Nailed it. 

I sent a PM to Patrick on August 30, 2012, 04:52:17 PM asking to withdraw 105 BTC, and received a reply on August 30, 2012, 05:10:49 PM saying "Done".  With a smiley face too!

Thanks for the great service Patrick. 

Probably because either

(1) it causes blockchain bloat like Satoshi Dice or

(2) it looks like a scam, like BS&T

But neither Satoshi Dice nor BS&T threads have been locked (except in BS&T's case by their owner) so I don't know.  Maybe you're special.

A suggestion: remember what game I was playing most recently, and take me back to that game when I visit your site.  Currently it always seems to start at blackjack, even though it's able to remember my last roulette bet between sessions.

I just spun the roulette wheel for the first time since your recent changes.  And it's still spinning.  My Internet went out for a while, but it's back now.  I was thinking the wheel might stop when the Internet service came back, but no.

Also, while it was spinning I think I may have placed another bet.  And now the 'spinning' button has changed back to 'spin', even though the wheel is still spinning.



Edit: reloading the page shows my balance back to where it started, so in all likelihood the server never saw my bet.  The "repeat last" button was greyed out, too.  Should the web browser re-submit the bet when Internet service returns?  Because it doesn't appear to.

This seems a little patchy.  For example, click on the top edge of the table, between the 12 and 15.  "10 to 15 sixline" pops up as the title.  Click right in the middle of the 'x' in 'sixline' and the box almost never closes.  But click a pixel or two to the left and it does.  I'm not sure what is determining whether the popup closes or not when I click on its title/description.

It seems that what he wants to test is how well the bitcoin network stands up to large numbers of transactions.  That's not something he can reasonably test using testnet since testnet doesn't have anything comparable in terms of current levels of transactions.

I can understand warning that this looks potentially like a scam, and that using it a lot is potentially damaging for the bitcoin network, but asking people not to play it seems too much.

What happened as a result of Matt's thread in which he complained about Satoshi Dice 'spam'?  I was watching it at one point but seem to have lost track of it.  Was any decision ever made regarding what to do about services which generate significant numbers of transactions?

If it was deterministic then I would be able to steal the bitcoins from 1NaNoBitU2q8czqE2y5rEQPj4qcW6K3mFp or any other address found using vanitygen just by searching for it and waiting about as long as it too the owner to find it.

Is there a working RSS feed for the podcasts?  I tried the ones on your site but they both seem to end around May of this year.  I'd like to have the donkdown shows automatically downloaded alongside the other podcasts  I subscribe to.

(I tried http://www.donkdown.com/component/podcast/?view=feed&format=raw&catid=34 and http://www.donkdown.com/index.php?option=com_podcast&view=rss&format=rss&catid=34 (labelled 'other podcast readers' and 'rss feed' resp.))

Hey mem.

There's a new roulette game in town:


Looks and plays well - the same clean simple interface their other games have, the same provably fair game, only a single 0.  All in all seems pretty good (if you like that kind of thing).

I noticed it's possible to place bets while the wheel is spinning; these decrease your balance, but are corrected when the spin is complete.  It would be better to disable both the placing and clearing of bets while the spin is happening.


And it's gone...

Just as I predicted.

I bet 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 mBTC all on red, and got black every time.  The final red was the dust I had left - I couldn't afford to double up again, and it quickly disappeared too:

According to my calculations, the expected return per 'bet' is 0.2511 BTC, and if you have a budget of 100 BTC to run this thing, you can expect to survive for 88000 bets (if you ignore transaction fees) or 61000 bets (if you assume a 0.0005 BTC transaction fee per payment):

>>> ((1*5.25 + 15*0.75 + 15*16*0.30 + 15*16*16*0.255 + 15*16*16*16*0.2505) / 65536) - 0.25
0.0011355590820312234
>>> 100 / (((1*5.25 + 15*0.75 + 15*16*0.30 + 15*16*16*0.255 + 15*16*16*16*0.2505) / 65536) - 0.25)
88062.34883096149
>>> 100 / (((1*5.25 + 15*0.75 + 15*16*0.30 + 15*16*16*0.255 + 15*16*16*16*0.2505) / 65536) - 0.25 + 0.0005)
61141.17251931286

This is genius: All the blockchain bloat of satoshi dice combined with all the counter-party risk of BS&T!

You should read http://www.satoshidice.com/progressive.php - that tells all about how the progressive game works.  There's a link to it in the 'learn more' section in the top right corner of the main SD page.

Basically, every 0.25 BTC you send to 1DiCestoZZ3mLsfgyT3FiLEhwv53Jx3sgj counts as one bet.  Each bet has a chance of winning the jackpot.  Currently the jackpot is 331.9929 BTC and each bet has a 0.04895% chance of winning it.  The jackpot will go up and the chance of winning will go down with each set of bets.

You can send any multiple of 0.25 BTC to the address to play multiple times with a single transaction, but I think you get very slightly worse odds that way than betting in single 0.25 amounts.

I'm talking about the 'bet per click' box, not the bet sizing box, in case you misunderstood.

Although I think I'd also like to see the full set of 4 buttons in the bet sizing box, not just the 2 to make the bets bigger.


Thanks.  I'm sure you'll have it all back soon. 

I just noticed I have to click 4 times per spin if I want to double my previous bet:
1) repeat last
2) click bet
3) click x2
4) spin

It's a little cumbersome compared to doing the same on blackjack (where I think I can just click x2 and then play) but then roulette is more complex than blackjack when it comes to placing bets.

How about an "auto repeat last" checkbox?

I like the changes you've made.  The focus in the text input box is good, but I still have to delete the previous bet.  It's conceivable that I'd type my new bet but forget to delete the previous bet, and end up with something huge in the field.  Would it be better to have the old amount selected, so that typing will delete it?

Finally, I notice that the spin animation freezes for a split second shortly before it stops.  I'm guessing that happens when you get the winning number from the server.  At that point the "repeat last" button stops being greyed out, and the "spinning" button changes back to "spin".  But the animation continues after the UI has updated.  It's a little distracting, and would look smoother if the updates were done after the spin finishes, not during the spin.

This is an easier way to do it:

$ ./bitcoind getbalance
$ deleted top secret bash command which uses a while loop to send 62 transactions after I received heat for it on IRC
$ sleep $((60*60))
$ ./bitcoind getbalance

I sent a single 0.25 payment and got 0.2505 back 4 blocks later.

My suspicious mind wonders whether this could be a really short-term ponzi scheme.  You get 0.2% interest per half hour.  The temptation obviously is to send thousands of these transactions.  Which is fine until they stop coming back.

OK, so in the example I quoted, 25% of losses are put back into the pot.  There's a 77% payout from the raw percentages, so 23% is lost.  25% of 23% is 5.75% which eventually goes back to the player, so the total payout seems to be 77% + 5.75% = 82.75%.

Where am I going wrong now?

Are you claiming that the theoretical payout is 97.125%, or just that that's what you've paid out so far?

When I click on a number to bet, there's a box I can type into to edit the bet size.  It doesn't have keyboard focus until I click on the box.  Could that be changed?  I want to be able to click 'red' then immediately type '27' rather than having to click the text entry box first.

I hadn't even noticed the 'bet per click'.  It gets reset to 1 for me too.  "per click" in the wording seems to suggest that each click will bet that amount, so if I click twice on a number it bets twice that amount (see my second comment in my previous post).

Also I'd like to see the 'x2 +1 -1 1/2' buttons next to the 'bet per click' box, just like there are for the bet sizing box for blackjack.