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I want to create a smart contract that has zero decimal places, i.e. whole integer balances only. The idea is that 1 token represents a ticket. It would be possible for people to buy multiple tickets. So basically an ERC20 with no decimal places, but with one extra function.

I want to be able to randomly select a winning address; getWinner(r), but the winner should be in proportion to the tickets an address owns. So for example; if A owns 1 ticket, B owns 3 tickets; then B is 3 times more likely to win. The problem I'm having is how to do this for a large number of addresses, I don't want to iterate. I guess I could store the address for every ticket in an array; [ A, B, B, B ] but that seems kind of inefficient, also I would have to move things around to plug holes on balance changes and deletes.

Is there a better way?

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  • whole integer balances only - that's the case whether you like it or not. There are no floating-point types in Solidity. You might be confused with the facts that some dapps display the balance in units of 10**18 instead of in units of 1 (so they divide the balance by 10**18 before displaying it). Jun 26, 2019 at 10:31
  • Yes, I just meant that I will set the decimals public field to 0 in the ERC20. Perhaps I should leave it at ^18 and just prevent them owning "fractions", I don't think this really changes the underlying challenge tho.
    – TurbanMan
    Jun 26, 2019 at 10:40

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Maybe you could generate the random number in the contract (on-chain), so everyone can see it was fairly made (ie. not just made up by you), then do the selection of the winning address off-chain, but in a way that is understood and predictable according to the on-chain data -- after which you pass the selected address back in... that way could could do expensive iteration to select the winning address off-chain, ie. for free.

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  • thx, had not considered that approach.
    – TurbanMan
    Jun 27, 2019 at 8:38

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