This is a variant of the "follow the money" argument.  You are saying if you want a feature, either code it or pay somebody to code it.  Very true, but it's also not the way modern corporations grow, see my comment upstream.  

case in point:  Swiss banks prided themselves on secrecy, and did their own thing for decades.  World opinion thought otherwise of Swiss banking secrecy, and majority opinion (of the kind you seem to disparage) voted Swiss banking secrecy out of existence.  Even the Swiss parliament bowed to world opinion (chiefly the EU and USA).   Another more familiar example to computer types is the old Linux vs Windows debate.  True, Linux is 'open source' and 'bazaar vs cathedral' models and all that, but absent mobile phones (if you consider that Linux) it still has less than about 2% market share.  The masses (majority opinion) spoke, and the "money" listened or went out of business or stayed obscure.  Don't think for a second the Bitcoin whales that hold significant amounts of BTC don't understand this.  They will sacrifice the beloved 'open source' and 'anonymity' features of BTC if it allows a 10x increase in price, in a heartbeat.

Well said.  What your detractors are pointing out is that the "stakeholders" (the customers in your example) have no real vote since they are not paying the core devs.  This is true, but also "old school".  Modern corporations in fact adopt your proposal, which is the modern trend, and incorporate 'stakeholders' in varying degrees.  An example is the PR campaign from BP, the oil company, saying to environmental groups "we agree with you on green energy" (mainly to ward off harmful legislation).  More directly, in your example, failure to listen to the "stakeholders" might mean less adoptions from the masses, and Bitcoin may go the way of "Linux" with PC operating systems.  Or, as I think G.A. and some others want (and have hinted) Bitcoin may go 'mainstream' and abandon the anonymity features it has, which will actually make it more suitable for international money transfers (i.e., it will prevent Bitcoin from being banned, and Bitcoin will essentially become a super-cheap, turbo-charged Western Union or improved PayPal, which is not such a bad thing actually).

I've only been here a short time, but already I see the writing on the wall (that if I have time I will explain later) and that is:  BTC is doomed as presently designed (though I am a holder of BTC and hope it goes up in price).

OK, I get it now. Thanks.  But there is a danger in "Groupthink" if you will.  Thought experiment:  suppose a very trusted person says: "This is the new canonical version of Bitcoin's blockchain, which incorporates new features XYZ.  Please use it from now on."  The vast majority of Bitcoin node owners trust this person, so they install this blockchain en masse.  Later, it is found to have a programming bug.  The blockchain is intact, but the bug makes the entire Bitcoin P2P network unstable and it crashes.  So this is not bitrot, but effectively, as in my bitrot crashes RAID example, this thought experiment shows the same thing.

Exactly, good point.  BikiniDice should put his BTC where his mouth is.  Let somebody invest in his company and if the profits are above average for a week, the investor should get his money back plus a profit, up to a maximum.  If in fact he lose money for a week, the investor should take a loss, up to a maximum.  That is real investment, not the games that BikiniDice is playing.  He is following the dicing industry script--no creativity, no new ideas, just treating his customers like trash and addicts.

Invest in a losing business?  Where the customer always loses?  You must think your customers are losers?  Way to go: you're reached a new low in your investment in humanity.

And keep in mind that the chief scientist of Bitcoin (GA) has said on his blog--correctly IMO--that it's only a matter of time before Bitcoin anonymity must go away. In fact, he says users will have to either pay to stay anonymous or give up their anonymity in exchange for lower block verification fees (read his blog, I don't have the link but this is well known).  Essentially, long term, the Bitcoin founders and the people that really matter are giving up anonymity in exchange for going mainstream, under the bet that if they try and stay anonymous, FinCen and other such entities around the world will regulate BTC out of existence, but if they go mainstream it will become acceptable to the average citizen and hence more profitable (and the price of BTC will go up).  It's a Faustian bargain but also an offer you can't refuse (prosper by going mainstream or be banned--your choice).  Also of course due to the more efficient manner of BTC it will replace PayPal if it goes mainstream, and PayPal probably knows this and wants to coop BTC before BTC makes PayPal obsolete.

I agree, though I have doubts whether Bitcoin will survive in its present form (I am long BTC).  If you read the Powers that be in the Bitcoin community, they are interested in making it more 'mainstream' which means getting rid of anonymity more and more, and eventually it becoming something like Paypal, but with much lower middleman fees (the block chain verifiers will get a small fee and become the 'middleman' that Paypal now is).  If that's what it takes to go BTC accepted, then the thinking is that it's a good thing.  But they will lose me as a customer if they go down that route.  However, I'm in the minority (and so is most of this board I suspect).  The real BTC powers are counting on mainstream acceptance, not what this board thinks.

Try setting up in a virtual machine or in another computer.  BTW always have the latest version of Armory running.  I feel sorry for you since it took me 44  hours to install Armory (before it was online) since the blockchain had to be downloaded... such is the price of progress?

The other day, for the sake of good publicity for Bitcoin miners, which is the topic of this thread in general, I saw in a glossy magazine a large bitcoin miner stationed in Greenland, who plans to use hydrogenerated electricity, and of course get rid of waste heat by nature of the cold climate there.  Forget the name of the mining outfit.

They are his virtual customers.  Just like elisabetta canalis zelig is his virtual girlfriend.  But it's your money my friend, feel free to throw it away...

This rant by cascadianhacker was excellent.  I was just about to post this when I saw this thread. 

My favorites below.  I laughed at the "failure of C++ comment".  I think the bitcoin devs should switch to C#, which is easy to program in (for me at least) and has automatic garbage collection with very little overhead, and supports the Generics library and has an IO library too.  What's not to like? 

TonyT

http://cascadianhacker.com/blog/2014/10/20_a-summary-of-changes-to-bitcoin-since-0321.html
 
The takeaway: next to nothing has been done to bring the Bitcoin project forwards since 0.5.3 (the duplicate TXID rules). This (and the comments to code ratio) speaks as strongly to the failure of C++ as an expressive language that fosters the construction of (developer) performance-enhancing abstractions as it does to the failures of the group of humans who've sprung up around the thing seeking to make a buck; make a name for themselves as "Bitcoiners" or what have you; or even just a few miserable credits in the eyes of those who would print fiat currencies endlessly by derping relentlessly at its fringes.

Bitcoin Core is stalled out. It's gone precisely nowhere since 0.5.3 (unless you count the SSL patches that should never have been necessary in the first place). {NOTE: 2012-03-14 - Bitcoin-Qt version 0.5.3 released}

//

 Doubling down on the "address reuse is evil and dangerous, bad for privacy and so on!" poor decisions. Sending your change to new addresses is, in the vast majority of scenarios, entirely pointless. The "hierarchical deterministic wallet" stuff is cool: being able to back up a single master key and have an arbitrary number of addresses keyed off it trumps the current behavior by miles.

The current behavior is for every transaction to spin up new addresses for change destination. This leads to wallet backups actually expiring - a phenomenally stupid thing that fell out of the poorly-thought-through "address reuse is evil, let's send change to arbitrary addresses" implementation shitshow. I look forward to finding when this actually happened at some point in my bitcoin archaeology. If, that is, I follow through in any detail.
//
From Gavin's own notes: "…accomodate higher transaction volume, and to measure what percentage of hashing power simply goes along with defaults." Read as: "we're probing the network to estimate our ability to push stuff through, and if by chance we get people to run this code the blockchain will increase in size even faster lending credence to our other efforts to put strange into the reference client in a vain attempt to reduce blockchain size". Note the plausible deniability that comes from running one campaign to "keep the blockchain small" while all the while bloating it.

http://cascadianhacker.com/blog/2014/10/20_a-summary-of-changes-to-bitcoin-since-0321.html

Yeah I like the Armory Deterministic Wallet myself:  print and scan the initial seed, password protect the scan, email it to your Gmail, and you're pretty much set with your private keys, never having to backup. 

Are you gong out of business soon?  I'd like to hear a 'sure'.

IMO there's nothing unique about your site.  You could have jazzed it up with sexy girls from your country, or even a live chat with girls (or pretending to be girls) but instead you simply cut and paste bikini models from Google Images and use some cheap code (writing code for a random number generator is trivial; the payments system you probably bought from somebody else).  Do you feel like a business person doing this sort of stuff? It's shameful a grown person like you is wasting their time on this.  I hope you fail, it will be a good example for the Bitcom community.  Just my two .0000001 BTCs.  Good luck and better luck next time.

Nice setup.  I personally don't like Android as it seems anybody can hack it, and if you lose your 'cheap Android device' you lose your money (like a USB stick--I have picked up an old USB stick from five years ago and found it no longer works).  But your system seems to work.  Nevertheless, I still say BTC is alpha/beta stage.
 

I doubt Facebook will allow you to trade BTC.  They have many rules and regulations for developers.  It would be nice however if they did.

mixers don't keep records, but if you don't trust them, your bitcoin can be traced to you more easily, even if you hide your IP.  Your IP address is not going to be logged unless the government or police are after you.  Then they will ask your ISP to track you, or they will install their own backdoor sniffer program without asking.  So you must trust somebody or you will be traced.  How do you intend to buy BTC?  The same trust exists, unless you buy it in person from a stranger in your town.

Using Armor without TOR is safer I have heard, than using it with TOR, since TOR has lots of spyware sites in it (the dark network) that will steal your BTC.  

But I'm a newbie, so ask around.  

If you worry about IP addresses being tracked (which are not permanent, unlike BTC addresses), just follow this protocol:  wash your BTC twice, using two different mixers, sending the output of one into the input of the second, and the output of the second back to your Armory wallet.  Next, go to the VPN that accepts bitcoins, they advertise on this forum but they're easy enough to find (or find an equivalent service on the net) and buy a year (or month, etc) of VPN service.  Pay them in BTC with a fake name and some email address.  Click the checkbox in Armory settings so it works with the VPN (see the Armory Help files, it's easy to find).  Now you can use Armory without Tor, and not only are you secure but also your IP address is hidden by the VPN.  And the chances of the VPN ripping off your BTC in a 'man in the middle' attack is very small (they are a reputable company, I've looked them up).

What?  You give the next server seed for every roll?  So your server seed rotates, A, B, C, D, . and you will give seed "B" on roll "A"?  So you don't vary your server seed out of sequence?  Is that what you claim?  Or you are just bad with English?  Please tell us in any event why your customers always seem to lose.  Let me visit your page now...yes, all red, though in fairness most of your customers don't play x< 50% but play increased odds bets...  lots of losers out there in crypto-coin land.  Good luck!

No I'm not an academic and yes I do code.  As you say, try it and see, and if it's really valuable there's no need to sell it:  why would you sell something to 1000s of people that's a gold mine for you?  Just use it and get rich.  However, if you do get rich, don't forget your cyber-friends that got you there.... my Bitcoin address is in my profile.  You're welcome. ;-)

"Because you write about legal problem only in this thread.." What legal problem?  You have legal problems now?  

I stand corrected about the server seed, but please answer the following question:  what if you have a pair of seeds, server and client, and you know which combination will 'win' for the house.  Then, every time a player plays, by picking a seed, that you provide, you at bikinidice change the server seed so that the combination of your new seed and his (the customer) seed yields a predetermined outcome.  That would be cheating.

Example:  Server Seeds A, B, C  and client seeds 1, 2, 3.  Combination A1, B1, C1 always gives a certain outcome.  Now client picks "1", and you pick A, so A1 results. Fine. Now client does not change his seed, but you pick B, so B1 gives another outcome.  You know this customer does not change his bet except every third time.  You know B1 will win for you.  So you switch the seed the second roll, and you win every second roll.  Is this why you change your seed every roll?  To cheat the customer, who is likely not to change their seed?  Answer please.

Maybe this explains why your site has so much red in it?  Why your customers always seem to lose?  Do you care to explain how your site avoids the above problem?  I hear you...running away.  Run away little man! See Sergey run...