findthefunction / lottery-bot

A simple lottery bot that watches the tx pool for a lottery contract deployment and then plays it

Lottery Bot

Here is how to get this bot started on a development envirnoment.

Exercise inspired from this article here.

Start geth and unlock the accounts

Please refer to the README for Geth on how to install and setup on your local dev environment or to a testnet environment.

Run the command below. You will need to create your own accounts in Geth and unlock them.

geth --datadir ./geth-test --networkid 15

Attach a terminal to the local geth node

geth attach ./geth-test/geth.ipc

Add helper scripts to geth

In the geth console that you are attached to, drop this into the console

loadScript('./geth/checkAllBalances.js')
loadScript('./geth/checkWork.js')
loadScript('./geth/unlockAllAccounts.js')

Feel free to take a look at each of these scripts inthe geth folder of this repo.

At this point you might need to create some local test accounts set one as the setEtherbase, mine and transfer funds as well as manually unlock these accounts. You can do so by following the instructions here.

Run the loaded functions

The checkWork function ensures that gethonly mines when there are transactions in the txpool. Note you need to load the script (using loadScript as shown above) before you can run this in the geth console.

checkWork()

Unlock all the accounts using the unlockAllAccounts script. This script makes some assumtions about the accounts that you have created and the passwords you have used. Feel free to modify this script to suite your own accounts setup.

unlockAllAccounts()

For fun, you can also run the checkAllBalances() function too:

checkAllBalances()

From the geth terminal, inpect the txpool which should be empty

Take a look at the txpool - it should be empty

txpool.inspect

Start the txSimulater

This simulates small transactions of ether between two accounts.

node simulator/traffic

Initialize the Bot

Be sure to have your .env file in the root of this project and correctly filled out.

node bot/init

Call releaseNextIncrement as the owner of the lottery contract

node simulator/lottery

If you see execution reverted: The counter needs to be incremented first then you need to manually run the increment() function on the smart contract using truffle console terminal (see below).

Check the bot output

You should see that the SniperBot fires a number of transactions. One of them will go through. Both the bot and the lottery simulator show the latest block after. This usually is the block that both transactions were mined in.

Review the CounterContract results

In truffle console window run. The winner should be the bot.

sc = await SimpleCounter.deployed()
(await sc.getCounter()).toString()
counter = await sc.getCounter()
sc.winners(counter)   // shows the address of that winner
sc.winners(counter+1) // should be an unclaimed slot (address 0x0)

If you need to manually increment the counter then run that function as follows

sc.increment()

Terminal screen capture

I had many terminal windows open while testing this: