That will work, but it would be a lot quicker to just remove the bad transactions from your wallet using PyWallet.

Why don't you try exporting the keys you used in the faulty transactions first and importing them into your new wallet - then you'll see that the bets have been paid out, and that it's just bad transactions in your wallet that prevent you from seeing them.

Sent.  An email, that is.

OK, it took me a while to figure out how to stop my browser saying it accepted gzipped pages from your server, but now I can capture the packets in uncompressed form.

The problem now is I have too many outstanding games, and so can't reproduce the error, I think.

Can you cancel them for me?  All the ones to my deposit address will be mine...

I just saw the error again without clicking anywhere near the hash.

I just reproduced the error again, and took screenshots as I did.

I started with a 5-minute old hash:



Then I clicked the game logo to generate a new hash, filled in the details, double-clicked the hash, and hit control-c.  All ready to click the 'place ...' button:



Then I clicked the 'place ...' button I saw the error message:



Notice that the hash is still selected in that final image.  I only selected it once, and it stayed selected.

I think every time I've double-clicked the hash, I've seen the error, and every time I haven't, I haven't.  Seems odd though.

This all happened in the space of a minute or so.

Would it help if I did it again and grabbed the HTTP packets that hit the network for you?

I see.  I assumed you would be using a session cookie or something to track my activity on the site.

I tried control-f5 but it doesn't seem to do anything at all.

I monitored the squid logs when I hit control-r, f5, etc.  Here's what happened - it seems to be the same for each, except for control-f5 which as I say did nothing:

I notice that control-shift-r gives different messages, so maybe that's the equivalent of what you asked for.

See my post immediately before yours.  I had the error happen 3 times in a row, on 3 different hashes.  The first time may have been over an hour old, I'm not sure.  But the 2nd and 3rd were newly generated.

I ended up sending BTC to the address it told me, and it worked fine.  But that may have been my 4th attempt, which didn't show the error.

Is it possible that my double-clicking the hash at the bottom of the game page then control-c'ing to copy it is causing something bad?


It might be good to let the user see their list of unpaid games for themselves, and possible let them cancel them.  Otherwise they have to wait 2 (?) hours for them to expire if they create too many when playing around.  Unless there's a good reason not to, of course.

Not wanting to risk it, I clicked the banner to get a new hash, put my deposit address, changed the bets to 0.10 and 0.20, input my guess, copy/pasted the hash into a text editor and hit 'place your wager'.  Again it told me something had been tampered with.

I tried again, and again got the 'tampered with' error message.

I tried a 4th time, not copy/pasting the hash, and that time it worked.

Then when I tried a 5th time, trying to find out if I could narrow down exactly what caused the problem, it told me it was sick of me and that I should go away.  Or something.

("Too many outstanding games from your IP address. Please pay for a game or wait for one to time out")

Can I find a list of outstanding games, so I can pay for one?  Is it safe to pay for the "tampered with" ones?

I just got an error message when I hit the 'place your wager' button:



I hit the refresh button in the browser, and it appeared to fix itself:



What does that 'tampered with' error message mean?  And is it safe to proceed with the bet after refreshing the page?

Great.  2 minutes was just too short, and I found myself exceeding the 15 minutes sometimes too, if I got distracted writing a forum post part way through betting.

An hour should be good though.  And nobody would mind a couple extra base64 characters in their secret either, just to be on the safe side.

You're going to have to chose one I'm afraid.  I suspect I'd be a lot less effective as a corpse.


I think part of the problem is that you encourage me.  You care about getting it right.  If you just said "that's how it is, accept it or sod off", that would an the end to it.  What's that?  You've said that several times already?  Oh, I don't know then.


I was going to post a question about it on the stackexchange gambling site.  But I couldn't find it.  I'm sure I've seen it before, but now there's no sign of it ever having existed.


That's where I got my basic strategy from.  And I follow it.  And I'm still losing 0.8% when the house edge is only 0.51%.  Wouldn't you think 11k hands would be enough for variance to take a back seat?  I do remember one night when I played drunk, early on in my "Sapphire career", and lost about $20 very quickly betting $5 per hand.  Perhaps that accounts for the difference.

I was looking at the feasibility of brute-forcing your hash last night.

You use a 10 character base64 'junk', so even if I can predict the exact time, and guess the right preselected 0-9999 number, I still have to run an expected (64^10)/2 = half a million million million hashes to see if I'm right.

The entire bitcoin network currently hashes at 12 Thash/s.  So if I could convince them all to help me win your 4 BTC wallet balance, it would take us about 13 hours to brute force one of your hashes (given that I already guessed the time and preselected number correctly).

So I think it's pretty safe to increase the time the user has to make his guess a little. 

Yes you can.  See the first point on http://www.satoshidice.com/advanced.php.

That would be me.

I never heard from you on Skype.  I don't know if you tried to contact me.

Did you ever get the issue resolved?  I had forgotten about this thread until trying to answer a similar issue for a SatoshiDICE player here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77870.msg958137#msg958137

I think he has the same problem as you, except that his bad transactions are incoming, not outgoing.  Either way, deleting them using PyWallet should fix the problem.

Edit: I'll subscribe to this thread this time so I won't miss your reply again.

The thing is, the transactions on the SD site have been confirmed.  For example, your first bet was paid out here:

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/d2768db6562c0231da78188c282748b0b4219064792221ff6e32266ca07f01c1

The problem is probably that you have a conflicting transaction in your wallet which prevents this real transaction from showing up.

I think you'll need to remove the bad transactions from your wallet so the real ones can show up.

I've found pywallet's web interface to be great for doing that.


The wallet.dat file holds transactions as well as private keys.  That's why you sometimes need '-rescan' - it tells bitcoin to not assume that it knows about all the transactions from old blocks, but to rescan the blockchain and add any relevant transactions to the wallet.

In this case we have too many transactions in the wallet and need to remove the bad ones.  Jeremy had a similar issue recently - I'll link you to his thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=85689.0

Ah, I meant the hash that you already show.  The hash of the secret.  Or maybe a prefix of it if you want to keep the URL reasonably short.

So instead of visiting ?id=34, I visit ?hash=2490b823498e


Yup.  Nice work. 

I had a look around.  Lots have worse terms than Sapphire, some have better.

http://www.williamhillcasino.com/ has a 150% up to $100 bonus with a 20x deposit+bonus WR where roulette bets count for 25% and blackjack bets count for 20%.  That's an effective 80x and 100x playthrough respectively, compared to a 150x playthrough at Sapphire.

http://www.partycasino.com/promotions/welcome-bonus.html has a 50% up to $200 bonus with a 100x playthrough, but where blackjack and roulette bets count for 100%.  They also have a 100% up to $500, "recommended for Roulette players" bonus with a 50x playthrough where roulette bets count 100%.  That's a whole 3 times better than Sapphire's terms for roulette.

But you're right - most casinos say things like: "Classic Blackjacks, All aces Video pokers 2%
All Roulette, Sic Bo, Craps, Baccarat, Table Poker, Casino War, Red dog 0%"


Oh, OK.  Scratch the above then.


Fair enough.  The point I'm making though is that even if they do try to grind out the bonus by placing large bets, they still have a large negative expectation due to the playthrough requirements, and so it doesn't make sense to discourage them.  You're effectively turning away profit by doing so (assuming they can and bother to do the maths.  That's possibly a poor assumption).


That's right, of course.  It's about finding a reasonable balance for that risk to give the player a chance.


I do join them.  Look at your records from yesterday.  Other than the freerolls, how many buy-ins where there into poker tournaments?  Two.  Both from me.  Both were cancelled because nobody else bought in:



I wouldn't be surprised if I've bought into more tournaments than any of your other players.


I'm losing 0.8% on blackjack when the house edge is only 0.51%?  How many hands is that over?

Your terms and conditions say:


I was considering the combined positive expectation of losing slowly at blackjack and winning bonuses and leaderboard competitions as a "mathematical advantage".  You're mad because I don't lose fast enough to counteract the bonuses you offer?  From the numbers you give above, it sounds like I'm around $300-$350 up overall.  I hate to think how many hours that has taken, or how much that works out as per bug I've helped you find, but I think it's got to be pretty cheap on both counts.


Nor should it.  They're friends whose business I sent your way.  I think you'll find them to be profitable for you.  Next time they deposit, they won't have the 200% bonus available.  Maybe they'll use the 50% bonus.  After that there are no more bonuses that I know of.  If you don't want people referring their friends, please make that clear.


Here's how that went down.  Bijoux contacted me, completely confused about how to deposit onto Sapphire.  I offered to help her deposit, and did so.  I told her about the bonus too.  Is it meant to be a secret?  She suggested funding her boyfriend's account too.  I didn't suggest an amount, she chose $20 each, since that's the bonus limit.  I would expect that you got a lot of $20 deposits from people taking advantage of the $20 bonus...

This happened a couple of hours before the weekend leaderboard competition ended, and I could have done without the interruption to be honest.  At the time I had completely forgotten about referral bonuses, and only remembered later.  Anyway, here's the chat log:



She's the one who referred me to your site.  I believe you met her on Seals and told her about your casino.  So in the end it's all her fault.  That's what I reckon.


I am scientific by nature.  I tend to play the games which have the best expectation for me.  The tagline: "Strike Sapphire - Intelligent Entertainment for the Thinking Player" lead me to believe that this would be OK.  I don't think I'm exploiting loopholes.  I'm taking advantage of the generous bonuses and competitions that you offer.  "Loopholes" makes it sound like I've found things you didn't intend.


That's fair enough.

Just out of interest, I plotted the probability distribution functions of the profit when clearing a $20+$40 bonus on roulette with the new 20% rule (x-axis = final balance, y-axis = probability):



This assumes the player plays through the 60x WR to the end, win or lose, and has infinite bankroll.  Notice the green line is the "hedger", betting max-bet on red and black.  He does worst of all, with a tiny fraction of a chance of ending up with $60.  The guy with the best chance of coming out on top is the one who bets max-bet on red every spin.  All 3 players can expect to lose $60.00 * 30 * 5 * 2/38 = $473.68, but the $50-on-red guy has big enough variance that he has a decent chance of ending up positive.

Oh, and now I've missed the $0.75 buy-in $3.25 guaranteed poker tournament, damn it.

I hope you're OK with all the criticism.  I like the game and the site, and complain only in the hope of helping you make it better.

That said:


Confirmation should be singular.


I'd like to see my guess in that line each time its shown.  The page which I refresh while waiting for the result doesn't show my guess at all until the result is known.  I'd like to see a range "our selection will need to be over 8012 or under 4120 for you to win" or some such.

Is it intentional that I can look through other people's bets?  http://myriadcoins.com/game.php?id=29 isn't mine.  Someone bet 0.40 to win 0.43, and lost, despite having a 92% chance of winning.  When they win, I see their wallet address too (like in http://myriadcoins.com/game.php?id=27).  Instead of a sequence number, you could use ?id=<hash> - then I'd only be able to look at bets I made myself.

If I pick a bad id number, I see NaN: http://myriadcoins.com/game.php?id=27122343 gives:



Would anyone ever care to see the deposit address again?  It's a throwaway address.  Maybe it's useful for matching up which bets correspond with which wallet entries, I don't know.

I'd like to be able to click on the logo at the top of any page to return to the front page.  Currently it doesn't do anything.

How about an option to not have to specify an address for winnings, but instead have me check a box to agree that you'll return winnings to one of the addresses I pay from?

Now this is interesting:

I reloaded your page, and now the wallet address box has some history in it.  But only the things that I typed into the form I made locally using your input element's HTML code.

So I think the problem lies with your submit button not updating the input element's history, and not with the input element itself.

So I've managed to get your page to remember my wallet address by doing the following:

1. make a file with this in:


2. visit the file in a web browser

3. type my wallet address in the box and hit return

4. that's all - now my wallet address is available in your page's element's history