My Internet was cut off suddenly a few days ago.  I'm back online at least part of the time now, so here it is...

That's non-trivial to check, but I'll give it a go.  The magic numbers aren't stored in the blockchain, so I'll need to grab a copy of the daily secrets from SD's site and calculate the lucky number for each bet.  I'll report back when I've done it.

That's kind of tricky.  Because you mean "3 times in a row for the same player" I expect.  But I can't tell which bets are from which players, since some people use a different address each time they bet.  I also can't tell for sure what order the bets were placed in - all I see is which block they are in.

One thing I can tell you for sure though is that the martingale scheme is never applicable for any game where the odds are in the house's favour...  All martingale betting will do is change the odds so that instead of having a large (1 in 2) chance of losing a little ($1), you have a little (1 in 2048) chance of losing a lot ($1024).

Also, we know the exact odds for each of the SatoshiDice bets, and so can work out how often we get N losses in a row:

For the "under X" game, where X is a number between 1 and 64000, the probability of winning an individual bet is X/65536.

So the probability of losing an individual bet is (65536-X)/65536.

And so the probability of losing N bets in a row is ((65536-X)/65536)^N.


To give a concrete example, the probability of losing 3 times in a row (N=3) when betting 'under 32000' (X=32000) is:

   ((65536-X)/65536)^N
= ((65536-32000)/65536)^3
= 0.134

that's about 1 in 7.46287 times.


Another example: the probabiliy of losing 3 times in a row (N=3) when betting 'under 32768' (X=32768) is:

   ((65536-X)/65536)^N
= ((65536-32768)/65536)^3
= 0.125

that's exactly 1 in 8 times.  Which is what you would expect; 'under 32768' is exactly a 50/50 bet, so there's 8 possible outcomes when you play 3 times, and only 1 of those 8 is "lose, lose, lose".

I was just offline for 4 days while moving house.  When I got back online, all my bitcointalk tabs were saying "session verification error" and telling me that I should log out and back in.  I did so, then checked my watchlist, expecting to see 20 or 30 threads that I needed to catch up on.  Instead there were only 2 threads shown, and they both had posts in the last couple of minutes.

Is there some way of getting the watchlist to show all the threads I'm watching that have had new posts since I last read them?

I don't know if it's the change of IP address, the delay between logins, or some error that has caused this, but I've come to rely on the watchlist instead of subscribing to threads the old way, and now it has let me down...

I didn't clean them out, because I liked the site and didn't want it to fail.

I played for the minimum stakes of 10c-$5 rather than the bigger tables, and ended up only winning about $300.  I taught my girlfriend how to count too, and she won about the same amount.  That wasn't all on blackjack; some of it was on the weekend tournaments which were also "beatable" in a way - there was a $20 or so prize for winning the most each weekend which made some high stake 50-50 roulette bets really worth playing.

Then the owner of the site banned us both, and all my friends.  He started making crazy accusations, like that my girlfriend didn't exist even though he had spoken to us both on Skype already.  It was funny because he knew we were counting cards all along, and kept telling us we were doing it wrong.  I'm still not clear why we were banned.  The owner has admitted that neither of us broke the site's terms and conditions.  But I reported a lot of bugs, and I think the owner took it personally, rather than seeing it as my attempt to help him fix his site.

I kind of wish now that I had cleaned them out, but at the time I thought the owner was a decent guy and wanted to see his business really take off.  Now, not so much.

I really think you're mistaken.  'bitcoind sendfrom' doesn't do what you think it does.  It debits the specified account, but uses whichever unspent outputs in your wallet fit the spent amount best* no matter which address 'owns' them.

* for a particular and somewhat weird definition of 'best'

As I understand it, I either run the satoshi client, or I run the satoshi client plus armory.

The former seems the simpler option to me.  It's not like armory is an alternative, it's an add-on.  Am I right?

No problem.

And there was no lack of delay. 

I've been using the 'logger' branch from the git repository, rather than a 0.82.2 download, and it works for me running my modified SatoshiDice analysis script.

I don't run Armory itself though.

25 random characters is plenty.  25 letter 'a's isn't.  There's a range between these two extremes.

Oh, and I just signed in and the whole site appears to be empty.  Player count: 1 - and I guess that includes me.

I have two small issues with the box that pops up while updating:



The first time I saw it, my Internet was being slow, the progress number wasn't updating.  I'm not even sure if it said 0%, or if it was missing entirely.  I read the message as "Downloading update.  Completed, please wait...".  i.e. I thought it had already completed, when it really hadn't even started.  The capital 'C' on 'Completed' makes it look like a new sentence.

Also, I'd like to see the total size of the download, rather than just a percentage.  I pay by the megabyte for Internet traffic, so don't like to download updates of unknown sizes.

Yeah - that was unrelated.  Giving bitcoin-qt the -noconnect flag causes the CPU to go to 100% for everyone, I guess.  I reported it, and provided a fix:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/1664

So I'm back to not being able to reproduce your problem.  I doubt that broadcasting the transactions to the network would cause a problem, but it's possible.  I guess I'd like to try with one of your bigger wallets once you're able to check them out.

That was probably a red herring.  I was running 'bitcoin-qt -noconnect' to stop it connecting to any peers.  That seems to be what causes the 100% CPU usage, whether I use your wallet or mine.

I just noticed bitcoin-qt is using 100% CPU.  It's still responsive, but it's a start...

OK, so I'm unable to reproduce this behaviour.

When I try to create a transaction that spends most of the satoshis, it very quickly selects the right coins, but then takes about 6 seconds signing all the inputs, and then fails because the maximum transaction size is apparently 100kb:


That puts a hard limit of something like 555 inputs on a transaction, although the coin selection code makes no attempt to keep the set of selected inputs to 555 or less.

So in summary: when you try to spend more than 555 inputs at a time it fails to create the transaction after taking a relatively long time to sign all the inputs, but I'm not yet seeing and crashes or long freezes.  Any idea what I might do to provoke the failures you were seeing?

I have a copy of your wallet.  It contains:

  * 2121 addresses which have been used and are currently empty,
  * 1484 which contain a single satoshi,
  * 1 address with 8 separate single satoshis, and
  * 1 address with a single 48508 satoshi coin.

I'll see if I can get the client to hang when I ask it to select coins for a transaction.

In a finite universe exponential growth is never perfectly sustainable.

In a system with a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins exponential growth is especially unsustainable.

1 BTC received.  Thanks.