keystroke/informant lotteries: a bitcoin/dac killer-app?

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Virtual Currency Keystroke/Informant Lotteries

How much work would you do for a lottery ticket?

by Bruce Swanson

* * * * * * * * * * *

Abstract

Increasingly ubiquitous and mobile internet access via smartphones and tablets may allow people

to work as online word-processors in exchange for online lottery-tickets funded by those who

need the typing done. Such owners could range from individuals to libraries and archives seeking

to digitize their handwritten holdings in order to enable online search. Anyone with a few

minutes or even seconds of time would log on to a website offering a menu of available projects.

Document owners would offer various payoffs to induce the maximum number of participants.

No time limits, keystroke quotas, work-schedules, or proofreading would be needed, nor would

one necessarily need to start at the beginning of a document. Instead, enough people from around

the world would work on the document to provide an abundance of redundancy well-sufficient

to achieve a consensus of the highest possible accuracy attainable given the state of the original

copy and the number of typists working on the project. Consensus would define accuracy and

only an abundance of typists could safely provide that. Abundance would be provided by the

incentivizing prospect of winning a sizeable lottery through the mechanism of easily accessible

work available 24/7, wherever internet access is available. Payoffs would likely be in bitcoins or

other virtual currencies to eliminate the need for typists to log on in order to provide proof of

their identity for Paypal, etc. Instead, guarantee of payment would be ensured by Ethereum-

based smart contracts.

Someone logging on and typing a single keystroke would have a statistical chance to win if that

keystroke was validated by other typists. However, the more one typed keystrokes validated by

others, the greater and greater ones chances of winning the lottery offered for that project.

Sabotage of the system by typing random numbers would not be cost-effective, as random

keystrokes would not be validated by the other typists. Vandals would quickly learn to play by

the rules in order to win.

This system could revolutionize translations as well as eliminate proofreading. As with ordinary

word processing, translating typists would be aiming for consensus alone rather than an abstract

ideal of accuracy. Such a method would likely work well for standardized forms of writing,

such as business letters, contracts, and the like, and even most standard-form fiction.

A keystroke-lottery system would likely foster a keystroke lottery culture not unlike

Wikipedias.

Keystroke Lotteries 2

This system could also revolutionize bounties offered for information needed to solve crimes. In

such a system, prisoners, parolees, home detainees and the like would participate, but would not

be directly eligible to win a given projects lottery. Instead, the winning ticket would go to

informants whose information had led to a conviction. However, since criminals are often in

possession of valuable information, they would be tempted to secretly provide it in order to win a

lottery. Since the smart-contract guaranteed payoffs would likely be in a virtual currency,

anonymity would be built in: police would not need to know the identity of the informant. Only

the value of an informants information would matter. As with conventional keystroke lotteries,

sabotage would be futile in the long run, as bad or misleading information provided by an

informant would be less likely to result in a conviction.

The current system of conventional information-bounties cannot guarantee the safety of

informants. The result is a corrosive community apathy towards crime. A keystroke-based

informant lottery could turn that apathy inside out. Instead of feeling that they might as well just

ignore crimes in their community rather than risk being an informant, people would realize that

they might as well just participate in a lottery by become an anonymous informant, submitting

the information and providing a public bitcoin address instead of their name. This would

especially be true where a given crime had multiple witnesses in a public setting.


Virtual Currency Keystroke/Informant Lotteries

[email protected]

You are at work, at play, at home, in transit. You have a second, a minute, an hour to kill.

You log onto a website where you find a list of typesetting, proofreading, copy editing, or

translation projects.

You choose a PDF file containing images of 100 pages of handwritten text of no interest to

anyone but the owner, who is offering $100 in bitcoins to have it all typed by midnight.

It's now 9 p.m. You start work.

But within a minute you are too bored to continue. Without hesitation you click the browser

window closed and three hours later the full $100 is deposited to your public blockchain address.

It's not a mistake.

Some days later, reading about a recent local murder, you realize that you knew the victim and

who her murderer might be. But you don't want to risk going public with the information. And

you don't trust the police and the courts to safeguard your identity.

You log on to a secure website that allows you and the police to exchange messages securely

without them ever knowing who you are. Nor can they ever know unless you tell them first. You

give them your hunch.

Within a week your suspect has been arrested. A year later he is tried and convicted.

Upon that conviction you begin privately receiving online a steady stream of big-payout lottery

tickets. Because you were the only one to inform the police, you'll keep getting the tickets until

one of them wins.


Everybody, almost, can and will be willing to hazard a

trifling sum for the chance of a considerable gain.

Alexander Hamilton

A keystroke, mouse-click, or touch-screen response is a trifling sum of work that everybody on

the Web, almost, would be willing to hazard for the chance of a considerable gain.

In the hypothetical situation described above, you began to type out handwritten text that had

been scanned into a PDF. But so did hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. Working

simultaneously, many quitting just like you did as others joined in, the 100-page project was

completely typed with time to spare. The funder of the lottery not only got a great deal at a page-

rate of one dollar, the work was finished much faster than could have been done using

conventional pay-arrangements. And the capacity to automatically count and record the total

number of different keystrokes you and everyone else typed all but guaranteed a numerical

keystroke-consensus per written character.

In effect, the document was proofread as it was typed.

That has never before been economically feasible, and the implications of that are what makes

the keystroke-lottery concept revolutionary.

You can see why someone would fund such a lottery: programmatic redundancy is always best

in data entry and proofreading. It is often good in copy editing, and might even be good in

certain kinds of translations, such as non-stylistic, non-literary efforts where speed and legal

intelligibility alone are paramount. Redundancy is the principle behind crowdsourcing, described

by Wikipedia as the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or

contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open

call.

Because the total payout offered ($100) was rather small as compared to conventional lotteries,

during the auction (which could have been for a place in the websites work-queue; number of

typists; level of keystroke redundancy, etc.), the owner of the pages guaranteed a winner and

specified no lower limit on the total quantity of keystrokes per person needed to win. That means

to play, you needed only to type the minimum number of keystrokes sufficient to establish a

context on the page, verifiable by enough of other peoples typing the same keystrokes to

represent the same handwritten letter or digit. In this example, had the document started with A,

then that single keystroke would have earned a chance to win the payout. But of course, the more


typing you do, the greater your chances of winning, and once logged on, you might as well type

more than one keystroke.

The thesis of this essay is that the growing ease and universality of visual communication must

and will eventually turn chance itself into compensation for certain distinct kinds of online work.

That chance to win money for minimal workwill guarantee access to a world-wide virtual

crowd of Web users whose sheer numbers will free them to participate as little or as much as

they want, when they want, hazarding their time and typing in the lottery associated with the

project on which they have chosen to work. Group keystrokes from around the world would in

real time repeatedly wash like a digital aurora over a given document, page, paragraph, sentence,

or Captcha-like word-picture in play at the moment. Conventional work-schedules and

commitments and piecework-schemes would be unnecessary.

A subtle but important point to be understood is that each typist would be working not

specifically to be accurate, but rather to achieve consensus with others. Because only a

consensus-validated keystroke could win, for the typists there would be no correct keystrokes per

se, only consensus-validated ones. The document would be intently followed to achieve that

consensus as quickly and easily as possible, and only documents that showed a reasonable

chance for the money offered of achieving a consensus would be accepted by the crowd. Thus,

keystroke lotteries could just as well be called consensus lotteries.

The need for consensus also dictates that typists will select only projects in which they have the

necessary expertise. (They would not be maximizing their chance of winning if they were not so

selective.) Thus, projects requiring a critical amount of recondite knowledge would cost more to

fund because fewer typists would be interested in gambling their time on them. As with jobs


featuring text like that pictured above, documents trafficking in obscurity would have to radically

increase their offered winnings to generate enough interest to provide meaningful consensus.

That point understood, gambling would quickly go to work. To make more interesting a small

payout for snippets of typesetting or proofreading (crap in printing-parlance), an appeal would

have to be made to immediate gratification with an instant guaranteed-winner upon project

completion. But as is the case in traditional lotteries, larger payouts wouldn't require a

guaranteed winner per drawing. (Insurance, funded by micro-lending members of the public who

prefer that form of gambling, might be offered to those who are unwilling to risk the higher

payouts their jobs may need to offer to attract typists.) Crowdsourcing would mean

crowdpaying, and the pay would be the lottery tickets earned when individual eyes, brains, and

fingers acted in sync with a crowd changing by the second, yet remaining unchanged in its

specific purpose.

As with any group working together, there would have to be a mechanism for a single typist or

minority of typists to forge a new consensus in the face of the majority. That mechanism would

probably be a kind of side-bet. A typist, realizing that the document contained a factual or

stylistic error, might offer a correction and then flag it. That flag would attract the attention of

others looking for consensus. So the dilemma for those other typists would be whether to

validate the flagged change with their own keystrokes, or ignore it. They might ignore it at their

peril, if newer typists logging on saw the flag and decided to back it up. Participants might even

bet their earned tickets on the outcome of a flag. Typists might allow a public record of their

corrections, thus lending credence to their flags. Thus would typeset-led proofreading morph into


copy-editing, a mechanism that might also make group translations possible (of which, see

below).

Because all this activity would be taking place in a digital environment, it might be possible to

select projects that offer odds modeled on popular conventional lotteries. This would allow

participants to learn the practical meaning of the odds that such lotteries offer, but without

paying cash for the lesson. In any case, as many chances beyond their customary daily or weekly

conventional-lottery ticket-purchases that they might pay out in the form of work done at their

keyboards, most people would still never win a significant payout even as they watched a

news-ticker roll across their monitors announcing the names of winners around the world

who had.

So a keystroke lottery could be educational enough California Lotto revenues are supposed to

help education to make conventional cash-purchases of lottery tickets unappealing to larger

and larger numbers of players. More and more of them might switch to keystroke lotteries, or

even the more perceptive among them quit lottery-gambling entirely. That said, although

few players ever win lotteries, there has always been enough players to regenerate interest for a

future payout. A chance for the money, as always, is the attraction. Quitters return to the fold.

And so they would for keystroke lotteries.

[Continued on next page]


The Wikipedia Precedent

If Wikipedia's business-plan had first been posted online for general review, most readers

probably would have accepted its theoretical potential, but not its chances for practical success.

What most surely would not have predicted is the spontaneous growth and increasing complexity

of Wikipedia's participatory culture that growing body of knowledge, experience, foresight,

governance, and enforcement that have come to characterize the experience of using and

maintaining it. (Wikipedia may be the first and only effective form of mass communism the

world has seen thus far.)

Because gambling is (arguably) based on psychology as much as mathematics, world-wide

keystroke lotteries probably couldn't be computer-modeled to the point of foregoing all funding

for further development in the manner of, say, cold fusion, should any given model indicate

failure. Only by trying it in real time with real people winning enough real money could its

technical feasibility and potential popularity be determined. Until that happens, I can see nothing

in the idea of keystroke-lotteries that would cause any reasonable person to state outright that

they wouldnt work and couldn't work, and that a culture similar to Wikipedia's wouldnt and

couldnt arise.

But there is another fundamental point: Wikipedia offers no compensation because it doesn't

have to, being viscerally attractive to huge numbers of volunteers. By contrast, the website

Distributed Proofreaders (for example) also offers no compensation, but isnt remotely as

popular as Wikipedia because the work it offers isnt creative at any level and is thus

fundamentally uninteresting to too many people. The prospect of proofreading a given book by

keyboard may interest you personally, but without the prospect of financial reward it wont

interest the general public. This is why DP is a useful but tiny part of the Internet, its momentary

slashdotting in 2002 notwithstanding. But putting a gaming front-end on equally uncreative data-

entry work could put keystroke lotteries on par with Wikipedia in popularity and impact,

attracting millions of disinterested strangers willing to do their best working together solely for

the chance of winning a payoff. If the result efficiently lowers cost and reduces production time

in other words, if it works who could object?


The federal government might object. It follows the laws set by Congress, so that bodys

gaming-industry contributors could be expected initially to fight any lottery system not already

fully described and permitted by law, the way they are fighting online gambling using dollars,

and will probably fight online gambling using bitcoins. More locally, there are states with

lotteries and states without them. Its possible that both would oppose a keystroke lottery, either

from fear of a loss of state-lotto earnings or out of opposition to any legalized form of online

gambling. In that event, the first keystroke-lotteries inevitably would move offshore. On the

other hand, all such interested governmental parties might embrace keystroke lotteries as a

promising revenue-source.

Legal objections notwithstanding, keystroke-lotteries are surely within our technical capability.

Their economics are another matter: we must consider the marginal cost of each additional

lottery-typist versus one staff proofreader or freelancer hired by the hour who could be counted

on over time to miss more mistakes than a crowd would. That marginal cost would no doubt vary

from project to project, but in general it probably would rise to a prohibitive point, reflecting the

fact that once youve gotten the crowd to a certain size for a document of a given perceived

complexity, the wisdom of that crowd would not be economically increased by adding any more

people to it. But when would that additional typist become prohibitive, and at what point would a

game not need a guaranteed winner? The job-queue auction mentioned earlier would provide the

answers.


As for collusion, it would surely be uneconomical at any scale. One would have to organize a

ring of typists and split the (rare) winnings with them, all the while knowing that the keystrokes

of enough unorganized players would swamp the conspiracy. Also, typists might (in some

lotteries anyway) be able to see what other typists are doing in real time. Software could also

detect suspicious patterns and block IP addresses. Endless waves of cheaters would inexorably

realize that they might just as well spend their time doing what everyone else is doing, given the

tiny chance of winning rather in the way that bitcoin miners realize that they might as well

just mine bitcoins as try to collude to achieve a greater than 51% share of the mining output

such an achievement being self-defeating. As with any lottery, tiny input, tiny chance; much

larger input, very slightly larger chance. Cheating would add to the real work necessary to

theoretically win, and would probably have to limit itself to the smaller-payout lotteries with

fewer participants. But even then, keystroke lotteries would still be premised on the little amount

of work required of any one person to participate. So protective levels of participation would

likely be a given even in lotteries with small payouts. And finally, projects might be graded

statistically, showing the theoretical effort required to cheat it, a measure that would certainly be

reflected in the projects bidding level. (Readership test: be the first to post a comment here on

Scribd that you have read this test, and then separately send me your Paypal address. Ill send

you five dollars.)



You can get it cheap, fast, or rightbut only two out of three.

Print-shop maxim

Small, neighborhood convenience-stores can charge premium prices while remaining

competitive with bigger-box stores located nearby. Likewise, keystroke lotteries would not

necessarily be less expensive than work done conventionally with paid employees or freelancers.

Such lotteries might even be more expensive, especially before they became ubiquitous enough

to induce sufficient competitive bidding among massive numbers of participants. Instead,

keystroke lotteries would be a radically cheaper and faster way to deliver the highest practically

attainable levels of quality for a given volume of work within a given deadline. In other words,

attaining such quality on time under traditional methods would be radically more expensive than

using a keystroke lottery. Understanding this distinction is critical. Initially not everyone would

be willing to pay the premium for that quality. But those who were willing would get their job

done cheaper, faster, and righter than ever before for premium quality delivered ASAP.

Cheaper, faster, and righter would eventually define cheap, fast, and right. The above-quoted

print-shop maxim would be overturned as a consistent principle for the first time in the history of

printing.



It remains to be seen how quickly the public would understand exactly what a keystroke

lottery isnt. The key selling-point would have to be consensus, a requirement limiting creativity

of input although not (as indicated above) prohibiting it entirely. Thus keystroke lotteries may

not be expandable to polls and advice-giving, formats not based directly on a template. However,

it might apply to certain forms of creative copy-writing, such as found on Trada.com. There,

freelance ad-writers try to write ads that merchants want written but dont have the time or

expertise to write themselves. It may be that that kind of short competitive writing, bounded by

strict space and content limitations (keywords and creative URLs), will attract people willing to

write complete but short Google ads, with the money they collectively earn going into a pot that

one of them would win.

Another recent try at crowdsourcing is Gigwalk.com, in which smartphone users are paid to

provide local bits and pieces of mapping or pricing information too expensive to obtain

conventionally. The rate starts at around $3 per gig. But how much work would someone do for

that three dollars? And how much work would they do if a lottery ticket for a n-thousand-dollar

pot cost $3, funded by pooling a days or weeks or months worth of collective $3 gigs? To ask

that question is to rephrase what I initially asked at the top of this page: how much work would

you do for a lottery ticket?

For perspective on the question of overall acceptance, imagine that keystroke lotteries were first

in the history of lottery gambling. Then someone came along and proposed the following:

instead of having people access to work-games from the convenience of their homes, offices, and

cellphones, why not have them trek to the corner liquor store? And instead of having people

gambling on the outcome of real work, why not have them gamble on colored images of fruit?

And pay with their own cash for the privilege?



Would the general public reject keystroke-lotteries even if there was ready money available to be

won merely by logging on and typing for a few seconds or minutes at a computer where they

already happen to be, and are going to be, hour after hour, day after day, whether at home or

work or on break? It doesnt seem likely, when a single keystroke or mouse-click could

(statistically speaking) win, and the wider publics general forbearance would to its quick

realization merely advantage a comparative handful of early-adapters.

Translations

I have at last discovered the right way to translate Onegin. This is the fifth or sixth complete

version that I have made. I am now breaking it up, banishing everything that honesty might deem

verbal velvet and, in fact, welcoming the awkward turn, the fish bone of the meager truth.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940 1971.

Novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov believed that no honest translation could aspire to, or

pretend to achieve, artistic unity with the language of the original work. Although his own novels

were conventionally translated for commercial reasons, he put his philosophy rigorously into

effect in his own literal translation of Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. Nabokovs model

has not caught on with the public, and today there is considerable discussion about what the

future holds for professional translation-services in an age of Google. Even for the strictly

monolingual (such as myself), it seems reasonable to suppose that a document translated by a

keystroke lottery would create enough consensus on which to base a lottery while simultaneously


producing significant differences (fifth or sixth complete version). But given the digital

environment of a word processor, those differences could be retained as separate documents, or

expressed by color coding, typefaces, or type sizes (take your pick); or abstracted statistically

and displayed in charts and graphs. Degrees of consensus could be indicated by a number on a

scale, and documents could have that number appended to them. All this would be an advantage

where the highest degree of accuracy (I think Nabokov would approve of the quote-marks)

would be needed as quickly and/or cheaply as possible. It should be remembered that the whole

point of the process is consensus and nothing else, so colloquial expressions of style might

persist as typists realized such a non-literal construction was also likely to suggest itself to other

typists, to the point of flag-betting for it or against it. Nabokov followed his own sense in

deciding when to finish his books, a sense no doubt informed at least in part by the dictates of

time and money. Those same dictates would govern typist-translators, albeit within a radically

different format. Keystroke-lottery translations may not be popular as literature, but literature

would not always be wanted or needed, either by the writer or the reader.

I doubt that computerized translations will ever pass a back-translation test. There are too many

variables to cover with an algorithm. Thus for any document of genuine importance, human

input will be needed indefinitely, and keystroke lotteries could be one way of doing that.

The Question Answered

How much work would you do for a lottery ticket? Very little at any one time. Thats the whole idea.



Part II

Informant Lotteries

In Sicily the police worked secretly; an informants name is never known. But in America an informant must appear in court. And to inform is to invite swift reprisals. Consequently the

already reserved and suspicious Sicilian shrugs his shoulders And if I knew, would I tell? The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929)

As described so far, keystroke lotteries and its variations would be for willing participants who

would receive their own earned online tickets and winnings as in any lottery. But if the

keystroke-lottery model were to be successful on a large-enough scale, it might include a

secondary market of participants: prisoners, parolees, and those sentenced to home-detention.

They would all work in keystroke lotteries without collecting any tickets. Instead, in exchange

for their labor they would receive incremental reductions in their sentences, or other credits. (The

basis for eligibility to participate might even end up as a class divide among prisoners in

general.)

To play those prisoner-generated tickets, anyone (prisoner or not) with information that could

lead to the arrest and conviction of individuals responsible for unsolved crimes, would submit

that information anonymously via Internet interfaces protected by strong encryption, such as

Torchat. Use of that protocol would enable the police to securely communicate with their

informants without requiring those informants personal identities. Upon a successful conviction (or some other appropriate stage of the proceedings), a successful informant would be sent, via


the same encrypted interface, an agreed-upon number of lottery tickets (formatted as a string of

numbers and letters) generated by prisoners, parolees, etc. Those tickets would then be played by

their new owners in whatever lottery was used to generate them in the first place. Given the

digital environment involved, informants could specify the jobs they would want to play, just as regular working participants in a keystroke lottery would. As described in the first section

above, such a process would be inexorably educational regarding the realities of such lottery

odds. And that would be a good thing in and of itself.

That education wouldnt be the only advantage. A Los Angeles Times story many years ago about the role of the police in that city's south-central district described how gang-members who

had killed one young man showed up at his funeral and cheerfully partook of the feast in full

view of his friends and family.1 Everyone knew who the uninvited guests were and what they

had done, but nothing in the story indicated that the killers were ever brought to heel by the

police or anyone else. Quite the contrary. The conclusion (unstated in the article of course) is that

the prevention of local vigilantism is the only effective consequence of a heavy police-presence

in dystopically high-crime areas. People living and working in such perversely-controlled

environments are necessarily indifferent to anything except their own immediate well-being, a

phenomenon well-described by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American

Cities. But now imagine the same funeral-feast in the presence of a keystroke-informant

network, an amoral mechanism that would make community involvement with law-enforcement

irresistible.


1 I have not been able to find that story in the Times online archive. But for a book-length analysis of Los Angeles problem of black-on-black murder, see Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, who is a reporter for the Times.


And now compare that imagined scenario with the present system. Most crimes get no bounty,

and those crimes that do often still go unsolved. And there is no pricing-mechanism available to

determine the value of information that could lead to conviction. Instead, that amount must be

determined administratively, the main determinant being the municipal budget and the officially-

perceived seriousness of the crime in question. Such a procedure is necessarily arbitrary and

feedback is inefficient to nonexistent. Police learn that the amount is too low when no

information is forthcoming, or the information comes in too slow to prevent further crimes by the

perpetrator(s); and they know that the sum is too high when they are flooded with bogus

information that also brings no suspects or convictions. And even attempting to earn the bounty

by an informant means reporting your identity to the authorities, who can never be trusted to

maintain secrecy. That can make possession of critical information useless, effectively reducing

the bounty to zero. But an informant-lottery would perform the helpful service of empowering

greed to trump fear, which it nearly always does. Information would now be as valuable as it is

potentially dangerous, thus making it valuable enough to warrant the easy effort of getting online

and anonymously putting the information in play. The authorities might be trusted, on average,

to maintain confidentiality of that play long enough to locate a named suspect before word hit the

street, although it might not always be important if they didnt: of the identity of the informant, there could be nothing directly known. Thats why public/private-key encryption is an integral part of this idea.



Valuation-psychology would necessarily change: informants would be competing against each

other in cases of crimes publicly witnessed or committed by a group, some of whom would have

lesser degrees of involvement. This would make possible a market-based pricing mechanism,

possibly along the lines of a Dutch Auction: crimes with no other informants would command

the highest price demanded: an open-ended stream of tickets that would stop only upon a

successful drawing: Play Until Win crimes a lottery-based annuity. Where any number of people had the critical information, informants would submit it along with a bid for the lowest

number of tickets desired in return, possibly as little as one: Play Once crimes.

Objection!

Informant lotteries wouldnt work in cases where testimony is required.

Not necessarily. But even accepting your objection, there would be fewer trials where testimony

is required, and fewer trials at all because there would be fewer crimes in the first place.

If there is no impediment to submitting lies and hunches, then a flood of them will result.

There have never been impediments. For the price of a postcard, phone-call, or email access

anybody can submit information anonymously (although doing so wouldnt win anything). The question is whether the chance of winning an informant-lottery would corrupt it to irrelevance.

Its more probable that, just as in Part Is discussion of collusion, useful information would predominate. Even if it didnt, tips that named too many different people, or even differed at all, would provide a useful measure of the probability of the particular crime ever being solved. It

would be even more useful if the extent of the divergence were public knowledge. What

wouldnt be public knowledge is who the informants were.


The slim chance of winning a lottery wouldn't attract informants.

Money being money, it certainly would attract informants, but their incentive, compared to

conventional bounties, would be turned inside out. Now, community indifference, which

currently forestalls action, would become a driving force. Informants would submit their

information for no other reason than they might as well. Its the flip-side of the coin of moral apathy: ask not why you should inform ask why not? Would you neglect to pick up an unused Lotto ticket from the sidewalk?

Does the keystroke get entered immediately, or only upon submission of the entire work?

I assume that you mean the entire work of a specific player who types a few seconds or minutes

and then quits the project, rather than the entire work of all the typists put together upon

expiration of the jobs deadline. I think each keystroke would be entered immediately, but that

each player/typist would have the choice to Save or Send their keystrokes before closing the

browser. By Saving your keystrokes, you might leave open the possibility of coming back later

and continuing, or even retyping it after researching a point. You also might want to see what the

other typists are doing with that particular string of text, assuming that capability were allowed

(and this might be a critical point). Note that the players are not racing against each other to win

the prize. At least as I envision it, each job worked on would have a specific deadline, and no

money would be awarded before its expiration. I do think this objection is essentially a technical

one and not fundamental to implementation of the idea, although I should add that Im not

employed in the computer field.

Does the work periodically get submitted; if not, how was it submitted when the user in the

hypothetical story closed their browser?

It would be a bit like online Chat. You type your message, and the person you are chatting with

is informed that you are typing a response, but cant see it until you Send it. The computer-network would be noting your ongoing participation, but would have no data for consensus

purposes until you finished typing and then sent it. And of course, you could have the option of

configuring your browser to automatically Send, Save, or Delete upon closing the window.

Again, I think primarily a technical question.

Suppose I added some whitespace, or accidental characters in my transcription, leading to all of

my letters being out of place by a few positions -- how does the verification system adjust for

that?

Its important to remember that there are no correct keystrokes per se, just consensus-validated ones. Thus, strictly speaking, your whitespaces and accidental characters would be disqualified

unless everyone else made the same ones. However, that only partially addresses your point. The

greater problem of being out of sync with other typists because of a single added word space or

character brings up the greater objection of how to link a given typists keystrokes with a specific string of text on copy. After all, lots of copy (such as legal text) is full of repetitious boilerplate.

How would the computer know which section of copy you typed from? And is this important?


To answer this question, bear in mind that the whole idea of a keystroke lottery is based on

massive levels of participation providing a lavish redundancy of keystrokes. This is a valid

premise, because this system is, after all, a system of gambling, and people are attracted to easy

ways to win money while gambling, and in a keystroke lottery a single consensus-validated

keystroke makes you eligible to win the pot. Thats pretty easy work. Even if the pot were quite small, say $5 (or even less), you wouldn't have to do much to have a chance to win it, and such

low winnings would probably offer a guaranteed winner. If there was a lack of enough

participation, then it would be possible to win with a consensus of oneyour own keystroke(s). But the playing community isnt going to allow that kind of vacuum. Every last character on copy is going to be typed many times by many different players because every character they

dont copy is one less chance of winning for them and one more chance of winning for someone else.

As for the computer, it starts out with a blank slateit is not comparing your keystrokes with the copy you are reading from. It is only comparing keystrokes from many different players. So any

player could start typing at any point in the document, from the first character to any random one

in the middle or at the end. Eventually, given sufficient participation, the computer(s) will find

matches for that character, and (amazingly) be able to logically assemble everyones keystrokes together in a way that matches the original copy as perceived by the ever changing collective of

typists. It will be able to do that because, although many people will type just small segments

(perhaps especially in low-payout jobs, which may require that they be aggregated with other

low-payout jobs for payout purposes), as many people will type much longer ones, perhaps even

the entire job. Those longer strings, sufficiently repeated and overlapped, will provide the chain

the computer needs to assemble the smaller segments in order.

That means that you cant just start typing letters at random, knowing that your letter a must be validated, thus earning you tickets. Certainly you could type a single highly popular letter or

word or phrase and then log off, and it would inevitably be validated. That would leave you with

one single chance. However, if you (or a bot) typed a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a; or: the the the

the the the (or just a bunch of jumbled letters), such a string is simply not going to be validated

by anyone else unless it matches the copy. In other words, a million monkeys would win

nothing. As for a botnet trying this approach, that could be easily spotted and blocked.

The same logic applies to any other string of keystrokes. The system is going to consider your

entire output (for that session) as the consecutive representation of what you are reading straight

from copy. Of course, you could log on to a job, type a letter a then log off, then log onto another

job, type another letter a, etc. But why bother? Why not just log onto one job and start typing

what you see? This addresses a point I made in the article about collusion. You could try, but in

the end you would better off spending your time just doing what everyone else is doing.

So to answer your original question, your added whitespace or accidental characters would be

ineligible but the rest of your text, if consensus-validated, would be rescued.

I think this is the key to the success of my imagined lottery: you log on, just start typing

anywhere, and type for as long or as little as you like. The computer-network, in combination

with overlapping and linking strings provided by the collective of other typists, does the rest.


If the submission is literally as you press each key, what happens when you press e.g.

Backspace? Does that undo the submission of that key, or is another entry accepted?

I think this question is addressed in my second answer: the backspace key wouldnt register. But there might be programmed into the system a unique keystroke-combination to type if you did

want it to register a backspace for some reason. There may conceivably be times when a

backspace could be appropriate in typing copy.

Wouldnt it be possible to script/similarly automate something that simply deletes and retypes the same key over and over, giving vastly better oddswhich could also be distributed across a bot-net for even better odds, while remaining economical?

In the system as Ive described it, there would be no benefit to retyping the same key, nor in repeating it, nor by churning out random keystrokes or having a bot do this. Besides the fact that

your keystrokes wouldnt be validated by anyone else, youd have to program the bot to type the letters at a human rate, not instantaneously, since the system would be programmed to look for

bot-like behavior, and it could look very closely at the intervals between strokes and compare

them to others churning out the same letters. Such botnet collusion would be obvious to the

network. The log-in process would be configured with Captcha-like requirements to block

automated log-ins; and real-name registration may also be required (although probably not for all

projects, especially those paying out bitcoins). Real-name registration would be perfectly

acceptable to most peoplethe likelihood of having to pay taxes on huge payouts doesnt hinder people from playing state-sponsored lotteries. (But as for Informant Lotteries and real names,

read on.)

I suppose your earlier points about blocking the IP's of suspicious clients is mitigation that could

be applied, but I wonder what the relative cost of keeping such a system secure would be?

Certainly it would dwarf the meager prize amount ($100 in the example story) if it needed to be

resilient against DDoS attacks, for example. Someone also has to host this service to the

potentially millions of clients, who will all want it to be reliable and highly available, lest they

were to be unfairly robbed of their 'lottery ticket(s)'. The server and storage costs would not be

insignificant.

When you look at this idea not as a system of work but as a system of gambling, the problem of

how to pay for it disappears. After all, what is the cost of installing and maintaining Lotto

machines in thousands of liquor stores, gas stations, and shopping malls? What is the cost of

building casinos in the middle of a desert? As people look to keystroke lotteries as a source of

gambling, as they began to catch on to it, they would very likely quit those other forms that are

more familiar but less convenient and which require them to actually purchase a ticket to play. Although smaller payouts would probably require a guaranteed winner, larger payouts

would not. Potentially there could be routine Powerball-sized, world-wide-funded payouts. Thus,

a piece of the uncollected auction-money (from games with no guaranteed winner) could be used

to support the system. After all, the funders of the lottery the information-owners wouldnt expect to have all that work done at no cost to themselves and (as noted above) winners of big

payouts dont expect to keep it all. The system may even require that some auction-funders pay to the system their entire offer upon completion of the work should there be no winners of the


drawing. (Here an obvious economical point arises: for larger payouts, the amount surrendered in

a no-win drawing should not exceed the amount that would be paid out under a conventional

hourly or freelance arrangement to get that work done. Which leads to the obvious conclusion

that, for those with work to fund, the sole object of a keystroke lottery is cost paid for a higher

level of quality within a shorter period of time that a conventional arrangement could deliver, a

point I addressed earlier but is worth repeating.) Whatever percentage subtracted from the pot as

a fee would no doubt vary, based on any number of metrics. Advertising would certainly play a

role in funding as well.

As for security, I dont think this would be fundamentally more difficult than providing security for online banking. However, the question of security (and cost) might have direct bearing on

whether the entire system would be proprietary or open-sourced peer-to-peer. Im not qualified to address this point in detail (and perhaps no one is at this point), but its reasonable to assume that both systems (keystroke- and informant-lotteries) would initially be decentralized.

Consider the further technical challenges presented by translation efforts. Individual

translations are likely to differ in words, rather than mere keys, meaning it would be very

difficult to award a lottery entry based on a keystroke. In particular, what will the impact be on

the consensus-validation logic? Even if many entries are submitted, they are likely to all differ in

several places due to word-choice and other variables that are highly expected when translating

(consider that even amongst the automated translation tools available, the phrasing chosen

varies non-trivially). This means that each submission will be impossible to compare on a

keystroke basis, since it is highly unlikely that even two submissions will contain the same set of

words, in the same order.

Although Im monolingual myself, like many people Im aware of the problems, both literal and artistic, inherent in translations. I have to disagree that there would not be sufficient keystroke-

consensus regarding certain kinds of translations. Your objection would probably apply to

modernist poetry for example, but surely not for the bulk of business letters and technical papers,

and perhaps even computer-program notations. As for the more problematical field of general

literature, remember that the typists are going to be thinking: What is everyone else going to

translate this to be? So there would doubtless be a flattening effect unpleasant to certain minds.

Yet it might get the point across to many more minds, and so be useful for the price. And

remember that all of the variations would be available to the auction-funder (the information-

owner), who might use the variations to polish the translation as he saw fit. As for technical

matter (or even for literature), as I pointed out earlier, all the differences could be made available

to readers upon completion of the project (why not?), with all kinds of measuring metrics

(perhaps expressed in colors, typesizes, etc.) available for comparison.

Your question is probably only resolvable by experimentation. Backwards translations via

keystroke lotteries might be a useful testing tool. But ultimately, the only real test that matters is

the price such translations would require, as established by auction. Multilingual typists would

decide amongst themselves, spontaneously, whether a particular document is worth spending

their time on. And dont forget my point in the article about the growth of a Wikipedia-like culture and mindset. That could result in a new kind of translator, thinking with the crowd,


instead of alone, as well as a new kind of reader of translations. I suspect both would arise, and

make consensus-translations practical, at least for certain kinds of subject matter.

Regarding the second idea [Informant Lotteries], I'm not sure how you would automate the

analysis of the testimonies. They would have no base source text to go from, and as such probably the only commonality between them will be keywords; notably, proper nouns (names of

suspects, victims, localities etc.). Hence, it becomes difficult to weed out a 'good' entry as

opposed to a 'bad' entry (there will probably be a lot of submissions with mentions of names that

have appeared in media already- these will be difficult to weed out as 'noise', since they will all

have a lot of keywords in common with each other).

I should have clarified this point in the article: informant lotteries would be a derivative function

of keystroke lotteries but the two would have nothing technical in commonthere would be no keystroke consensus-building at all in an informant lottery. Instead, tickets generated by

prisoners and home detainees (or even volunteers) would be used as a source of reward-value,

instead of cash, as I described it. In brief, someone submits a suspects name, and that person is later convicted. The informant is then rewarded by tickets generated by a prisoner, etc.

There is a problem though with weeding out bogus tips by criminals themselves or people just

trying to game the system. (I actually addressed this point in an earlier version but inadvertently

deleted it.) The solution is that informants would have to have skin in the game to participate.

They might do this by working in normal-payout keystroke lotteries themselves and

accumulating a sufficient number of ticket-credits, just like a prisoner would, although in the

informants case they could win payouts while a prisoner could not.2 Thus would residents of high-crime environments be induced to become keystroke-lottery players as a form both of gambling but also of a kind of insurance. To fight this, criminal organizations could in theory

recruit plenty of typists, and their bad information (submitted under coercion) could result in

convictions, but of course in general the better the incriminating information, the greater the

likelihood of conviction. Another twist is that such attempts at collusion could themselves be

made the subject of an informant lottery. Indeed that would probably be inevitable.

Possibly an informant's ticket-stream for providing incriminating evidence that resulted in a

conviction would be based in part on how many tickets overall that person had generated, in

conjunction with the seriousness of the crime and the number of competing informants, if any.

The stream might match the generated tickets one-for-one for some crimes, and be a big multiple

for other crimes. For example, if the information led to the capture of a suspect at large, then ten

generated tickets might earn a stream of 100 tickets upon conviction. If the information led to a

second conviction of someone already in prison, it might earn less, depending on the crime.3

2 It should also be pointed out that someone could buy skin in the game by purchasing a lottery ticket, one linked to a specific crime, as a demonstration of how sure they are that their information will result in a conviction betting that they will get their money back. In this way would an informant lottery begin to act like a conventional

lottery based on a purchase.

3 Of course, genuine informants would have to generate their skin in the game credits only in projects that did not require a real-name registration, of which there would probably be many.


It would also still be impossible to completely guarantee the anonymity of informants, even with

private + public key encryption technologyand the fewer informants, the higher the risk. A few reasons are listed below:

Informants would need a completely secure terminal to work on. If the hypothetical guilty party

suspected one or more informants, they could potentially plant keyloggers / other malicious

solutions to capture the information. It is then trivial to correlate personally identifying

information with a submitted testimony.

The lottery ticket must be cashed by the informant to claim the prize -- it is also a unique code,

which is known by the issuing agency. If they were compelled by law (or by some other means),

they could find out the identity of whoever cashes that entry code- this could easily be traced by

determining the identity of the owner of the bank account the money is deposited into.

The layman informant will be unlikely to take sufficient steps to conceal their identity when

submitting information (probably connecting from a personal device, with no proxy)- their IP

would be trivial to attain, and hence their location and identity could be established.

Its true that the fewer the informants, the higher the risk for those informants. However, there is also a greater chance of winning, given accurate information. As I point out earlier, greed trumps

fear. So does outrage. But remember also that if informant lotteries caught on, it would stress

especially any group or pair of criminals contemplating a crime. It would tend to spread distrust

among them, and so inhibit them in their activities. Also the fact that a crime was in

play wouldnt necessarily be made public immediately. Thus, the informant could have time to take protective measuresmeasures no doubt planned in advance, given that that person would also know of the lack of other potential informants to hide among.

Im not sure informants would need a completely secure terminal to work from. People who bank online dont. Although a criminal party could install a keylogger, as the knowledge of exactly how to get a keylogger and install it spreads among thugs and their enablers, so will

knowledge of those keyloggers spread to their intended victims. The solution is a simple one: use

your unshared home computer or smartphone, or go somewhere else far outside your

neighborhood. I think this point also address your third asterisks comment: even non-technical people can (and will) quickly learn the basics of computer security, if they havent already. Who doesnt know that computers come with security risks? Certainly an informant lottery log-on page could state the risks and make recommendations, like logging in through a proxy-server to

avoid IP tracing. Those deeply concerned might boot up with a thumb drive using Linux, a

technique recommended to those seeking strong Bitcoin-wallet security. (Admittedly that would

ask a lot of the public, at least at first.)

As for the lottery-ticket anonymity: the ticket would indeed have a unique code of some kind,

but Im not sure that it would necessarily be known by the issuing agency. There might at first not even be an issuing agency. Instead, informant lotteries might start out as an underground


peer-to-peer system based on of all things trust,4 with lottery payouts made in the virtual currency of choice. Indeed, informant lotteries might turn out to be a virtual currency killer-app.

Of course, all this describes an ungoverned system, with all the benefits and perils. There would

be a lot of trial and error. Later, as the system (say, that of bitcoins and ripples) grew in

popularity, governments would probably accept the method and possibly even improve it (or

improve it). At that point, an agency would issue the tickets, and couldnt there be a way to create a PGP-protected ticket-generator to prevent tracing? But even granting your point about

the lack of perfect security (even bitcoins arent anonymous unless you use a mixer), dont lose sight of the fact that an informant lottery would surely be better than the present method and its

hopeless dysfunctions.


4 Possibly using Ripples!


Postscript

Keystroke Lotteries: A Speculative Essay stems from an idea I got around Christmas 2003,

watching a sales-rep hand out lottery-tickets as gifts in the office where I was employed as a

proofreader. I wondered how much, if any, additional work I might do to get an additional ticket.

In the years that followed I would occasionally Google as many likely keywords and phrases as I

could think of, to see if anyone had already discussed or even implemented a program based on

the idea of working online for lottery tickets. As far as I can tell, no one had and no one has still.

Finally, in October 2008, I submitted the essential idea to Googles Project 10 ^ 100, condensed to fit its online template (see below). This was before Satoshi Nakamotos paper on the blockchain was published. After the Project ended, I expanded the core idea and put it on

Google's Knol website, where it supposedly generated 8,000 or so hits. (It actually generated two

or three comments). But Knol, like Project 10^100 never really caught on and it was shut down

in May of 2012. I then moved it to Scribd. In March of 2014 I repurposed the original keystroke

lottery concept as a bitcoin-based one, which seems to fit perfectly.

Project 10 ^ 100 version

Title: Auction-funded work lotteries.

150 characters: Growing internet ubiquity may eventually encourage virtual groups of people to

work simultaneously on demand for lottery tickets.

300 words: Describe idea in more depth. Hiring a large and ever-changing staff of typesetters to

work on the same document would obviate proofreading because its unlikely that any one persons errors would be duplicated by the majority. Instead they would be overwritten by others as a computer assembled a matrix of consensus-validated keystrokes. But paying so many

typesetters a market-rate wage wouldn't be economical. Instead, consider a lottery ticket.

However small its payout or winning chances, it cant be completely valueless before its drawing, given a practical way to obtain one for the least amount of value or work. On a

computer, the smallest unit of work is a keystroke or mouse click. So the solution may be to link

an essentially random group-validated keystroke to an online lottery-ticket. This method could

initially function for any kind of online work requiring little or no interpretation by typists. In

time it might successfully be applied to less restrictive kinds of work.

To attract the maximum number of participants, it probably would be essential that a single

group-validated keystroke could win the drawing. The lottery itself would be funded by those


needing the work done, by bidding on a place in a queue, or for a specific period of work, and/or

total number of 'players' (workers). Such lotteries could be very large, but given the small unit of

work needed to win, some people might not disdain a smaller payoff with a larger winning

chance, contrary to conventional lottery-design and player psychology. [Not sure I agree with

that last statement anymore. A smaller payoff with a larger chance of winning seems perfectly in

line with conventional lottery-design and player psychology.]

150 words: Problem or issue addressed. Around the world people have computers and access to

the internet. Some have work to do, and others have bits and pieces of time in which to do it. The

problem is how to harvest that time and make use of it on demand. The kind of work to be done

requires compensation, but using this proposed model it can't be priced and allocated

conventionally. The solution may be to make an irrational form of compensation accessible to

enough people. The internet could do that.

150 words: Who would benefit the most. Successfully implemented, we could have an

economically productive and socially benign lottery and all that that entails. Even while using

gambling as a lure, it would freely educate participants in its long-term futility. Most would

never win a significant payout, even as they hourly watch a news ticker across their computer

screens announcing individuals around the world who have. So why pay cash for a Lotto ticket?

Although Gamblers Anonymous might go out of business, the virtual pool of labor would never

diminish.

Get it started: 150 words. It's probably inevitable that this kind of development will occur on the

internet, if it hasn't already. Google could test its underlying technical feasibility and scalability,

but given how initially destabilizing such lotteries could be, considerable political pressure

would be required to convince legislatures and tax authorities to go along. Probably the best way

to get it started is to test it, and if successful enough at a small scale, talk about it, and so initiate

change from below.

Optimal outcome: 150 words. The optimal outcome for this idea would be its eventual legal

acceptance and growth to the point of competing with unskilled forms of gambling, as anyone

with internet access, anywhere in the world, keyboards for a few seconds or minutes with an

ever-changing number of people on a virtually infinite number of projects.

TranslationsThe Question AnsweredInformant LotteriesObjection!Postscript

keystroke/informant lotteries: a bitcoin/dac killer-app?

Documents

keystrokelottery system

keystroke lottery culture

lottery ticket

sizeable lottery

abundance of typists

online lotterytickets

keystroke lotteries

given projects lottery