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 one’s 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
Wikipedia’s.

Bruce.Swanson.California@gmail.com
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 project’s 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 informant’s 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.
Keystroke Lotteries 3

Virtual Currency Keystroke/Informant Lotteries

bruce.swanson.california@gmail.com

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.
Keystroke Lotteries 4

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 website’s 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 people’s 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
Keystroke Lotteries 5

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 work—will 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
Keystroke Lotteries 6

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
Keystroke Lotteries 7

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]

Keystroke Lotteries 8

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 wouldn’t work and couldn't work, and that a culture similar to Wikipedia's wouldn’t and
couldn’t 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 isn’t remotely as
popular as Wikipedia because the work it offers isn’t 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 won’t
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?
Keystroke Lotteries 9

The federal government might object. It follows the laws set by Congress, so that body’s
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. It’s 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 you’ve 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.
Keystroke Lotteries 10

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 project’s 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. I’ll send
you five dollars.)

[Continued on next page]

Keystroke Lotteries 11

You can get it cheap, fast, or right—but 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.

[Continued on next page]

Keystroke Lotteries 12

It remains to be seen how quickly the public would understand exactly what a keystroke
lottery isn’t. 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 don’t 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 day’s or week’s or month’s 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?

[Continued on next page]

Keystroke Lotteries 13

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 doesn’t seem likely, when a single keystroke or mouse-click could
(statistically speaking) win, and the wider public’s 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. Nabokov’s 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
Keystroke Lotteries 14

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. That’s the
whole idea.

[Continued on next page]

Keystroke Lotteries 15

Part II

Informant Lotteries

In Sicily the police worked secretly; an informant’s 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
Keystroke Lotteries 16

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 wouldn’t 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.

[Continued on next page]

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.
Keystroke Lotteries 17

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 didn’t: of the identity of the informant,
there could be nothing directly known. That’s why public/private-key encryption is an integral
part of this idea.

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Keystroke Lotteries 18

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 wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t win anything). The
question is whether the chance of winning an informant-lottery would corrupt it to irrelevance.
It’s more probable that, just as in Part I’s discussion of collusion, useful information would
predominate. Even if it didn’t, 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
wouldn’t be public knowledge is who the informants were.
Keystroke Lotteries 19

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. It’s 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 job’s 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 I’m 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 can’t 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?

It’s 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 typist’s 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?
Keystroke Lotteries 20

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. That’s 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 one—your own keystroke(s).
But the playing community isn’t 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
don’t 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 slate—it 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 everyone’s 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 can’t 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.
Keystroke Lotteries 21

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 wouldn’t 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.

Wouldn’t it be possible to script/similarly automate something that simply deletes and retypes
the same key over and over, giving vastly better odds—which could also be distributed across a
bot-net for even better odds, while remaining economical?

In the system as I’ve 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 wouldn’t be validated by anyone else, you’d 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 people—the likelihood of having to pay taxes on huge payouts doesn’t 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 — wouldn’t
expect to have all that work done at no cost to themselves and (as noted above) winners of big
payouts don’t 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
Keystroke Lotteries 22

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 don’t 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. I’m not qualified
to address this point in detail (and perhaps no one is at this point), but it’s 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 I’m monolingual myself, like many people I’m 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 don’t 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,
Keystroke Lotteries 23

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 common—there 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 suspect’s 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
informant’s 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.
Keystroke Lotteries 24

It would also still be impossible to completely guarantee the anonymity of informants, even with
private + public key encryption technology—and 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.

It’s 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 wouldn’t necessarily be made public immediately. Thus, the informant could have time to
take protective measures—measures no doubt planned in advance, given that that person would
also know of the lack of other potential informants to hide among.

I’m not sure informants would need a completely secure terminal to work from. People who
bank online don’t. 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 asterisk’s comment: even non-technical
people can (and will) quickly learn the basics of computer security, if they haven’t already. Who
doesn’t 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 I’m 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
Keystroke Lotteries 25

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 couldn’t 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 aren’t anonymous unless you use a mixer), don’t lose
sight of the fact that an informant lottery would surely be better than the present method and its
hopeless dysfunctions.

[Continued on next page]

4
Possibly using Ripples!
Keystroke Lotteries 26

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 Google’s Project 10 ^ 100, condensed
to fit its online template (see below). This was before Satoshi Nakamoto’s 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 it’s unlikely that any one
person’s 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 can’t 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
Keystroke Lotteries 27

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.