A Lottery For All

Since the dawn of the Divi Blockchain in September 2018, this blockchain lottery has been held week after week, each with 10 ‘small’ winners, each who receives 25,200 Divi and one super winner who receives 252,000 Divi! More than once people have tripled or quadrupled their Divi ownership in a week by winning a lottery.

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How does it work? And why is now a good time to review it? This is the post that ties this all together.

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A quick review of staking

There are other articles you can read about staking in the Divi blockchain, but to put it in a short paragraph, when you use a computer to help validate transactions and make copies of the blockchain ledger, you get rewarded. The security of the entire blockchain is dependent upon how much money, or effort, it takes to make non-consensus based changes to the ledger. Thus, the more funds that are put towards staking, the more funds it requires to attack the chain. For this, you get rewarded according to how much you put up to staking.

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Divi’s blockchain based lottery system

The blockchain lottery is a pretty simple system. If you think of a “king of the hill” type competition, you will understand the methodology. Let’s start with how you enter the lottery.

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When you get a staking reward, that transaction has a hash associated with it. This hash is how you can look up an individual transaction. This hash may look something like this: 

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23f310ae2c3fd7f7b4f8e9b9dd4756a793b5f9e3c606bcaf459292536c54da1c

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Believe it or not, this can be evaluated as an actual number (the hash itself is a combination of other hashes, but is essentially random). To evaluate this as a number, like all numeric systems we start with the rightmost digit. Here you can see it is a ‘c’. Well, that is a weird ‘number’. This is what is known as a hexadecimal number. For decimal numbers, we use the characters ‘0’-’9’ to represent the numbers 0-9. In hexadecimal, the characters 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f are used to represent the decimal numbers 0-15. So, the evaluated number for that hash is enormous! 

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Luckily we don’t need to evaluate and keep track of the entire hash as a number. There are only 10080 staking rewards handed out per week, so we only need to keep the last few digits of each one. So, let’s look at a possible lottery scenario.

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On the left, let’s say we are some point before the 10080 blocks when the lottery is evaluated. We can see 11 addresses are all qualified for possibly receiving a lottery win. The hashes are scored, and the ranks are given (ranks 3-8 not shown). And the address in rank 10 is in the running for receiving the large win of 252,000 Divi! You go DGQD5!

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Another odd format we see is in the rank 2 position, there is a ‘:’. This just means that the validator that has ranked in that position is a Validator Vault and not a hot staking node.

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So, on the 10080 block after the last lottery (right side), we can see that the old Rank 0 address, DNMKr, has been knocked off the mountain because a new Validator Vault earned a staking reward that had a hash that put it into Rank 2 (the green bounded box). Thus the old Rank 2 was moved to Rank 1, the old Rank 1 to Rank 0, and the old Rank 0 got bumped off the list. Sorry DNMKr.

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The rewards are sent out, 252,000 Divi to the rank 10 address, and each of the other addresses gets 25,200 Divi. 

There are some rules around the lottery. For example, if you win a lottery reward, that address is not eligible for another one for 4 more weeks. Further, the address that has earned a staking reward must have 10,000 Divi in it to be eligible for the lottery.

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How do you get a better score than someone else? You don’t. Remember, the scores are based on the transaction hashes, which are random numbers. The way to improve your chances in this lottery is by receiving more staking rewards. You get more staking rewards each week, by staking more Divi, which secures the blockchain from attack. Everyone wins!

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Well, not everyone. Masternode owners don’t.

Why reiterate the lottery mechanics now?

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The reason it is a good time to go over the lottery system now is that, soon, everyone who helps secure the Divi blockchain will be eligible for the lottery.  Masternode rewards were never eligible for the lottery. Yes, that is right. Due to the fact that masternodes are being upgraded to Validator Vaults, everyone who is participating in the Divi ecosystem by staking their funds, will be eligible to receive a staking reward. Everyone who receives a staking reward, and meets the lottery requirements, will be eligible for the lottery. So get staking!

This article is part of a series of articles regarding the migration to Divi 3.0. It will be executed in steps over several weeks, allowing for a seamless and efficient transition process. We urge you to pay close attention to the forthcoming updates, as they will contain vital instructions for the migration. There will be a gamification element incorporated, so we encourage you all to stay engaged! This should make the process more engaging and a rewarding experience for all node owners and the Divi family. You can find the introduction article as well as the list of articles of the series on this link.

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