The prize counter

Every arcade has one: the counter with the shelves, the small prizes within reach at the bottom and the big one everybody stares at on the top shelf. This is ours. The only prize on our shelves is Bitcoin.

Prizes are entertainment. Nothing on the counter is owed to anyone; it is a game the floor plays with its own fee stream, drawn by a process the House cannot rig.

Where the sats come from — the House stocks it

The counter is the one thing the whole floor shares, and it is stocked by the House out of two streams:

• RENT — 15% of what every cabinet's pool collects, paid for its spot on the floor. It is the House's money the moment it arrives, with no claim from the cabinet that paid it.
• 10% of every jackpot, at the moment it fires. A jackpot going off anywhere on the floor puts a tenth of its pot on these shelves before it burns the rest.

That second one is worth saying plainly: the counter grows every time a machine somewhere has a big night. The two streams are why a shelf can fill while the floor is quiet on the cabinet you happen to be watching.

Why the House pays for it, and not the cabinets. The counter used to be a fifth share every cabinet had a stake in. A cabinet with a stake in a shared pot forces the engine to rank cabinets against one another, and ranking is where every cross-token valuation on this floor came from — the machinery that broke most often and cost the most to fix. Rent has no strings: the House takes it, the House spends it here, and no cabinet has to be measured against another for the shelves to work.

One pot, two ledgers

Every sat that enters the pot is split 50/50 the moment it lands:

Half	Where it goes
half	The shelves — stocked one at a time, from the bottom up
half	The top shelf — the whole coin, never touched until it is full

The two ledgers are arithmetic anyone can redo from the pot's history:

inflow       = pot balance now + every prize already paid out
shelves fund = inflow / 2 − shelf prizes paid
top fund     = inflow / 2 − coins paid

The shelves

Shelf	Prize
1	0.01 BTC
2	0.025 BTC
3	0.05 BTC
4	0.1 BTC
5	0.25 BTC
6	0.5 BTC

• One shelf at a time. The counter stocks shelf 1 first. Its gauge fills as sats arrive; when it holds the full prize it reads IN STOCK and the machine calls a ticket. Then shelf 2 starts, and so on up the wall. Whatever is left over after a shelf is handed out starts the next one.
• One winner per shelf. A drawing among ticket holders, weighted by tickets (see Tickets), decided by Chainlink VRF — the House does not know the winner before you do. The shelf shows WON BY and the wallet, then CLAIMED once the prize is actually pulled from the round's contract; the round sits in the prize counter with its proof like every other prize.
• The counter keeps stocking while a shelf waits to be collected. A shelf is marked won the moment its round is published, so shelf 5 fills while shelves 1 to 4 are still at the counter. Nothing on the wall waits for anybody to claim.
• The counter restocks. After shelf 6 is won the wall starts again from shelf 1 — lap 2, lap 3 … Every shelf remembers who took it last time.
• The wall shows its pace, never a promise. Each shelf carries an "at this pace" estimate measured from the last seven days of inflow. If the floor is quiet, the estimate grows; nothing on the wall is a date.

The top shelf: the whole coin

The top shelf holds 1 BTC — 100,000,000 sats. Its half of the counter fills a coin you can watch being painted. It is never spent on anything else and never timed against a chart: the meter reads 100,000,000 sats or it doesn't. When it does, the machine calls one ticket, exactly like a shelf. Then the top shelf starts filling again.

The top shelf charges its price like every other shelf. Winning it does not wipe a player's book — what you spent is what it cost, and what you had left is still yours. The boss is the biggest thing on the counter, not a reset.

If nobody comes to the counter

One draw, one winner, and nobody queued behind them. A shelf's winner has the claim window — seven days. If they never claim, the sats go back to the counter's pot, the shelf reads RETURNED TO THE WALL, and the counter restocks with them. Never a re-draw, never the House.

The floor used to keep three alternates and pass an unclaimed shelf down the line, each with a fresh window of their own. It meant an unclaimed shelf could take the better part of a month to resolve, and it was machinery that almost never fired — because a winner who passes up a prize to gamble on the next one is making a bad trade, so essentially nobody does. Almost-never-fired machinery on the one path that moves a player's money is the worst kind: not exercised enough to be trusted, complicated enough to be wrong. It is gone.

What you actually receive

The counter pays BITCOIN. A shelf is named in bitcoin, sized in sats, and paid in cbBTC at that size — converted at the moment the shelf is funded, on the same reference pool the board values every satoshi through, so the rate you are paid at is the rate the board quoted you. Nothing to convert afterwards and no button to press.

This is the one machine on the floor that does convert, and it is deliberate: the counter is the only thing every cabinet shares, and what it hands over should be the thing the whole floor counts in. Everywhere else the rule is the opposite — a pot pays what it holds and the door out sits beside it. A HIGH SCORE pot holds COIN-OP, so a HIGH SCORE prize is COIN-OP with CASH OUT next to it; we never say "we pay in bitcoin" there. Here we do, because here we do.

The size is fixed the moment the round is drawn. From then on the price is yours to carry, not the House's to guess — claiming on day six instead of day one changes the day and nothing else. The House does not hold a position between earning a fee and paying a prize, which is the only way it can never be caught wanting the market to move before it pays you.

Fairness, in one line

Sats arrive from rent and from every jackpot's ten percent; a shelf fires when it is full, never when someone decides; VRF picks one ticket and nobody is queued behind them; the prize counter shows the proof; you are handed what the pot holds with the door out beside it; and what nobody claims returns to the counter — never to the House. See Prizes & fairness for the rules every prize shares.