I think I got an 11, doubled it, got to 16 and lost.  But that's from memory.  I've closed the table already.  I know, now it's amazingly unlikely, huh? 

I just had 3 blackjacks in a row at Strike Sapphire:


If each is a one in 21 chance, then that's a 1 in over 9000 shot!

All three were Ace + Jack.  That's even less likely, by a factor of 64.  That makes it about a one in a half-million shot.

I hope it wasn't too much for you.

I guess it could come across as me giving you a hard time, but I just thought it would perhaps be useful if I just told you everything I thought could use some attention.

Overall I like the site and how it works.

The odds of the dealer getting a natural depends on how many decks are being used, but generally the probability of a natural is about (1/13) * (4/13) * 2, or about 1 in 21 hands.

Blackjack is a funny game, and seems to have very high variance.  Winning or losing streaks can last for long periods of time, even though the shuffles are random.

When playing in a real casino, the play moves around the table clockwise, from right to left.  If you've split and hand, it does the same, playing the right-hand hand first.

Your game plays the left-hand hand first, which gets confusing.

Also, the action buttons are pretty big and far apart.  If I'm going to play this for any length of time, I'm going to get tired of moving the mouse between the buttons.

Is it possible to make keyboard shortcuts in HTML5?  Maybe if I could type to play instead of constantly 'aiming' for buttons with the mouse it would feel less tiring.

Maybe I should just get some sleep.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. 

This is going to sound weird, but the repeated diagonal sliding animation of the cards makes me feel kind of nauseous.  I don't usually get that from any kind of game, but there's something about how the cards slide in quickly and often that leaves me feeling like I'm falling over sideways.  It's quite unpleasant.

How about an option to disable animations?

I think it would be nice if you kept a record of my play money balance.

It seems that if I leave the table and go back again, my balance is reset to 1000.

Maybe offer a 'reset' button either when I go bust or available all the time, in case people run out, but I'd prefer to see how I'm doing overall on the play money before committing to depositing precious mbtc. 

Is there a minimum deposit?  State this on the deposit page.

There's a text entry box at the bottom of the bit that says:


I'm not sure what's going on there.  Am I meant to type the amount I'm going to deposit into the box?  Whatever I type it gets changed back to zero.

Or is that the withdraw box, and it's getting changed to zero because I have a zero balance?

If so, it's confusing to use "cash in" to mean both "deposit" and "withdraw".

Apparently the fees they pay are significant.  According to etotheipi's analysis:


Fees make up around 25% of their cumulative losses so far.  And make up more than 0.1% of payouts.  Since the house edge is 1.5%, these fees correspond to about 8% of theoretical profits.

Even if satoshidice used a single sendmany each hour to pay out all bets, they would less than halve the number of SD transactions on the network.

Currently 50k bets per day = 100k transactions per day.

With sendmany, 50k bets per dat = 50024 transactions per day.

"Encouraging" them to use sendmany just to gain a factor of less than 2 reduction in the number of transactions doesn't seem very useful, given the rate they're growing.  It's only a week since their volume last doubled, so by switching to sendmany you're maybe gaining a week until the network can no longer handle their volume (assuming continued exponential growth until the network explodes).

Since all their bets go via a few publicly known bitcoin addresses, it's possible to work out how well they're doing simply by looking at the blockchain.

etotheipi wrote a script to do exactly that, and periodically publishes its output in the first post of this thread:
  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80312.0

As of June 11th they were 695.26123453 BTC down, including over 100 BTC paid in transaction fees.

Some have speculated that it's possible to rob them by waiting until you mine a block which includes a payment to yourself, then send a transaction to SatoshiDICE  betting that same output, wait and see if you win or lose.  If you lose, quickly publish the block you mined, and if you win, don't.  That way your bet will be cancelled if you lose.  But you lose the block reward if you don't publish your block, so your winnings had better be more than 50 BTC or it's not worth doing.

I don't know if that's an attack that's actually feasible given how slowly SatoshiDICE has been running recently, or if it's ever been used.  I know at times they've been quite a lot up, so maybe it's just a high-variance game that they're temporarily losing.

Do you know that your signature is showing up as "*Image Removed*" only now?

I don't know if you see it the same as everyone else does.

Sounds like he's been exploiting loopholes to me! 

That took me a while to work out.  She hadn't received the dime, and the address I was playing with hadn't either.  They I remembered I have a donation address in my signature...  Thanks a lot! 


The last time I looked, SatoshiDICE was 700 BTC down overall since they started operations.  Their maximum bets get set to a maximum of 5 BTC across the board recently, even the ones which you're pretty sure to win and which pay very little.  I don't know if that's just a feature of how martingale betting looks to the house - a series of small losses with the occasional monster win.  But if max bet is now 5 BTC, there won't be any monster wins for the house, so I don't know.

How about on the first page, having a '+' button which adds 3 box boxes, for "bet", "win" and "guess" each time it's clicked, up to a maximum of 10 bets or so.  Each time it's clicked the hash changes as a new predetermined number is added to the secret.  The paranoid user can keep a list of all the hashes and see that sha256(junk date nnn1) = first hash, sha256(junk date nnn1 nnn2) = 2nd hash, etc. and the less paranoid but still careful user just needs to check that sha256(junk date nnn1 ... nnnN) = final hash.  You only ever store a database entry for the final hash, along with the "junk date nnn1 ... nnnN" secret.  The user has to pay for all the bets at once, to a single address, and gets the results all at once on a single page.  You count this big bet as if it were N single bets, so if you usually allow a user to have 10 pending bets, you only allow them one of these 10 bet combinations.

OK then.  I have an even better deal for you:

There's an over 9999.99% payout in the Strike Sapphire poker freeroll at 3pm PST (11pm in the UK).  That's right - a $2 prize pool for a $0 stake.  You do the math.  Just beware the divide by zero.  (For legal reasons there are no French or USAians allowed.  And definitely no Italians.  There are usually too many Portuguese however, but three out of four ain't bad).

I just tried and failed to sell people on a 216.66% payout.  What can you do? 

If I bet on a row of 3 numbers on a roulette table, I have a 3 in 38 (or 3 in 37, depending whether it's American or European roulette) chance of winning 12 times my money.  That's a 1-in-12.33333 or 1-in-12.66666 chance of winning 12x.

This is offering a 1-in-15 chance of winning 10x.

How does that "look" better in any way?

That sounds like you're returning less than 67% to the players.

Why would anyone play, when they can get around 99% at satoshidice, or 95% on a roulette table?

There's a poker tournament at StrikeSapphire starting at noon PST, 8pm in the UK, which costs $0.75 to buy into, and has a guaranteed prize pool of $3.25.

I'm currently the only one signed up for it.  If someone else signs up, we have an expected win of $1.67 each - more than double our buy-in.

(All balances and bets are denominated in US dollars, but deposits and withdrawals are done using Bitcoin, converted to/from USD at the MtGox spot price at time of deposit/withdrawal).

Seems like a good deal to me, especially if it ends up just 2 players playing.

If you use my referral link then I get a bonus when you deposit at no extra cost to you.