How this draw is provable

Before entries closed we published a commitment: a one-way fingerprint (SHA-256) of a secret random seed. After the draw we revealed the seed. Because the commitment was public before entries closed, the seed could not have been changed afterwards to draw a particular ticket.

The draw also folds in a public randomness beacon (drand, the League of Entropy) whose value is only published after entries close. Anyone can re-fetch the exact beacon round below and confirm the same value went into the draw.

Commitment (published before entries closed)

ea247bba67b3190ae5f23545365ac2ec45f37dc7b973418ea937a329d36f04a6

Revealed seed (published after the draw)

4204590190c86e977ec3ef1c318418e82f50bf8c812548b33b244877f65910a2

Beacon round (emitted after close) & its public value

Round 6,422,967 on the drand chain 8990e7a9aaed2ffed73dbd7092123d6f289930540d7651336225dc172e51b2ce

04f12ac7bbf6ce45f8c6590072779cc6b17b29d5521d9f5e61143dbad19ee240

Re-fetch it: curl https://api.drand.sh/8990e7a9aaed2ffed73dbd7092123d6f289930540d7651336225dc172e51b2ce/public/6422967

Check it yourself

1. The seed matches the commitment

Run SHA-256 on the revealed seed - it equals the commitment above. For example, in a terminal:

printf '%s' '4204590190c86e977ec3ef1c318418e82f50bf8c812548b33b244877f65910a2' | sha256sum

2. The seed and the beacon draw the winning ticket number

Every one of the 1,056 tickets (numbered 1 to 1,056) went into this draw. The winner is drawn from the locked-in seed mixed with the post-close beacon value shown above - both are in the $msg below. The seed was committed before entries closed, and the public beacon that decides the winner didn't exist until after - so the result couldn't be set in advance or predicted. Recompute it and you'll get ticket #800:

$seed  = '4204590190c86e977ec3ef1c318418e82f50bf8c812548b33b244877f65910a2';
$total = 1056;                       // tickets in the draw (numbers 1..1056)
$msg   = 'draw:019ff5d3-5027-72d7-ab29-ea82cbed1086:'.$total.':04f12ac7bbf6ce45f8c6590072779cc6b17b29d5521d9f5e61143dbad19ee240';   // note: the trailing value is the drand beacon above
$span  = 1 << 60;                          // 60-bit space
$limit = intdiv($span, $total) * $total;   // reject above this to remove bias
$i = 0;
do {
    $n = (int) hexdec(substr(hash_hmac('sha256', $msg.':'.$i, $seed), 0, 15));
    $i++;
} while ($n >= $limit);
echo ($n % $total) + 1;                     // => winning ticket #800

3. Ticket #800 belongs to the winner

That ticket number is held by exactly one entry - Lian M. from Birmingham. We publish a fingerprint of every ticket number in the draw, so the set of numbers can't be altered after the fact, and we hold the full list in our tamper-evident audit trail, available to the Advertising Standards Authority on request.

Ticket-numbers fingerprint

ee00de479cf6c5924c376cf2edf33fcf105ad8a022d3e2d2b1ff27aaae2fe499

How ticket numbers are assigned

This competition has a fixed set of 1,056 tickets, and on this draw you choose your own ticket number when you enter, from the numbers still available. They aren’t handed out one after another in entry order. Your number is fixed the instant you buy, timestamped, and independently verifiable there and then.

Whichever number you pick doesn’t decide anything on its own. The winner is picked at the draw (shown above), from a secret value committed before entries closed and a public randomness beacon that didn’t exist until after they closed, so the number you chose can’t affect who wins. Every number that’s taken appears in the competition’s entrants list, so the numbers in play are public and can’t be quietly changed later.

You can see them: every entry and its ticket number is listed on the competition’s entrants page.