Thanks for the compliments If you want to, feel free to make another bet with some of the bitcoins I sent you. Still about 20 minutes to the first game!

Nah it's my fault, should have thought of that possibility before. It's already been fixed, from now on the pages will refresh automatically so you don't need to worry about it

Okay, here's what happened:

The point line for the Cavaliers - Raptors game was originally 197.5, but once we got word that Kyrie Irving would miss the game, the line dropped to 194.5. Of course all the bets that had been made prior to that would still get the original line, as well as the bets that were made around the time that change went into effect (within 30 minutes of the change or so).

About 90 minutes later there was one more bet for under, so I figured that the bettor was betting on the new line. But of course if you still had the original page open on your browser, you also saw the original line. The game finished at 195 points. So if that's the case it's a winning bet and I'll send you the full amount.

We try to keep the point lines and odds as static as possible for this reason, but sometimes there needs to be small adjustments either way. For this reason the page should be refreshed every once in a while.

Actually, this issue should be rather easily (and obviously) solved with an auto refresh script, so customers need not worry about it in the future. I'll get to work on it right away. Thanks for bringing up the issue!

Okay, thanks for the answers. I'm probably making way too much out of it, but I do get some strange transactions every once in a while... like once there were 10 bitcoins unconfirmed for 11 hours (no fee), and another time when I didn't see a payment in my transactions list until the next day... but so far so good.

Fair enough, I'm not trying to say it's wrong or anything. I'd just be very worried about carrying that much cash with me, and if I was making a purchase, I'd prefer to withdraw the cash at the target destination. But I guess there might be cases when that might be inconvenient. Bitcoin is great when the wallet can at least be encrypted, if only there were easier ways to exchange it for cash quickly.

You make a good point about declaring the cash. Especially when there are plenty of countries where safety might be a concern (inluding when dealing with the officials).

I wish I wasn't already a Namecheap customer so I could transfer my domains again. Very curious to see what happens once we get an official statement!

It's a bit early to tell, frankly I haven't put a lot of thought into the MLB season yet. But the odds will be around the same margins as with our current games.


Sorry to disappoint, I know there is demand for it. But there are already a few upcoming leagues in our "budget" so I want to make sure that we can offer all the games from our current lineup before trying to offer everything else. It's still a fairly new site and I hope we'll have college basketball in the near future.


Don't worry about it, I paid it anyway this time since it was so early in the game - though that's strictly unofficial and in the future late bets will still be voided. I'll see if we can implement a system that would make games that have already started disappear, but so far the attemps haven't been compatible with the site.


Yeah, there were some very strange scores yesterday on basketball, the point total lines weren't anywhere close... and 3 out of 5 hockey games going into overtime. I guess a lot of players were disappointed with the performances of certain teams, though of course there were plenty of winners as well.

FC Barcelona - Real Madrid game on today, odds now available

Hey,

I'm very paranoid when it comes to double spending in my line of business. Unfortunately this is also very inconvenient for business and customers. I'm wondering if there are any signs that I should look for with possible double spenders, since even if they are unsuccesful, I'd still like to know if someone was trying to mess with me. So, a couple of questions...

If I see an unconfirmed incoming transaction on my Bitcoin Client, and those bitcoins are later spent elsewhere, does the incoming transaction disappear without a trace from my transaction list? Does it disappear from Blockchain.info records? Do they ever even show up anywhere? Are the time stamps on my Client trustworthy?

Speaking of which, can Blockchain.info wallets be used for double spending, or do you need custom software? Wondering if payments coming from Blockchain's IP are reliable.

Is there any "safe" time during which a double spend is unlikely to happen? Say, if a no-fee transaction is confirmed in less than 30 or 60 minutes, do you think a double spender would have enough time to spend it elsewhere or would they need many hours to do so reliably?

Any other signs that I should keep an eye out for?

Thanks for your time,

-Paul

[edit] Would a tech board been more appropriate for this? Not sure :/

I'm sure you have your reasons but I'm still curious as to why anyone would feel the need to transport more than 10k of cash at any time. As was said, you can transport more within the EU, as long as you declare it first, so why not declare it? Though I would like to know what happens after that, does the government place you on some watch-list as a potential arms trader?

I doubt that transporting bitcoins is a problem though. I would think that it's more like carrying a credit/debit card with a high limit rather than cash. Technically you don't "own" those bitcoins at all (no one does), you just have the right to use them and they can't expect you to lose your bitcoins before traveling.

Yeah, sorry about that. So many games last weekend, I couldn't get the rest of them online in time for people to make bet. Of course we want to have as many options as possible but I think we have to admit that not every option is going to be available for every game.

MLB season starts at the end of March, right? We'll cover it too since that's what people seem to want. Another "league" that we're adding next month is Formula 1 racing, so keep an eye out for that


Max bet to wager is 10 BTC. Betting 10 minutes before game start is fine if you use the default transaction fee, which I recommend for everyone. No-fee transactions might take a few hours to confirm which could be too late. This is of course one downside of the system that is difficult to control when your transaction will be confirmed, hopefully future versions of Bitcoin will be better in that aspect.

We're pretty flexible with the confirmation limit, I'm not going to void a bet if it's a minute or two late, but sometimes we get a bet once a game has already finished, so those kinds of bets cannot be accepted because there might be some foul play involved :/

Cool site, but there's room for improvement. Here are a couple of tips that should be easy to fix.

1) If you do international shipping, you need to mention it somewhere (preferably on the front page). I didn't find that info anywhere, so I assumed it was US only before reading this thread.

2) What's the logic behind the left menu bar? I recommend either put it in alphabetical order or based on popularity. Right now you have "miscellaneous" on top, and I doubt that shaver accessories are your top products. Consumer electronics should probably be a lot higher on the list.

3) "Privacy Policy" is listed twice at the bottom, not very professional... Did you not notice that?

Keep up the good work, I might buy something later if the shipping prices are reasonable.

[edit] You'll want to clean up your Privacy Policy page too. Have a look at it and you'll see what I mean.

Glad to hear that. Also the last of yesterday's winners have now been paid, there were a lot of them, congrats.

We've increased the minimum bet size to 0.1 BTC. Don't mean to discriminate anyone, but with the transaction fees, handling bets of 0.01 BTC just doesn't seem very meaningful. And we do recommend people use the transaction fees when making late bets to make sure the bets are confirmed before match start.

Today's early games are up and the rest are coming shortly! Not sure if I mentioned it before but we've got today's UFC matches as well

Yeah, should have had those games posted yesterday, sorry about that. Game winners are now online and total goals will be up soon. I'm still going through some of yesterday's transactions, there were a lot of them, so it'll take still a bit longer for the winning bets to be paid out.

Great work guys, can't say how grateful I am for the work you're doing. I have a question though:


I assume this means only transactions sent from 0.8.0? So that an attacker can just keep using the older version for his purposes, regardless of if the receiver has the latest version. Not saying that it still isn't a very important fix to have for the future.

Also, yesterday I saw some very quick confirmations on a lot of transactions, even no-fee transactions were generally confirmed in less than 10 minutes, which is very good for business. Does that have something to do with this update or is it just a coincidence?

Wow, people really made a lot of money on hockey yesterday. Almost all of the bets were winners, even with some surprising results in certain games (Detroit what are you doing??). Congrats.


At the moment I'm the only one working on lines and payments, but I get some help elsewhere. We don't exactly generate enough profit so that we could hire people to work for us, but maybe some day... That's why I'd like to keep the betting options to the most popular games that I know get action every day. We're slowly increasing the numbers of bets and leagues though.


For the NBA and NHL, five minutes past is fine because games don't actually start before that. For football and such, it's exactly at the announced time. Of course it's better to bet early than late if it can be helped. Transactions through Tor are fine as long as they get through in time.

You guys do make some good points. The thing is, if we add NCAA, then there needs to be enough action on those games to make posting them worthwhile, and I'm not so sure if that is the case. Like you said, it's already easily more than 10 additional games per day to keep track of, and some people will still be disappointed if their favorite team isn't included.

It already takes a lot of time to update NBA and NHL due to the large number of games being played every day, and a lot of teams playing back-to-back. So I'm kind of hoping that people interested in basketball will find something interesting in our NBA selections. Another thing to consider is the unpredictability of NCAA games.

Football is much easier to do in the sense that there is usually a limited number of games being played each week, so we can make odds available to play much earlier and they reach a much larger audience.

Yes, in general, but we recommend users pay at least the default transaction fee when making late bets. Our official rule is that a bet needs to have at least one confirmation before match start (or at least soon after it). This doesn't usually take more than a couple of minutes to happen.

There have been a few cases when we've got very large bets hours afterwards, even after a match had ended, and there is currently no way to check for possible double spending on these, so those bets have to be voided for security reasons.

We hope we can add at least Bundesliga soon to our selection. We've rearranged our site, offering more bets, but for the moment that also means that parlay bets are offline due to the increased number of bet options. Maybe our parlay system wasn't really good enough to begin with anyway.

Yeah that could be one way to do it. Just don't want people to get disappointed if their game isn't playable. We're updating the site again, so let's see if we can add that.


Yes, this is the downside of our system. It's not really possible for us to create 100+ new bitcoin addresses every day because it takes a lot to maintain them.


We're adding more goal selections to the NHL today. However I don't think it's smart for us to try to add every option just because somebody else is doing it too, we try to stick to the most popular bets and avoid cluttering up the site.


Yes, but we didn't get such a bet yesterday. Instead we had 0.20000315, which was read as "03, 15" and that bet didn't win. Another bet was 0.2000055, which seems to include only one selection. I'll refund both of these for now. I know the system is a bit complicated but that's the cost for not needing an account to play.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, keep playing!

[edit] Wait a minute, maybe it's just my client that cut off the last zero on that parlay selection. In that case it's a winning bet!

Bettors certainly seem to think so. Glad to see more interest towards "traditional" football!

Sorry for the delay. I think we are able to add more leagues to our selection, so the question is... what or which leagues? I know NCAA basketball is very popular, but like you said I can't guarantee that all games and selections will be available every night. I'll take a look into it anyway.

Don't forget NBA returns tonight with 9 games, we'll have those odds online very soon!

[edit] Forgot to mention that we've added more goal and goal scorer selections to our Champions League games!