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If there’s a million tickets and you know one of them is a winner, then yes. If you have an effectively infinite stream of tickets and each have a 1 in X proba

• denton-scratch 5y ago
  Yeah, I think that's right. The hypothesis was that on average, one in a million cards is a hit. That implies that if you scratch a million cards, you have a 50:50 chance of a hit. That the author got this basic thing wrong doesn't inspire much confidence in the rest of his reasoning.
  • rich_sasha 5y ago
    Well, I guess in real life blockchains it’s like the latter case. You have a block and look for a nonce. There is an effectively infinite stream of nonces (“lottery tickets”). You have no guarantee that even one works, other than statistical hope. So then if probability of a match is 1 in X, you expect to have to do X attempts. I have other issues with the article but this bit seems ok.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      /me not a statistician! I'm not clear how "expected no. of attempts for X" is related to the probability of X. And I seem to be struggling to recall what little I used to know about probability. I'd welcome a (link to a) clear unpacking of this scenario. I'm feeling rather stupid, as if I've had a stroke and lost a mental faculty. It seems to be a straightforward and obvious scenario, but I've lost confidence in my reasoning about it.