It happens occasionally.  It doesn't appear that making a fuss helps get it resolved any quicker unfortunately, though you could try that.

All bets get paid out eventually, but I've seen it take 2 or 3 days before.

Thanks for the 250k uBTC. 

I thought I had found another bug - maybe one to keep to myself for a bit.  I got my balance up to 1.6 BTC, placed a largish bet on the roulette table, but then clicked 'cash out' before spinning the wheel.  My balance went to 1.85 BTC.  I figured you had accidentally added the placed-but-not-spun bet to my balance twice.

Then I checked the 'deposit' page and saw it was another thank you deposit. 

One issue this brought up for me was that the timestamp on the deposits is in UTC.  I thought UTC was 8 hours ahead of here, which would have made the 0.25 deposit just about 61 minutes ago, in which case I was wondering why you hadn't posted about it.  But I guess UTC is only 7 hours ahead of here, and you had made the 0.25 BTC deposit into my account before composing your post here.  What I'm trying to say is I'd like to see all timestamps in localtime, not UTC.  Maybe let me pick a timezone, or maybe trust that my browser knows what timezone I'm in, I don't really care which.

Transactions don't have timestamps though.  You client may make a note of the time that it first saw a particular transaction, but my client may put a different timestamp on it.  I don't think there's any way we can safely agree on the exact timestamp of a transaction, since it's not part of the transaction itself.  All we can agree upon is the timestamp of the block that includes it.

You're not going to believe this, but I just shut down Linux and booted into Windows 7.  My laptop came with Windows 7, but I've never used it before other than for 5 minutes to see what it looked like.

I went to pmpoker.com and downloaded the .exe installer again, and ran it.  I logged in to my dooglus account, and everything happened the same as in WINE.  First I got an access violation error, then a bunch of bigger messages with JSON in them.

Here's a screenshot:



Note the bog standard ACER wallpaper - it's a real OEM Windows 7 install that came pre-installed on the laptop because I was too lazy to try to find a "No OS" laptop this time.

So maybe the issue is with my pmpoker account, but it's definitely NOT with WINE!

I just installed PokerStars from an old .exe I had lying around.  I ran the .exe in WINE, it told me there was a newer version available, offered to download it, downloaded it, installed it, let me log in, and everything looks fine:



So WINE still works for me like it used to, except not with pmpoker.

I hope somebody makes an HTML5 poker site some day, using the same kind of technology as http://bitzino.com/ uses.  Those guys know how to make a gambling site that works for everyone.  No need for Windows, Flash, etc.  Just use your browser, and it just works.

I've had good success with WINE in the past.  Some programs work 100% fine with it, and some don't work at all.  What's weird is that pmpoker worked great in WINE until yesterday...  I guess I should try something else that I know used to work great in WINE and see how that works now.  It that's messed up too then I should stop posting here, since it's clearly a WINE issue.

The thing is, I expect lots of people with Bitcoins don't use Windows.  Windows is notorious for being targeted by viruses and other malware, so it makes sense to avoid it and use something more secure if you're going to be dealing with Bitcoins.  I'm not sure a Windows-only Bitcoin poker site is going to fly at the moment.

I'm no expert on malware, but I would expect it's less likely to be able to thrive in a WINE environment than on a real Windows box.  Specially crafted programs could probably cause you some trouble though.  I believe programs running in WINE can see your whole filesystem, not just your ~/.wine.

I did that.  I re-downloaded the .exe file from the pmpoker website and ran it in WINE after deleting my .wine folder (where the Windows C: drive is stored, etc).  After installing, pmpoker downloaded over 5MB of "updates", which is bigger than the installer itself.  But that's a separate issue.

Once it had updated, it let me type my username and password, and then went crazy, flashing up error boxes quickly.  I moved some of them around so you can see a few of them:



I wonder if I can go back to the previous version of WINE somehow...

tldr: pmpoker doesn't want to work with wine, but it used to

I don't know what's going on today, but I'm unable to play pmpoker at all.  I get all kinds of error dialogs popping up which stop me from being able to play.  Earlier today I was getting this:



followed by an awful lot of beeping.  It was as if my actions (fold, raise, etc) were being ignored and the beeping was trying to get me to act, when I had already acted, and the buttons to act with has already disappeared.

I signed up for 3 tournaments this morning, and couldn't play in any of them for more than a few hands before the problems started.  I did manage to win 25 mBTC in each of them though by coming 3rd or 4th without winning a hand.  There are few enough players that you can get in the money without playing at the moment - so it's worth signing up just for that!

This afternoon I just tried again, and now I'm getting different errors:







These error boxes appear faster than I can close them, making play impossible.

I run Ubuntu Linux, and use WINE to run pmpoker, since there doesn't seem to be a Linux client available for it.  This has worked flawlessly until yesterday (well, as flawlessly as on Windows, I expect - I've had small issues with it, but nothing like this).  I updated Ubuntu from version 12.04 to 12.10 yesterday, so that may be the root cause of the problem.  The new Ubuntu may have a different version of WINE.

I just checked.  Here are the versions I've installed:

2012-07-23 18:00:47 status installed wine 1.4-0ubuntu4
2012-07-26 15:25:17 status installed wine 1.4-0ubuntu4.1
2012-10-22 19:40:56 status installed wine:amd64 1.4.1-0ubuntu1

So it went from 1.4.0 to 1.4.1 with the new Ubuntu yesterday.

I'll try deleting my ~/.wine folder and reinstalling pmpoker from scratch.

I think you're confusing two hashes.  There's:

* The hash of the day's secret number.  It was published months ago and won't change.
* The hash of your bet transaction, also known as the transaction ID.  It is created (by your client, not by SatoshiDice) when you make a payment.  It doesn't change.


You get to pick your transaction ID if you want to, as follows:

1. back up your wallet.dat file
2. turn off your Internet connection
3. tell your wallet to send a bet to SD
4. check the transaction ID
5. if you don't like it, quit the wallet program, restore your wallet.dat from the backup, restart the wallet program, and go back to step 3, but add 1 satoshi to the bet amount.  that will cause a completely different transaction ID to be used
6. turn your Internet connection back on
7. wait for the wallet to send the transaction (only the most recent one, whose txid you liked) out to the network

There's no point doing any of this if you don't know the daily secret, because you can't tell with txid values to "like" - you would want to like just the ones that are going to win, but you can't tell that without the secret, which you won't know until tomorrow.  You usually just create a transaction and instantly broadcast it, but using the steps above it's possible to check the txid before broadcasting it, and delete (by restoring a backup) the transaction so nobody but you ever knows you made it.

You're not getting it.

They picked all the daily secrets before starting operations, and published all the hashes then too.

So the day after you bet, they reveal the secret they used, and you can verify that its hash matches the hash they published months ago.  That means they used the secret they made up months ago (or they've cracked the hash, in which case there's much bigger money to be made elsewhere).

In addition to that, they use the same secret for everyone - they only use one secret per day.  So even if they did have some way of switching secrets 'at the last minute', they'd have to find one that screwed you, but which also didn't change the result of any of the bets they'd already processed that day.

If I was you I would read up on how it works and see if you can think of any way they could be cheating.  It's easy to say "they can pick any number they want" when you don't understand how things work.  But if you can make such a statement once you understand the mechanics of it, that would be interesting.

Click the 'verification' link in the top right corner of their site to read about how they pick the number.

In short it goes like this:

* at the dawn of time, they picked a random 'secret' number for each day, and published the hash of each secret number
* when they receive your bet transaction, they use that day's secret and your bet's transaction ID to make your magic number.  this is done using a well known, published algorithm.  you could do it yourself if you knew their secret
* at the end of the day, they publish that day's secret, and start using the next day's secret

So a day after you place your bet, they publish the secret they used.  You can check that the hash of the secret matches the hash they showed you in advance (so you can be sure they didn't make up a special secret just to make your bet lose) and you can also run the algorithm that combines the secret with your transaction id and check that the magic number they gave you is right.

Ew, that sounds like work.  

In other news, I found another annoyance.  I have a bet of 2000 on a red.  I want to change it to 2100, so I click the existing 2000 bet, click between the 2nd and 3rd digit of the 2000, moving the cursor there:



then hit backspace to delete the first 0:



and finally type '1' to insert a 1 where the first '0' used to be:



As you can see, hitting backspace moves the cursor to the end of the bet amount, so when I type '1' I end up with 2001 and not 2100.  Almost everything I do moves the cursor to the end of the text field, which is kind of annoying, and makes it hard to edit the bet amount.  It's easier to just delete it and type the whole new value from scratch.

Edit: I discovered I can change 2000 to 2100 by selecting the 1st '0' by dragging the mouse over it:



and then typing a '1':



It still moves the text cursor to the end of the amount, which looks weird, but at least now I can make single-digit changes without having to retype the whole amount.

Edit2: note that the "bet per click" box has none of these problems.  The cursor keys work correctly there, and I am free to edit the number in the manner to which I have become accustomed on every other site on the web.

I'd recommend bitZino too, and I don't have a referral link to push at you.    Every game is provably fair - they shuffle the deck, then effectively allow you to cut it before they deal the hand, so the site itself doesn't know and can't control what cards (or dice rolls, or roulette numbers) are going to come out, since it's decided by the player's "cut".

On top of that, the games all just work in your browser.  No download required, and no Flash plugin required.  All just pure HTML5 goodness.

It's the only place I know that has all 3 of:

* provably fair (like strike sapphire isn't - they publish the shuffles only well after you play, no hash magic before you play)
* fun (like satoshidice isn't - it's like there's no game, just winning or losing)
* always pays out when you win (like bitjack21 doesn't - they invented 'provably fair' but seem to have trouble paying out)

That seems unfair.  I've seen nothing but good from freemoney, and seals is a good poker site.  It's good to see pmpoker starting to put up some competition but I think it's fair to say the software has some way to go before it's as nice to play as the sealswithclubs software.  (And that's still miles behind the big companies' clients).

You didn't update the balances like you usually do.  And it looks like last week you updated the balances, but not the date of the last update.

I think if you're placing two complimentary bets which cancel each other out, leaving you a guaranteed profit, that's arbitrage.  If you find a site that's offering a 10-1 payout for an event which you are pretty sure will happen around 50% of the time, that's not arbitrage; that's just taking advantage of someone estimating the true odds incorrectly.

Yes, but there's no way you can prove whether the site owner's bitcoind received the transaction today or tomorrow.  The received time is potentially different for each bitcoin node.

What's going on here?  "Your bitcoin deposit address: Available balance".



It doesn't tell me my deposit address.

Clicking "Or play with play money" then "play with bitcoins" fixed the problem.