BitDraw.com Review (Closed)
Bitdraw.com, which was first introduced in August 2012, was a Bitcoin raffle site that provided players who enjoy a lottery type of game, a chance to use their Bitcoin for Bitcoin related prizes. Players would exchange their Bitcoin for gaming tokens, that could be used to enter the various raffles that took place all throughout the day and the weekly special draws. While most prizes were in the form of gaming tokens that could be redeemed for Bitcoin, some of BitDraw’s promotional prizes were physical items, such as physical Bitcoin and Bitcoin magazine subscriptions. BitDraw’s popularity seemed non-existent, at first. The biggest cause of this problem was the fact that BitDraw did not have a verification, in place, that could verify a legitimate winner, by everyone who played. The original explanation by the owner, Dustin Trammel, was the following:
“The random bits of data used for our random number generation is pulled from random.org, an unbiased, independent third party who’s entire purpose is to provide truly random data to the Internet community. True randomness is important because machines are notoriously bad at being random. In fact, with enough data to analyze, they can be quite predictable in their “randomness”, which is very, very bad for certain purposes like raffle and lottery drawings. Therefore, instead of using a potentially predictable pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) such as the ones provided by most operating systems and programming languages, we use a proven source of truly random data for our drawings. Further, the winning raffle ticket or lottery values, as well as a list of all of the tickets purchased, are displayed on each game page for your own verification after the game closes. While we don’t disclose identifiable user information on who purchased tickets and the winners, there is enough information for each user to determine which tickets in the pool they purchased and whether or not theirs was the winner. We will build the option for winners to identify themselves, directly into the site, in a future version. Bitdraw knows how important security is to the Bitcoin community. With the last couple years’ track record of service site hacks, scammers claiming to be hacked and running off with the users’ funds, password database leaks, and the like, we have taken a number of significant steps from the beginning, to ensure that our service has as much integrity as possible. Some of BitDraw’s current security features include:
- The entire site is wrapped in SSL, all the time. This ensures that you know that your browser is connected to the legitimate site and that communications and data in transit such as your authentication credentials are protected from prying eyes on the Internet.
- The site employs an entirely offline Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoins deposited at BitDraw are sent to an offline wallet and withdrawals are processed manually and only after the withdrawal is confirmed by the user via response to a PGP-signed email. While a bit slower than instant withdrawal, your Bitcoins themselves are completely safe in the event that the BitDraw site itself is hacked or becomes otherwise compromised.
- BitDraw stores passwords securely and enforces a strong password policy. Our password policy requires passwords to be 12 characters long and have at least one upper case character, one lower case character, one number and one symbol. Passwords are stored as a salted SHA-512 hash.
