Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

Background
We have been watching bitcoin network since the very beginning of its emergence, and we found that the design of difficulty value for this network is fascinating. It fluctuates based on reality events like stocks, for example, ASICMiner development. This is the value we care the most when mining bitcoins. It’s a little bit predictable yet nobody is able to get an exact figure beforehand. So, why not play a game to see who the best predictor is. We build a lottery pool for betting on future difficulty. We believe this is a game more like Poker, skills are required, and however, good luck is another necessity.

Lottery on BitCoin Difficulty
After several months development and testing, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our revolutionary game – betting on difficulty – a lottery game for us, true bitcoin users. ;)

Rules for the game
The rules are simple and straightforward we don’t want to bind you with tedious regulations. Have fun and show us all your talents, good luck!


We are still in beta version, if you found any problem, please feel free to leave comments here or use the suggestion dialog in the website. You precious help will benefit both us and you!  

Best Luck,
BTCFarseer Development Team
support@btcfarseer.com

Q: How do you pay me back when re-distributing the lottery?
A: We will send money back to the bitcoin address that you used to make your bet. So, please make sure that address is owned by you. Using trading account like mtGox may have problem receiving money since the actual address may not owned by you. We suggest to use your own personal wallet.

Q: When will a round stop accepting bets?
A: Bitcoin network will adjust its difficulty every 2016 blocks. And we consider every 2016 blocks as a round based on the difficulty adjustment, as a sequence, a round will automatically closes when bitcoin network's difficulty change (Every 2016 blocks).

Q: What if I accidentally make an invalid bet?
A: We will refund your bet to the address you used to send us the invalid bet. Note that we will refund the bitcoin once per round. So if you make an invalid bet, please be patient to wait for the refund or you can contact us if you are in an emergent situation.

To get exact how many blocks away from next adjustment, now you may check through blockchain http://blockchain.info or other services. We are also working on this part to show the exact close time on our website. However, as the computing power of bitcoin network varies from time to time, the time interval between blocks are not constant, so the estimated close time can only be used as reference, it may change based on computing power. Please refer to the number of blocks when you need an exact estimation.

Also, we suggest that if you see there is only 10 or less blocks away, please consider to bet on next round since due to the traffic of bitcoin network, your bet may not come to our lottery in time.


Best Luck,
BTCFarseer Development Team
support@btcfarseer.com

Notice
We will offer a coupon to everybody who fulfill below two tasks:
1) Propose a suggestion here in this post or on our website
2) We make a change based on the proposed suggestion

The coupon can be used on our website when you make your bet. When we issue a coupon, we will ask you to give us a bitcoin address (so please leave your contact info when you offer an advice). If you make your bet through the bitcoin address that you offer, we will waiver your house fee (by sending your house fee back). This coupon can be used 20 times. This coupon can only be used within next 5 rounds (starting from the round we issue the coupon).

We reserves the right to the interpretation of the above terms and conditions.

Quick Update
Our lottery Pool Address: 1btcfsrtdUVTmn9oiK8Zmb9VgtwDHFHg2
Detailed Rules: http://btcfarseer.com/rule

Round : 121
Status: Payed out
Average Guess : 16,721,878
Lottery Pool : 0.18BTC
Payout Time: Jun.16, 2013 UTC
Payout Transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/7bec67dda53374bc1d32856c2569abc377fd2d52c114d0dafbe93ec5242c4521

Round : 122
Status: Payed out
Current Average Guess : 27,466,729
Lottery Pool : 0.14BTC
Payout Time: Jun.30, 2013
Payout Transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/8b58915ef8db439b7fc9f2a1b55d0fc4e7ab8d51ccf5242dc957cf7bff5dc835
Note: We found that we have three invalid bets come from the address of 1PRQvNX6TfdE7cQG2YFP1gSvLMn97tUvGy, so we refund this user's bet together inside this payout transaction. The three invalid bets are:
https://blockchain.info/tx/510f51c2765148931d4c5cfd8242860fb229f97df216228165090679083e1349
https://blockchain.info/tx/62306b01f1d16edf712b5239fe027f43f6c4f19780e17cc9cca544ab9f5e2ae2
https://blockchain.info/tx/b78162b9eb8b2be4afd20f006929acc9682aedd085d4dafcd734080dad040530


Round : 123
Status: Closed
Average Guess : 27,548,358
Lottery Pool : 0.38BTC
Estimated Payout Time: Jul.13, 2013

Round : 124
Status: Open
Average Guess : 23,167,650
Lottery Pool : 0.04BTC
Estimated Close Time: Jul.13, 2013

Update Time: 2013-06-30

Why are you hiding the last 5 digits of the bet address?

bitcoin addresses are anonymous by nature and blockchain.info allow to look for the address by its first characters

Good point. We'll discuss about this.
Thank you for your comment.

Best Luck,
BTCFarseer Development Team
support@btcfarseer.com

We are showing the last 5 digits now. Thank you again for your hints. :D

What's more, we'd like to give you a coupon for your suggestion. This coupon can be used when you make your bet in our website. Please offer us a bitcoin address owned by you (you can post here or PM us). If you make your bet through the bitcoin address you offer, we will waiver your house fee (by sending the house fee back to you). This coupon can be used 20 times.  ;)

Again, thank you very much for your support!

Best Luck,
BTCFarseer Development Team
support@btcfarseer.com

An interesting idea. Why don't link the "Quick Guide" button to the "How to Bet" part in your "Rules" page?  :-\

Because we consider it as a detailed guide  ;)
Thank you for your kind suggestion  :)

I spent a ridiculous amount of time refining my prediction model, and then I didn't like the results so I opted for something simpler. Time to hurry up and wait...

Awesome game. When does bets close?

Good luck!  ;)

This round is closing soon as the difficulty will be adjusted within hours.
Be careful when the round is closing. If your transactions take too long to get into a block (e.g. without transaction fee), your bet may be fall to the next available round (round 122 at the time of writing).

Just found out that the dialog isn't showing the closing time. We'll fix it soon.

Good luck! :D

Pretty sure I'm going to lose. I should have incorporated this difficulty adjustment into my model, and didn't. (Not that hard to calculate when you're less than 100 blocks from adjustment.)

Round reset is based on adjustment block, right? Ie if your transaction is before the adjustment, it's in this round, but if you miss and it's after the adjustment, it's in the next round?

I guess the guy who bet 19,000,000 will win round 121 cause the difficulty now is already more than 15M.
Yes, you are right that it is easy to calculate the next round's difficulty less than 100 blocks away. So we only allow betting on the next next round, i.e. the nearest block distance you can get is 2016 blocks away. However, we have a small bias on early bet in order to compensate early player's information loss.



Yes, you are right! We categorize all the bets based on the blocks they are in.

What is the maximum allowed bet ?

There is a standard bet amount, but nothing stops you from submitting more than one bet.

Just made a wild bet of 36,000,000. but it displays 3,600,000  :-[

Well, it displays 3,600,000 instead of 36,000,000 because the current difficulty is 15, 605, 633, and
15.6M - 3.6M < 36M - 15.6M

Please rest assured that this calculation will be done again once the difficulty of round 122 is known.

BTW, thank you for your suggestion, could you leave an address here or PM us so we can give you a coupon!

Thanks. Please check your pm~

I see the display is correct now (36 000 000). You changed your algorithm?

I don't understand which part of algorithm you mentioned. Yet we have fixed this bug and our rules remain the same. Good luck to your bet, and thank you for your kind support and suggestions!

The growth model changed from linear to exponential, so that we can correctly decode you bet now. (36M/15.6M < 15.6M/3.6M)
This model is better than the linear one. Note that this change only affects the decoding and displaying, won't affect the lottery result.

We are more than happy to announce that the result of Round 121 will soon be known!  ;D
This is the first pay out since our site online.

The payout transaction will be made today. How's your guess? ;)

Currently we are fixing the displaying problem, and double check the payout amount. Will update this when it's done.

Is your grading and payout automated or manual?

Round 121 payment sent:
https://blockchain.info/tx/7bec67dda53374bc1d32856c2569abc377fd2d52c114d0dafbe93ec5242c4521
 ;)

Automated. Since this is the first payout, we want to send the payment after we manually check the result.

Leader board is still broken. Do you need the errors it shows, or you already have it?

Wow, just notice that! Thank you. I'll fix it now.
btw, please pm your address to us and we will have you a coupon.

Fixed. Thanks again for you report.

Hey, this game is awesome! I think you guys should do more marketing, make more people know about this game!

Thank you for your support! We have started a marketing campaign, I am sure that next round's pool size will be much bigger than before. Please keep in tune! We will do better and better!

Round 122 is payed out.
Payout Transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/8b58915ef8db439b7fc9f2a1b55d0fc4e7ab8d51ccf5242dc957cf7bff5dc835

We found that we have three invalid bets come from the address of 1PRQvNX6TfdE7cQG2YFP1gSvLMn97tUvGy, so we refund this user's bet together with the above transaction. The three invalid bets are:

https://blockchain.info/tx/510f51c2765148931d4c5cfd8242860fb229f97df216228165090679083e1349
https://blockchain.info/tx/62306b01f1d16edf712b5239fe027f43f6c4f19780e17cc9cca544ab9f5e2ae2
https://blockchain.info/tx/b78162b9eb8b2be4afd20f006929acc9682aedd085d4dafcd734080dad040530

Hello,

I made 3 bets but only one shows up on the list of all bets on the page.
I made 1st bet on 30th June for 0.02241001 . It showed up on the list as 24,100,000.

Then I made 2nd and 3rd extra bets on 6th July for the amount of 0.02300159 and 0.02297619 but they do not appear on the list.

2nd bet was for difficulty around 25,030,000
3rd bet was for difficulty 25,100,000

I have been trying to contact BTC Farseer support for last few days from 2 different e-mail adresses and all my e-mails have been ignored.
I tried to find out if my bets where invalid and why. Now the round 124 is closed and it seems that my bets/transactions went into void.

My address: 1Mge22NA83mHPj3NET2i8f5qmS51ZVXV3D

BCOB

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t28/bladadupa/Loterry_zps2db5cb93.jpg

2nd and 3rd transactions/bets:
http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t28/bladadupa/LoterryTicket2_zpsabd78ca9.jpg
http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t28/bladadupa/LoterryTicket3_zps3b3bb571.jpg

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, we are out for some days.
First, 0.02[241001] means you are betting on 24,100,100. So your second bet of 0.02300159 is betting on 30,015,900 and the third of 0.02297619 is betting on
29, 761, 900

Second, you can examine all our transactions through:
https://blockchain.info/address/1btcfsrtdUVTmn9oiK8Zmb9VgtwDHFHg2

From your image send to our email, your two 'missing' bets are in the lists of round 124.
One is

Jul.6, 2013   1AntysQo9CwvBTtB3jijF9DEGMPjCqUXQo   24,761,900   
Transaction hash is bce24e9d4727b8ce873cb8e3c5487f9576a8f1b53ad46ba730d6675c51d0a2f6
Your bet amount is 0.02247619


Another one is
Jul.6, 2013   1MuoRPK5Az3CdFSPhowggxfbUeJt8kPwvE   25,015,900
Transaction hash is 7ceca04fbae4c30880c7e2e0461087314a44118f9e7bc110d8c77fbcc4425ccf
Your bet amount is 0.02250159

The reason why it shows 0.02300159 instead of 0.02250159 is because the previous one includes your transaction fee which is 0.0005

Thanks for your reply and refund.

All is fine now.

Cheers,
P

Interesting site.

We plan to change a server, will be online soon.