Online lottery betting operator Lottoland is hopping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon by offering what it claims is the world’s first Bitcoin lottery.
Lottoland recently announced that “the world is going Bitcoin bonkers and so are we” via the launch of Bitcoin Lotto. The game is a standard 6/49 style numeric lottery draw – based on the official results of Spanish lottery Bonolotto – but any one player who manages to correctly match all six numbers will win a jackpot of 1k BTC, worth approximately €14.2m at the time of Lottoland’s announcement.
In the case of multiple winners, each winners’ share of the Bitcoin Lotto jackpot will depend on the number of Bonolotto jackpot winners. As explained on the Lottoland website, “if there are 2 Lottoland winners of the Bitcoin lotto and 2 winners of the Bonoloto jackpot, the 2 Lottoland winners would each win 250 BTC.”
Following Bitcoin Lotto draws, which start on December 18 and run every day except Sundays, Lottoland will lock in the current value of 1k BTC as listed on Coinbase charts. This value will be converted back into BTC when the winner officially requests payment via BTC.
At its core, this new product is more about novelty than true innovation, as the only changed element is the ability to collect a prize in Bitcoin, and Lottoland will also offer winners the option to collect the cash equivalent at the time their numbers come in.
That said, given the extraordinarily high transaction fees plaguing Bitcoin – aka ‘Segwit Coin’ – these days, the current Bitcoin Lotto ticket price of €3.50 may represent the only way anyone could acquire that much Bitcoin without paying through the nose and waiting the better part of a week for confirmation that the deal’s gone through.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) transaction fees are not only dramatically lower, but BCH transactions are also processed significantly faster. While Segwit Bitcoin may currently have a significantly higher per-coin value than BCH, the former is fundamentally useless as a currency, meaning anyone who actually wants to buy anything with his Bitcoin Lotto winnings will be forced to convert them into fiat currency.
Regardless, Lottoland CEO Nigel Birrell believes the favorable odds of winning the Bitcoin Lotto jackpot – currently 1 in 14m, or roughly ten times more likely than winning the EuroMillions, a product that Lottoland will soon have to purge from its UK offering – will be enough to ensure the new product makes an impression with players.
