Freebitcoin: The pitfalls of “fair” play

The mathematical face of Fribitcoin

One of the most popular bitcoin faucets, or sites for giving away cryptocurrency for free, is FreeBitcoin. However, despite the promises of the site’s administrators about the complete honesty of the game, there is reason to believe otherwise.

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If we talk about the mathematical aspect of the game, the user before his attempt is offered to check the server sid using its hash function. A hash function is the result of applying a number of mathematical operations to a server sid, which has two important properties: it is impossible to reconstruct the original sid by its hash and the probability that different sids will have the same hash is close to zero.

Through this system, the user can easily check the honesty of the organizers by making sure that the sid and its hash match each other.

Possible fraud options

Consider whether site administrators can cheat users? So, possible courses of action:

1. Result spoofing. Unrealistic, as the user would be able to see the spoofing through an inconsistency in the verification formula.
2. Substitution Nonce. Also unrealistic, since any ordinal numbers of attempts would have been noticed.
3. ClientSeed spoofing. Again unlikely, as the user might notice the difference if they change their sysid.
4. ServerSeed spoofing. Also impossible, since the user has a hash of the serverSeed and would easily notice the discrepancy.

So, it seems that under any circumstances, the organizers are playing fair and it is impossible to abuse anything within the stated rules.

Rhetorical questions and fraud exposure

However, none of the users will scrutinize all these aspects. Most players either do not understand how the FreeBitcoin website system works or simply do not have enough patience to check all the data accurately.

However, during a lengthy experiment, it was discovered that the site could indeed be scamming. This was discovered after more than 1.5 thousand attempts. Attempt number 5821 showed that the hash of the server sid switches between two values. Thus, once the result of the initial configuration game becomes unsatisfactory to the administrators, they simply change the ServerSeed value, functioning like “the cheat’s cards”.

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Conclusion

The results of this study show that despite all the promises of honesty on the part of FreeBitcoin, actually winning in this game can be complicated by dishonest actions of the site administration. This may come as a shock to those who naively believed in the honesty of the system and expected to win big. Instead, it turns out that this is just a beautiful advertising image that hides the real dishonesty in practice.