Prizes & fairness
This is the page that matters most. Prizes on the floor are drawn by a process the House itself cannot rig, and anything left unclaimed goes back to the floor, never to the House. Here is exactly how it works.
Prizes are entertainment. They are not a return on holding and not a payout you are owed — they are a game the floor plays with its own fee stream.
What you can win
- HIGH SCORE rounds — each cabinet's own prize pool, drawn from your tickets (see Tickets). Paid in COIN-OP.
- The PRIZE COUNTER — shelves of bitcoin stocked one at a time from the bottom (0.01 → 0.5 BTC, one ticket holder takes each, then the counter restocks) and, on the top shelf, 1 whole Bitcoin filling in parallel. Full rules: The prize counter.
The jackpot is not on this list, and that is not an oversight. A cabinet's jackpot is not a prize anybody claims — when its pot trips, the machine buys its own coin on its own pool and burns it, and every holder wins through the burn. There is no draw, no ticket and no winner to announce, because there is no personal payout. Ten percent of the pot goes to the PRIZE COUNTER on the way, so a jackpot going off anywhere on the floor stocks the shelves for everyone. See The flywheel.
Who is eligible to be drawn
A prize can only be won by a wallet that actually played — that bought and still holds the cabinet's coin. Your prize tickets are counted from your bought-and-held coins.
- Airdropped or received coins do not create prize tickets. They show in a wallet's holdings on the display board, but do not make it eligible to win. So a prize can never be drawn to a wallet that never chose to play — you cannot win by accident, and no one can be handed tickets they didn't earn.
- The House never plays. The operator's own wallets — the deployer, the ops wallet and every one of the floor's pots — are never eligible for prizes. The House runs the raffle; it never enters it. That list is read from the keeper's own record of what a pot is, so a pot that gets invented tomorrow is excluded the day it exists.
When prizes are drawn — HEAT: the machines fire on their own
There is no calendar and no fixed hour. An arcade machine full of tickets does not pay on Mondays at a fixed hour; it goes off when it goes off. Every cabinet on the floor runs HEAT:
- Its High Score pot (the 30% of its fees that accrues for prizes) is measured in sats — the floor's unit — at the moment of every reading. Nothing is ever fixed in COIN-OP, so a coin whose price moves 10× in a week changes nothing about when it pays.
- The House has exactly one number: the floor per person — 32,500 sats. The last place of any round takes home at least that.
- A pot that can pay a full podium — three winners of the 1/r split with the last one at the floor, about 5.5× the floor — is ARMED. Under it, the machine is COLD: nothing happens, no rollover, no clock. It just keeps filling.
- Every arcade hour, an armed machine rolls a die. The hotter the pot, the likelier it fires: heat = pot ÷ line − 1, odds per hour = heat ÷ 24. Twice the line fires about once a day; five times, every few hours; twenty-five times, within the hour. Nobody knows the moment — any day, any hour, more than once a day if the floor runs hot.
- TILT. A machine armed for seven days fires no matter what. The week is the worst case, not the rule.
When it fires, the whole pot opens a round on its own: snapshot, VRF draw, prize counter. The Operator can still open a round by hand any day; that empties the pot and the machine cools. Every round, automatic or not, is announced on our X — @insertopcoin.
FIRED stays on the sign. A machine that fired does not vanish from the HEAT board: it stays up for a full arcade day wearing the FIRED frame — the round number, how many winners the reel picked, and where the payout is (calling the VRF → paying out → in the claim room) — while its pot fills again underneath. If the pot arms again inside that day, it reads RE-ARMED. Everyone on the floor sees which machine went off, not just the winners.
Two dice, two sources. The hourly when die is the hash of the first block at or after the hour boundary — public, replayable by anyone, chosen by no one — and it only moves the moment. The who is the VRF, as always. Manipulating when buys nothing, because who is incorruptible.
What the House does not control is who wins, or how many:
- Every draw is a single VRF (verifiable random) roll over the eligible tickets, published on-chain with a proof anyone can check.
- Choosing when to draw can never change who the dice pick.
- A VRF draw is never re-run. Requesting the randomness again to change a winner would void the entire fairness guarantee and is permanently visible on-chain. A raffle is drawn once.
- Each round publishes the snapshot block (the exact tickets entered) and the VRF proof (that the randomness was genuine and chosen by no one).
The reel — how many winners a fire pays
A slot machine does not pay the same line every time, and neither does the floor. The same VRF number that picks the winners also spins the reel that decides how many there are. The roll (the number, hashed, mod 100) lands on a published pay table:
| Winners | Odds |
|---|---|
| 1 — winner takes the whole pot | 10% |
| 2 | 15% |
| 3 | 30% |
| 5 | 25% |
| 7 | 15% |
| 10 | 5% |
Prizes split by rank (1st gets the biggest share, then 2nd, and so on). Two guards keep it honest: there are never more winners than eligible wallets in the snapshot, and no prize is ever smaller than the House floor (32,500 sats, valued in COIN-OP at the draw) — if the reel shows more winners than the pot can pay properly, the count is lowered until the last prize clears the floor. A pot right at the podium line pays three; a pot at 13× the floor can pay ten. More pot, more winners, never a diluted prize. The roll, the table, and both guards are in every round's public record, so anyone can replay the spin.
How you claim
When you win a round, your prize is waiting in the prize counter. Connect your wallet, open the prize counter, and hit claim. You pay only the small gas for your own claim — there are no tips, the prize is the prize.
One draw, one winner per prize. There is no queue behind a winner and no second round for a ticket that was next in line. The floor used to keep three alternates and pass an unclaimed prize down the line, each with its own window; it was machinery that almost never fired, on the one path that moves a player's money, and it made an unclaimed shelf take the better part of a month to resolve. It is gone. If a winner never comes to the counter, the prize goes back where it came from and the next round is stocked sooner.
The prize counter is not just for winners: it shows every round, win or lose — the shelves, the winners, the claim window, the proof, and (connected) your exact tickets and odds in each snapshot. If you weren't drawn, it says so, with your numbers — nothing on the floor ends in a blank screen.
Each round has the same claim window — a house rule, never a per-round choice: 7 days from the round's announcement, an arcade week. Within it, claim whenever you like; the prize counter shows the countdown.
What you are handed, and what you do with it
A pot pays what it holds — except the one pot the whole floor shares.
- A HIGH SCORE prize is COIN-OP, because that machine's pot holds COIN-OP. Beside it is the CASH OUT button: keep what you won or turn it into something else, your call, and the floor does not make it for you. We never say we pay you in bitcoin here, because we do not.
- A shelf at the PRIZE COUNTER is named in bitcoin, sized in sats, and paid in bitcoin — cbBTC, converted the moment the shelf is funded, at the same reference pool the board quoted you through. Nothing left to press.
The counter is the exception for one reason: it is the only machine every cabinet on the floor shares, so what it hands over is the thing the whole floor counts in.
A prize's 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. That cuts both ways and it is the honest version: the House does not hold a position between earning a fee and paying a prize, so it can never be caught wanting the market to move before it pays you.
Unclaimed prizes — the credits stay in the cabinet
When a round's claim window closes, whatever wasn't claimed is not kept by the House.
- A HIGH SCORE prize rolls into that cabinet's own High Score pot — the pool the next round is paid from. Walk away from an arcade cabinet with credits still in it and the next player plays them; that is exactly what happens here.
- A shelf goes back to the counter's pot, and the counter restocks with it. The shelf reads RETURNED TO THE WALL.
Either way it is automatic, decided by no one, and every sweep is one public transaction in the round's record.
Two rules make that honest:
- The House never sells COIN-OP — not to fill a meter, not for any reason. A prize is a coin, and it stays a coin until a player claims it.
- The pool's destinations are fixed on-chain: the High Score pot, the REFILL furnace, or the dead address — nothing else, least of all the House.
There are no tips in the prize counter. The House keeps nothing, so a tip had nowhere honest to go — the prize is the prize.
Why a window at all: it keeps prizes from locking capital forever and keeps the pot compounding for the players who show up. A week is long enough for anyone engaged, short enough that the machine keeps moving.
In one line
The machines fire on their own — a pot worth a podium is armed and rolls every hour, hotter pots fire sooner, seven days armed fires by TILT; the last place always clears the House floor; the dice pick who wins and the reel picks how many; one draw picks one winner per prize with nobody queued behind them; you have a week to claim; you are handed what the pot holds with the door out beside it; and anything left unclaimed goes back to the floor — never kept by the House. Every step is checkable on-chain.