If 1 million people donated $1 to a single person, a millionaire can be made.
The simple idea was posted to r/ShowerThoughts by Redditor moizmie on Nov. 19, and has prompted more than 119,000 Redditors to enter a drawing to become the first Reddit community-made millionaire.
[seealso slug="shower-thoughts"]
After the original post hit the front page, a dedicated subreddit called r/MillionaireMakers was created for Redditors to enter to win. User Emphursis won the first drawing last month. Reddit didn't quite hit its $1 million mark, but Emphursis did walk away with $968.13.
This drawing, however, seems to have captured more attention from the community, possibly because it's the giving season and that the page was one of five highlighted trending subreddits on Tuesday.
Entering the contest is simple; just leave a comment in this thread. Your account must be older than the subreddit, and throwaway accounts or accounts without some amount of activity (comment and post history) will not be eligible.
After 24 hours of submissions, which end at 1:05 p.m. ET on Dec. 23, the thread will close and the selection process will begin, a lengthy method that involves a bot attaching a number to a user, uploading those numbers to Dropbox and selecting a number based on mined blocks from the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Once the sixth block is mined after the participant announcement, the bot will use the block's hash to create a new number. The number equal to the generated number will be the winner. The selection process may take a while due to Reddit's API.
TL;DR: A bot assigns everyone a number and uses mined Bitcoin blocks to create a new number. The assigned number that matches the mined number wins.
The selected winner will be notified and prompted to provide a payment method (like PayPal or Bitcoin) where the Reddit community can donate. Obviously, there is no incentive, so this truly comes down to the generosity of the community.
The thread also emphasizes that this is not a lottery, which may be considered illegal. Rather, Redditors are considering this a gift donation that you don't need to pay to enter. Since Reddit's moderators do not touch the donations, they are not giving away prizes.
