3 ms·

He said lottery numbers, not tickets.

• thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Ah, my mistake. In the number-only scenario, the value that person provides is organizational / financial. Every so often (though rarely), the expected value of a lottery ticket is greater than the cost of the ticket. Imagine a simple 50 choose 6 lottery, where a ticket costs $1, you choose six numbers between 1 and 50, and if you get all six right you win the jackpot. If, through the vagaries of chance, the jackpot reaches $30 million, you could buy one of each possible ticket (there are 15,890,700) and guarantee that you'll hit the jackpot. If, as is normal, the jackpot is shared among all winning tickets, then you have a decent chance of winning $14 million and an also-decent chance of losing $1 million or more, so it's still kind of risky in that scenario. But we can imagine the jackpot reaching, say $50 million, where even if another person gets a winning ticket you still make a hefty profit. That's great if you have sixteen million dollars to hand, but if you don't, you could join a "lottery mining pool" ;) where you buy a certain number of tickets and the pool together covers the ticket space. In such a case, the person giving you the numbers is performing the valuable function of preventing collisions within the pool.
  • tylerlh 13y ago
    Fair enough, and a good point.