Just come to the chat, the lotto bot will select people randomly and give them juicy prizes. If you've never seen one, join us, it's all chaos and fun!

During the LB happy hour^tm, every fearless shrimp can be a godzilla.

C'mon man, give us some time to breath, that was some stressful days lately. Added emphasize in our previous post, see bold face.

Thanks everyone for the kind words, and for your understandable impatience.
The bitcoin network has recently undergone some significant changes, and since we use it directly, we must implement hopefully long-term solutions rather than rushing towards quick fixes.
We're on it, and things are moving ahead!

It might be a couple more days before we re-open. Please accept our apologies.

@yahoo, your lotto status will be compensated one way or another!

(Note that these opinions are personal - one of the admin speaking for himself)

Like almost everybody (except Peter Todd and few others), we think the limit should be increased at some point. In the original idea of Satoshi there was no limit, and in the original code of Satoshi, the limit was 32MB simply because it was the maximum size of a packet. The current limit of 1MB was added later solely as an anti-spam measure, and assumed to be raised at some point.

However even people who are ok to increase the block size, do not agree when to do it, and by how much...

Personally, we believe a dynamic limit is the way to go. Because hardcoding is rarely a good coding decision, and in this case a larger limit that would be hardcoded would simply postpone the issue, and in the future it would be even harder to change if Bitcoin keeps growing. There are two possibilities of dynamic limits:
The first is a static predefined schedule (as one of the proposals of G. Andresen for instance, double the size every year or so).
The second is fully dynamic, and is adapted based on some algorithmic rules that take into account recent observed conditions. This is how the mining difficulty is already adapted for instance: it follows a simple rule whose input is the time between the latest blocks. Similar rules could be used to adapt the block size as well, some altcoins such as Monero use this sucessefully, so we know it is in the realm of the reasonable at least. See for instance https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1078521.0 or https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38fmra/max_block_size_2_average_size_of_last_144_blocks/

You must think of the problem differently: what will happen if Bitcoin usage keeps growing?

If you want to keep the feeling that user have nowadays in the future, larger blocks will help.
If we keep the same block size, in the future the fees will be higher, and the confirmation time will depend on the fees paid (large fees = confirm quickly like today, low fee = confirm slowly or even never).

If you think of the problem this way, you'll realize that making blocks larger is not the biggest change between the two options. It's the other one, keeping the block as it is, that will be the biggest change for the users.

The entity or entities behind it are not known. Everybody is left speculating.
The term "stress test" is maybe too gentle, some call it a clear DDoS attack on Bitcoin users.
Technically, there are a lot of transactions that remain a long time unconfirmed in memory pools (or would never confirm). Some miners took some measures to help fire fighting, but the results is that the propagation of transactions (not only their confirmation) has been affected, too. We intend to right a complete write-up of the issues that are affecting directly business like us, after we'll have open again.


There will be no benefit to spammers. If the block size is increased X times, in order to spam as they are doing now, they'll have to spend X times the money they are spending now.

The effect on users of raising the block limit is controversial. At the moment, larger blocks would nullify the spamming consequences and the network would behave as it was before. (assuming the spam attack would be as it today, and not performed at a larger scale too). On a long term perspective, pretty much everybody agrees we will need larger blocks, but by how much, when and how, is a debate still happening that doesn't seem to come to a shared agreement.

The stress test has created a new environment on the network, with new yet unseen technical challenges. We want to deal with these challenges properly before re-opening.

We're aiming at Monday, but there is no certainty.

Not sure what you mean... You mean what happen when people send some bets while we are under maintenance?
In that case, the bets would be processed when the maintenance is over. We guarantee that no bets will be lost (and everybody can check, since it's on the blockchain).

No, we fired off the bet engine just to process and pay those stuck bets, but it won't be running continuously.
We don't encourage anyone to send bets at the moment.

Your bet was processed, sorry that it was stuck for a while.
All confirmed bets have been processed.

Yes, just click on it.

Surprisingly nobody found out yet what is (or better: are) after whale. Lotto scales all the way through the roof

Thanks for the kind words, glad you like it!