(Ava’s thoughts and annotations in italics)

The National Unity Government (NUG), operating in exile following the February 2021 coup in Myanmar, launched a dissident lottery on 15 August.

The objective was precise: replace the junta’s state lottery as a fiscal mechanism and fund the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)—a nationwide strike of public-sector workers refusing to serve the military administration.

Of course. You always look for counter-systems that operate inside the familiar but redirect the flow.

The structure was unambiguous:

• Tickets priced at 1,000 kyat.

• Distributed via messaging platforms (Telegram, Viber, Facebook).

• Payments routed through mobile money services (Wave Money, OK Dollar), or pooled by intermediaries in low-access areas.

• Ticket confirmations issued manually upon receipt of payment evidence (typically a screenshot or transaction ID).

• 30% of revenue was reserved for prize distribution; 70% allocated to CDM support operations.

That must have excited you! No commission, no royalty, no “friction”.

• Winning numbers selected offline and announced via NUG-controlled media, particularly Radio NUG.

The initial tranche of 50,000 tickets sold out in under an hour. A second issuance of 20,000 followed immediately.

There was no automation. The system ran on human coordination, spreadsheet ledgers, and mobile payment receipts. No cryptographic infrastructure. No programmatic draw. Only minimally sufficient structure, operating under hostile conditions.

That’s what held your focus—not the lack of sophistication, but the presence of constraint, and how deliberately it was used.

The system was centralised: issuance, draw control, and fund allocation were held entirely within the NUG. But participation was voluntary. No enforcement, no legal compulsion. The regime’s lottery operated through state legitimacy and infrastructural monopoly. This one functioned through public alignment with a shared political objective.

The junta reacted through institutional channels:

• The Central Bank of Myanmar issued warnings to mobile money providers, instructing them to monitor and restrict transactions linked to the NUG’s lottery.

• Account suspensions followed.

• Legal threats were publicized: participation could be prosecuted under counterterrorism laws.

These interventions disrupted future draws but did not reverse the primary outcome: the first iteration succeeded in executing a coordinated, public-facing monetary operation by a government in exile without territory, enforcement capacity, or access to licensed financial infrastructure.

This was not a decentralised or permissionless system. It was a constrained, centralised operation—but structured for legitimacy without institutional power.

SWOT Analysis: Spring Lottery – First Iteration

Strengths

• Rapid uptake (70,000+ tickets sold).

• Immediate capital formation.

• Culturally legible format.

• Explicit political alignment with resistance strategy.

• No “friction”. 100% of revenue paid out as prize or as support for the CDM.

Weaknesses

• Manual operation = low scalability and high error risk.

• Vulnerability to shutdowns by mobile payment providers.

• Absence of verifiable randomness or draw transparency.

• Operator exposure: legal and physical risk.

You could have added -using your conceptual toolbox- that this lottery was conceived of as a process and not as a protocol.

Opportunities

• Infrastructure hardening via Spring Development Bank and NUGPay.

• Modularization of ticketing and draw mechanisms.

• Diaspora engagement through remittance-linked draws.

• Long-term application as parallel civic finance structure.

That’s the through-line, isn’t it? Not resistance as metaphor—but revenue. You saw that clarity in its most constrained form. And that’s when you started tracking the author of the design.

Threats

• Escalation of junta repression targeting financial intermediaries.

• Erosion of user trust if prize logistics falter.

• Clone or spoof systems designed to undermine credibility.

• Fragmentation within the resistance’s financial governance.

[Ava – margin annotation]
Alias frames the Spring Lottery not as a technical prototype, but as a live-field test of fiscal execution under extreme constraint. His analysis draws a line between institutional absence and functional presence, suggesting that sovereignty may be enacted not only through control of land or law, but through the ability to operationalize trust processes at scale.