO.
For the lottery mechanics itself, a ticket does not have to match each character in the winning lottery number to win some prize. In fact, each lottery ticket will have an 8.31% chance of winning a substantial prize, which is much better than existing lotteries. This means that the odds should speak for themselves in generating interested players.
UltraYOLO’s team chooses to remain anonymous because they believe in the democratic principles of equal opportunity participation in this exciting era of cryptocurrency. However, they make public their intentions to maintain strict integrity and to abide by law and high standards for professionalism.
To learn more visit us at www.ultrayolo.com
