Lottery tickets are one of those things that you buy in exchange for an experience. A thrill goes through the body once you’ve placed your bet on your favourite 4, 5 or 6 numbers, depending on what lottery you’re passionate about. It’s the unknown that you’re playing, the expectation, the hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow. And even if you don’t win this time, there’s always the hope that you’re going to get those numbers right the next time around.

For all that it matters, people do actually win enormous sums of money out of lotteries. There are many stories out there, all over the world, depicting simple people with no special skills or fortune-telling powers who’ve changed their lives forever with the help of a cheap lottery ticket. Nowadays, you don’t even have to go to a lottery booth downtown in order to place your bet. It all happens online.

And with some of the biggest concerns about the lottery being its honesty, the new technologies that are available are now disrupting the way people not only play but feel about the fairness of the lottery companies. One such company, Fire Lotto, claims to be the very first global and completely fair lottery. Thousands of people from all over the planet have already tried it and earned important money. But the money is not yet important as is the technology behind Fire Lotto.

Gambling and playing the lottery on the blockchain

Gambling is one of the most important industries on the web. Online casinos have made billions of dollars in revenue in 2019. All over the world, people are playing their favourite games on the web every day. Be it dice games, card games, roulette, blackjack, plinko, baccarat, the list goes on and on, the new gamers of the century have long forgotten about the brick-and-mortar casinos they’d have to drive for hours.

There are two types of online casinos, people can choose from. The first is the traditional online casino. This casino uses a random number generator that works in the back of the site in order to generate gaming results. Whenever a new blackjack hand is drawn, the random number generator does its thing in the back. The player simply has to take the casino’s word for it and trust that the hand has been fairly chosen.

The second type of casinos you can play on is the blockchain casino. The main difference between a normal and a blockchain-based casino is in the algorithm that the companies are using for playing the games on offer. While the random number generator might be somewhat random, yet still unverifiable, the blockchain casino uses a piece of code called the provably fair algorithm which enables users to personally verify for the fairness of each played hand.

Provably fair and lotteries

The provably fair algorithm is a complicated piece of code that makes gamers' lives simple. It works by generating a hash with a client seed and a server seed. These two pieces of information get encrypted and are only available to players at the end of a session of gaming. They are the keys that allow players to manually check to see if the hands that they were dealt in a game of poker were truly random.

Provably fair games come in all shapes and sizes. The truth is, they cannot be cheated on by players or gaming companies. There is no human interaction that can mingle with the end results of a gaming session. Be it on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains, a game that’s probably fair is surely a fair one, be it a lottery or a slot, poker game, dice or whatever else you might have in mind.

Global lottery industry’s worth

In 2008, the world was struck by the economic crisis. The markets crashed and burned, the dollar went down and the entire economy followed. But you know what never took a hit? Or at least not as near as hard as any other industry? The gaming industry. Take the lottery, for example: it used to be worth 187 billion in 2004, but in 2016 it was worth 294 billion globally. That is an over 100 billion dollars increase in a time of extreme financial crisis.

More than 65% of lotteries worldwide come from America or Europe. Only once from 2004 up until 2016 was the lottery in decline as an industry. It was nothing but up, up and up some more in the rest of the time. And with the changes that modern technologies have brought, nowadays more than half of the lotteries are earning their over 50 billion in revenue online.

Once more, there’s the ethical question about which lottery to go for: the traditional or the blockchain-based? The answer should be evident to anyone: blockchain games are more than random. They’re double-random, completely verifiable thanks to online tools and guaranteed to make a better chance of winning than traditional lotteries. One of the newest lotteries that promise to disrupt the way we play our favourite numbers is Fire Lotto.

Fire Lotto overview

Fire Lotto is the first global blockchain lottery. The website where you can find everything about the service is firelotto.io, and then there’s firelotto.com for those of you who have some Ethereums to spare and want to try it. According to the website, “One of only a few real-life applications that use blockchain technology, Fire Lotto is the world’s first totally decentralized lottery platform based on the Ethereum blockchain and managed by smart contracts without any human intervention. Fire Lotto offers two types of lottery games: a draw lottery and an instant win game. The Firelotto.com website has already been launched and the total prize pool has exceeded ETH 1200.”

The platform has its own crypto exchange service you can use, a friendly interface and the option of buying your tickets with either normal currency or cryptocurrencies. For the people who want to pay with dollars for their chance at winning, they can do so via PayPal or credit cards.

Fire Lotto works by the help of tokens, as it so happens with most blockchain-based projects. A token is a virtual asset you can buy as an investor to support a certain idea or project. For every token that they buy, Fire Lotto investors get a 10% commission out of all lottery ticket sales. These commissions are paid in Ethereum every 2 months. If you’re done with keeping tokens for a profit, you can simply use them later to play the lottery yourself.

How is Fire Lotto disrupting the way people play the lottery

Fire Lotto is an Ethereum-based lottery. You can’t say anything of such sorts about any other lottery out there, because most of them are just… government-based?! Coming back, because of the fact that the lottery is based on the blockchain, there are many ways in which this particular global lottery is disrupting the way people are playing and feeling about lotteries in general. Gone are the days when buying a lottery ticket wasn’t enough of a proof you’re actually entering any contest of sorts.

How is Fire Lotto changing the way the world plays games of chance?

1. Smart contracts

Fire Lotto works with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Because of this, there is no need for human interaction on the site. The site has no servers, as everything happens on the network. Developers behind the site have been able to solve the issues regarding payments and deposits and withdrawals, without pressuring the Ethereum blockchain in any way.

2. Proven fairness

Fire Lotto is not just a concept of better lottery gaming. It’s a proven, working environment where players from all over the planet are engaging in lottery bets every day. Thousands of them have won over 1200 ETH already, according to the official website.

3. Bullet-proof

The Fire Lotto platform is completely decentralized. This means everything that happens on the site is anonymous, autonomous, independent, transparent and extremely secure.

4. Record-breaking prizes

So far, Fire Lotto has paid over 1200 ETH in prizes. This means over 70$ of the money spent by players on the site have been returned to them. This is uncanny as most casinos and therefore online lotteries never pay more than a few percent back to their users. This is possible thanks to the fact that maintaining a site on the blockchain is much more cost-efficient than a traditional one. Everything happens by the nature of the blockchain. The jackpots of the Fire Lotto lotteries can therefore get higher faster and pay more than at a traditional lottery.

5. Groundbreaking

Fire Lotto is more than a lottery. It is a platform where the best new blockchain games are added as soon as they gain the right popularity.

6. Global reach

One important factor about the site is that there’s no way any government or state can ban it from inside their borders. The Fire Lotto is completely legal and works every day to ensure it keeps its global status and away from troubles.

7. Accessible from anywhere

The code behind Fire Lotto is free and public, so if you’re connected to the internet you can access it and play with it, invest in it or become an affiliate with the site. Over 120 sites all over the world are affiliate sites with the lottery. And the number just keeps going up.

8. Completely unbiased

The portal is unbiased, which is uncommon with traditional or even some blockchain-based casinos. This means it is playable from anywhere on Earth, regardless if you’re American, Chinese, Russian, Indian or Australian.

Problems of the lotteries of the world

Lotteries have a set of issues they’ve been dealing with forever. And they are nowhere near solving them. Maybe that’s no accident. The truth is, a blockchain-based lottery will never be as frugal and secretive as a traditional one.

While traditional lotteries are infallible, blockchain lotteries are using the decentralised technology to eliminate any possibility of human interaction. Another sure aspect of blockchain lotteries is reliability. Fire Lotto offers almost instant payments guaranteed by the smart contracts.

Unlike traditional lotteries, Fire Lotto stay safe and anonymous to governmental bodies, as well as to hackers, making them less of a target for virtual crimes or scams. Also, because of complete transparency, these lotteries are publishing all of their data on ticket sales, costs, income and everything else performance-related.

Most lotteries are monopolized. It’s as simple as that. But because the blockchain technology is out of any government’s reach, all restrictions that come from borders and laws are non-existent with lotteries like Fire Lotto, making it unmonopoolizable.

Traditional lotteries scandals

Lotteries are not the best examples of trustworthiness and fairness. There have been a ton of scandals revolving around traditional lotteries all over the planet. Two of them are presented in the white paper of the Fire Lotto ICO.

Hot Lotto fraud scandal (2010). Eddie Tipton, the former information security director of the U.S. Multi-State Lottery Association, installed software code that allowed him to manipulate random number generation and predict winning numbers on specific days of the year and led to his winning a $14.3 million jackpot in 2010. The manipulation was discovered, and Tipton was convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in 2015.

The 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal (also known as the Triple Six Fix). This was a plot to rig the Daily Number, a three-digit game offered by the Pennsylvania Lottery. All the balls in the three machines, except those numbered 4 and 6, were weighted, and as a result, the numbers drawn were almost sure to be a combination of those digits. The scheme was successful in that 666 (one of the eight combinations that the Page 3 conspirators were hoping for) was drawn on April 24, 1980; however, authorities were alerted by unusual betting patterns. The chief participants in the plot were sent to prison, and most of the fraudulently acquired winnings were never paid out.

How to play on Fire Lotto – Accepted currencies and exchanges

There are four lotteries available on the Fire Lotto website, www.firelotto.com, of which three are regular and one instant. The regular ones are 4/20, 5/36 and 6/45. The instant lottery is called Roger’s Wheel Lottery. As of writing this article, the largest jackpot on the site is the one for the 6/45 type, which is worth 1.017 ETH or roughly 369.000 USD.

In order to play a lottery ticket on the Fire Lotto site, all you have to do is to add an Ethereum wallet address, enter your desired amount and then play away. There’s a 1 in 8 million chance of winning on the site. In comparison, the national lottery of Italy offers a 1 in 623 million chance of winning their game. That’s a pretty big gap between a regular and a blockchain-based lottery.

There is a drawing every six hours in each lottery. Numbers are drawn randomly with the help of the blockchain-based RNG (any four, five, or six numbers are taken from the unique code of the latest bitcoin block mined). After all the numbers in the lottery have been drawn, winnings are automatically transferred to the owners of the winning tickets through the algorithm built in the smart contract.

How is Fire Lotto profitable?

Fire Lotto is still profitable. But if they offer 70% back to their players, how is this platform staying profitable for the investors that support it? By simply cutting the pie chart in the correct way. According to their site, besides the 70% that are given back to the players, 10% of all income goes on advertisement, 10% goes to token holders for their commission, 5% goes into keeping things running from a technical point of view and finally, another 5% goes towards support and development. Simple, yet effective mathematics.