Constant-Deposit Multiparty Lotteries on Bitcoin for Arbitrary Number of Players and Winners

Secure lottery is a cryptographic protocol that allows multiple players to determine a winner from them uniformly at random, without any trusted third party. Bitcoin enables us to construct a secure lottery to guarantee further that the winner receives reward money from the other losers. Many existing works for Bitcoin-based lottery use deposits to ensure that honest players never be disadvantaged in the presence of adversaries. Bartoletti and Zunino (FC 2017) proposed a Bitcoin-based lottery protocol with a constant deposit, i.e., the deposit amount is independent of the number of players. However, their scheme is limited to work only when the number of participants is a power of two. We tackle this problem and propose a lottery protocol applicable to an arbitrary number of players based on their work. Furthermore, we generalize the number of winners; namely, we propose a secure (k, n)-lottery protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address Bitcoin-based (k, n)-lottery protocol. Notably, our protocols maintain the constant deposit property.