Is it possible for players to have a positive expectation playing poker in a casino? Sure it is. So isn't the casino losing money? Because the players who have a positive expectation do so at the expense of the worse players who have a negative expectation.

It's the same at bustabit. The house is +EV, and so are the good players. Their positive expectation comes from getting more than their fair share of the 1% "bonus" that is taken from every bet.

How many people have access to the server seeds?

That's where I would start my investigation if I were you. Anyone with access to the server seeds has effectively direct access to your whole bankroll, even if it is stored in offline wallets. That's a lot of money that you are trusting them with, especially when they can steal it without it being possible for you to detect the theft.


For sure. Whenever anyone wins a lot there's always a part of me wondering whether they are cheating somehow. I don't like how it feels to be suspicious of people like that, but I think it wouldn't be good to blindly trust everyone either.


I don't think that's true. If he's honest and lucky then any of those outcomes are likely to happen. And if he's cheating then they are also likely. If all he needs to do to convince you that he's not cheating is to take a 75 BTC loss, then why wouldn't he? He can always win it back again if he knows how to cheat. Look at HufflePuff on Prime Dice. He didn't just win repeatedly; he went to great lengths to go on big winning and losing streaks to make it look like he was just lucky. He would win a load then lose most of it back over and over.


How would you recognize it? I don't see any way you could distinguish between one of your partners using his server access to cheat on a separate account and a lucky player winning legitimately.


If any of you were cheating using the server seeds you surely wouldn't do it on your own account would you?


You have a pretty good memory. I think I bet 'hi' not 'low', but you have everything else spot on.


I think you're missing his question. He is asking *how* the seed is generated, not what the range is or how it is stored or accessed. How do you ensure that it is securely random and not predictable? Do you use a cryptographically secure RNG? If so you shouldn't be afraid to tell us which one. If not, why not?


Sites shouldn't give server access to their developers. Does MP? It seems kind of dangerous to trust a stranger with a million dollars of other people's money.


To be fair we're not talking about "a few bitcoins here and there". Wasn't the bankroll in the region of 1000 BTC? How long would it take you to earn that much at the rate MP are paying you?

Well, it hasn't been down much recently. And it was only 2 people who commented.

Don't you just add the client and server seeds together? If so, to "find a match", all you need to do is subtract the server seed from the result you want, and that gives you the client seed (modulo 2^32 or whatever you use). It took me less than 6 minutes to type this. I'm sure you could do the math in less than 6 seconds.


I don't know what to make of this. Surely as site owner you understand how the seeds work. Why did you post that it would take 6 minutes to do something that would take less than a thousandth of a second in reality, and then edit your post when called out on it?

I'm sure people would be very interested to hear your explanation for this.


I've no idea, but since you posted that he has edited his post to completely change its meaning.

Original post:


Replacement post:


"We are opening up as much information as possible" is inconsistent with editing old posts to remove inconvenient information. What's going on, guys?

It was down for maintenance for 35 minutes this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The biggest bet I ever saw on dice was a bet of 7016 BTC on just-dice.com.

At the time BTC was trading at $137 so that works out as a $961k BTC.

At today's prices that would be a 1393 BTC bet.

It's a tough call how much to allow investors to control their own risk factor.

Sensible investors like you (and I) will invest a little and set the multiplier high to limit our counterparty risk. But the majority of investors will invest their whole bankroll and set the multiplier high just to maximize their expected return, even though it is very risky. It's still safer than betting it on dice as a player where the expectation is negative.

Suppose there are two investors and a maximum leverage multiplier of 100x:

* A (that's you) has 100 BTC, and decides to invest just 1 BTC at 100x, so it's like he's investing his whole bankroll, but with just 1% of the counterparty risk.
* B (a gamber) has 100 BTC, and decided to invest the whole 100 BTC at 100x, to get as much profit as possible, screw the risk.

A ends up with just 1% of the house profit (after commissions). B gets the other 99%. By taking advantage of the massive leverage B has effectively taken all of A's profits away.

So instead suppose the house decides to limit the maximum multiplier to 4x:

Now when A invests 25 BTC at 4x and B invests 100 BTC at 4x, A still ends up with 20% of the house profits after commissions. B is still able to take part of A's share of the profits, but nowhere near as bad as when 100x leverage is allowed.

As this example shows, it actually works out in A's favor when the house cuts the maximum leverage multiplier. It stops the crazy gamble-investors from ending up with almost all the profits.

At 2:30 you say that if you invest in the bankroll BetKing takes 25% of the profits and you keep the rest. That's not right is it? I think it's more like a 50/50 split. They take 25% of the expected profit plus 25% of the actual profit, for a total of 50% on average.

No it isn't.

bustabit's bonus system means that it is possible to play a +EV strategy and so have a positive profit in the long run.

That is what people keep trying to tell you: taking advantage of the bonus is the only way to have a positive expectation in this game.

JPR is using some public cookie handling code written by a third party. That's entirely normal and doesn't suggest any kind of a link between the two entities.

Edit: I wonder if the description "cookie manipulation" is worrying you.

Manipulation doesn't necessarily indicate foul play. It has two definitions:

1. handle or control (a tool, mechanism, etc.), typically in a skillful manner.
2. control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.

The cookie.js description is talking about the first definition.

Then I've misunderstood the model.

I thought one of the points of MoneyPot was that it allows random untrusted strangers to run a casino by proxying the trust of the MoneyPot owner.

I thought it went like this:

I deposit to MoneyPot, the untrusted site places my bet on MoneyPot for me, and my winnings stay in my MoneyPot account, leaving no way for the untrusted site operator to steal any of my winnings.

Where did I get it wrong? I thought the site operator could place bets on my behalf that I hadn't agreed to, or could change the details of my bet before placing them, but I didn't realize they could outright take a portion of my winnings without me knowing it.

Edit: I guess if the untrusted casino site allows me to tip players then there's not much that can be done to prevent this attack other than banning the offending casino(s). It would even be possible for a dodgy casino to show a winning bet as a loss and keep all the winnings for themselves. If the player didn't bother checking the bet (and/or tipping history) on MoneyPot itself he wouldn't even know he was being stolen from.

How is that even possible? I thought MP handled all the payouts with client-side apps, so how can JPR be skimming 20% from the jackpots?

Is that 20% reflected in the house edge as reported by MP?

Has this been discussed publicly elsewhere? Got a link to it?

Thanks.

It's kind of hard to understand what you're trying to say, but it sounds like your computer is infected with some kind of malware.

I would suggest wiping the hard drive after backing up any data you want to keep, installing a more secure operating system, and being more careful in future about what programs you download and what sites you visit.

It's quite likely that the person who installed the malware was watching your screen and messing with whatever files you were working on. It's not a coincidence that the files you had open were the ones that got altered.

It seems very unlikely to me that the jackpotracer site is able to delete files from your computer, hack your router, etc.

Did you mean to write "unreadable parsnips"?


I had to google to find out what you meant. To me BM stands for Bowel Movement.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BM

No. You didn't read the thread very well!

You could argue that if it costs 0.0002 BTC to make a transaction with 1 input, and since one average only 1 in 16 bets will win, the average payout transaction will have 16 inputs making the transaction roughly 16 times bigger and so 16 times more expensive to send.

If all that is true then it is right that they deduct the 0.0002 from the stake amount and not the payout itself. Someone has to pay to "tidy up" all the small bet amounts. The actual number of inputs per payout is going to be pretty random, depending on the coin selection algorithm of the client they are using, but on average there will be 16 inputs per payout.

No. Imagine a site with a high house edge but with no customers. Your expected profit would be zero.

Alternatively, imagine a site with a good house edge and a lot of high volume customers, but with an enormous bankroll, so big that your investment is a tiny drop in the ocean. You will end up getting a tiny share of the site's profit, and so your expect profit is pretty low still.

Thirdly, imagine a site with a good house edge, decent volume, and a reasonable bankroll size, but which takes something like 50% of your expected profit in commission (hey Dean!) - that's going to severely affect the profit you make.

To calculate your expected profit you need to take into account the house edge, the betting volume on the site, what fraction of the bankroll you make up, and how much commission the site charges you.


I think it's pretty much academic, since OP seems to have abandoned his plan to run his hedge fund style investment scheme. But yes, you would want to consider all these things.

I just updated that bootstrap post with an up-to-date copy of the blockchain.

I think you're right about the cause of the problem. The blocks arrive out of order, the client keeps up to 750 new blocks in memory while it waits for the missing older blocks to arrive, but is only willing to keep 750 in memory before it starts ignoring out of order blocks.

I think rebasing the CLAM client from a newer release of the Bitcoin client would solve this problem. I also think xploited is in the process of doing exactly that. You can see his work on the 'reindex' branch of his own github repository, here:

    https://github.com/l0rdicon/clams/tree/reindex

Hopefully he'll merge his work onto the release branch some time so everyone can benefit from the improvements.

You noticed that he failed to answer any of my three questions too.

mastertrader777:

Ignore the trades that OP made that you didn't tell him to.

There was no agreement that OP wasn't allowed to buy anything that you didn't advise.

Just look at the trades you told him to make.

Would he have made a profit if he had followed your words to the letter?

I don't think so.

Do you like how I am writing every sentence in a new paragraph?

Or does it annoy you?

I know it annoys me.

Please answer my three simple questions.

RHavar also raises a very good point:

"No one can sanely offer to cover your downside but let you keep the upside, which also means he'd be a lot better off just making those trades himself"

Your guarantee makes no sense.

You could just make the trades yourself.

The only way your guarantee makes any sense is if you didn't intend to honor it.

And that makes you a scammer.

In my opinion.

I think they insta-mined 10 million rubies in the first block. That's 100 BTC worth at the moneypot 1000 satoshi floor.


I guess they only need 105 BTC to buy all the rubies that will exist after the first year. But I don't understand why they would be wanting to buy Rubies at an artificially high price.


That makes it even harder to understand. Why make a promise to "always" be willing to buy the coin for 1000 satoshis if it's going to be abandoned in a year's time?

Using past ROI is much the same as picking sites at random. You need to look at the expected future ROI not the past.


Theoretical EV is the same as the actual EV. EV is a theoretical concept.