Lotto FAQ

Subscribe for £1 a month on the lotto page — enter your email and choose a public alias, then pay with Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Each monthly payment gives you one ticket in the next draw. Your subscription renews automatically each month (paid from your credit balance), so once you’re in, you’re in every draw until you cancel.

The jackpot is every satoshi paid in by that month’s entrants, plus any sats rolled over from unclaimed previous draws. The organisers take nothing — 100% of entry money is paid out. Because your £1 is converted to bitcoin at the moment you pay, the pot is counted in sats, and that’s exactly what the winner receives.

Every month, one Bitcoin block acts as an impartial judge for the draw. At the start of the draw month — midnight UTC on the 1st — we look at the Bitcoin blockchain and find the very first block whose timestamp falls on or after that moment. Bitcoin blocks are mined by miners worldwide roughly every ten minutes, and crucially, nobody can predict or influence what a future block’s hash will be. The hash is a 64-character string of letters and numbers that is essentially a unique fingerprint of everything that happened on the Bitcoin network at that moment.

 

Once that block is identified, we take its hash and convert it into a large number. We then divide that number by the total count of tickets in the draw and take the remainder — a standard mathematical operation called modulo. Because the block hash is unpredictable and the modulo operation is deterministic, the result is a number between zero and the number of tickets minus one, which maps directly to one ticket. The holder of that ticket is the winner.

 

The whole process can be independently verified by anyone in the world. Every Bitcoin block is publicly recorded forever on the blockchain. Anyone can look up the block that was used, perform the same calculation themselves, and confirm the correct winner was selected. No-one — not the organisers, not the plugin software, not the server it runs on — has any ability to influence or change the outcome, because the winning block was mined by the global Bitcoin network before anyone ran the draw. It is genuinely trustless.

 

Each draw has its own verification page showing the block, the full list of entries in order, and the arithmetic — see “Can I check a draw myself?” below.

Draws happen at the start of every month. All subscriptions paid during a calendar month are entered into the draw at the start of the following month — so a payment made any time in July, whether on the 1st or the 31st, buys a ticket in the draw that takes place just after midnight UTC on 1st August. The draw runs automatically; no human presses a button.

The winner gets an email with a personal claim link the moment the draw is announced. Everyone else gets an email with the result. The winner’s alias, the jackpot, and the winning block are also published on the lotto page.

Open the claim link from your winner email, paste a Lightning invoice or Lightning address from your wallet, and the sats are sent to you automatically — usually within seconds. You have 30 days to claim.

After 30 days the claim link expires and the full jackpot rolls over into the next month’s pot, on top of that month’s entries. Nothing is ever kept back.

Yes — that’s the point. Every completed draw has a public verification page showing the exact Bitcoin block used (with a link to view it on mempool.space), the full list of tickets in their fixed order and the calculation. Take the block hash, convert it to a number, divide by the number of tickets and the remainder points to the winning row. You can do this with any block explorer and a calculator that handles big numbers — you don’t have to trust us, our software or our server.

Only the alias you chose when signing up. If you never set one, we show a shortened form of your email (like “sa…”) — never the full address. Pick something fun; it’s what appears on the results page if you win.

Use the “Manage my subscription” box on the lotto page — enter your email and we’ll send you a personal portal link. From the portal you can top up credit, check your renewal date or cancel. Cancelling stops future tickets; you stay entered in any draw you’ve already paid for.

Just use the sign-up form again with the same email. We’ll recognise you and email your personal portal link. From the portal, top up your credit — as soon as your balance covers the monthly price, your subscription restarts and your ticket is assigned automatically. Pay before the end of the month and you’re in the next draw.

The lotto is run by the organiser of the Lincs Bitcoin meetup, on their personal self-hosted BTCPay Server — the same open-source payment software used by merchants worldwide. It’s a community raffle for meetup members: the purpose is fun, orange-pilling and demonstrating a real Bitcoin circular economy, not profit.

 

The draw itself is provably fair and needs no trust (see above). The pot, though, is held on the organiser’s Lightning node between draws — so, like any club raffle, you’re trusting the person holding the kitty until the winner claims. Every sat paid in is paid out and prizes are settled automatically within seconds of claiming.