People here really should study NLNico's post. Just to add to his points, you'll be lucky to find a reliable, qualified programmer you can trust for $100/hour. I've paid several people online for work, and the vast majority of cases have been total disasters. The last time I paid what should've worked out to ~$100/hour I ended up with poor quality, half-finished code that I needed to completely refactor myself. (I'm sure this gets a lot easier if you have stable work to offer. But it's rarely as simple as "find someone who can code")

People on BaB chat often speculate how hard it'd be to cost to run their own (the source is open), and most people seem to believe they can host it for ~$6 a month (on something like DO). While you can indeed host a dev version for that, in reality, i'm spending over $500/month on database hosting costs alone. (That's to have a replicated database (in different datacenters), streaming and nightly backups. Even a few minutes of dataloss would be completely unacceptable, you really can't tell people "sorry we lost all your bets since the last nightly snapshot!". Add in all the other hosting costs (bitcoind, webserver, cf, depositor) and it's starting to not look pretty.

Another good example is DustDice.com that's something that I personally thought would be an instant-hit, but to date it's only clicked with a very select few (ironically, one of which was a whale who raped the site) and it's not financially even come close to paying off its development costs. Fortunately the bankroll is used for multiple sites, otherwise it'd be a total disaster tying up 500+ btc just so a whale could play, who rarely plays.  To add the extra features that might making it more appealing (streaming all-bets), it basically needs a total rewrite at this point as well. While I still like the idea, at this point it's a bit of a write-off.

And I also think the market is a lot smaller than people realize. I believe BaB is the 2nd most popular bitcoin casino/game and I'm pretty sure I make less than I would working at a big tech company with significantly less stress and guilt.

A tricky situation. While I personally don't think that ideas in themselves are worth much, but I guess what I'd do in your situation is apply for a patent on it. At least then you can speak freely about it (and importantly, sell the idea. Even if it's the best idea in the world, it'll be hard to convince people it's worth anything) and then go and license or sell it to someone who is too legitimate to just blatantly steal it.

This is probably more of a question for multibit devs, but two possible reasons I can think of:

A) multibit incorrectly thinks that using nlocktime is non-standard
b) a (malicious) bitcoin node modified the withdrawal transaction, and your client saw the incorrect one (with the high s value)


Either way, there's nothing to worry about. MoneyPot only sends out standard transactions, and it'll confirm like normal, and show up in your spendable balance.

It took a lot longer than I thought, and was a lot more stressful than I would have imagined it would be, but it seems like my theory did indeed hold =)

Damn it. Guess that serves me right for trying to use gender-neutral pronouns. What's your MP or BaB username?

(Give me a day or two to verify the solution, and after this, no more prize money will be given out   )

Nah, MoneyPot doesn't audit sites at all. We try be an open system, so anyone can use our platform without permission.

However, a site can only have access to the money you explicitly credit it with, and can never rig rolls (they provably fair is done by MP itself). However, there's nothing stopping them just tipping away your balance. So a moneypot site can steal from you, but if they do, you'll know. =)

Our biggest win yet:

https://www.bustabit.com/game/1954550


A 15 BTC win, on a game that went over 5000x!

You could estimate, but it's impossible to do it perfectly. If you imagine the game busts at 0x, you really have no idea what people were going to cashout. You can make a guess, but it'll still be a guess. Especially the whales tend to just play on gut feelings, so that's not something easy to predict and it makes a big difference if you assume they were going to cashout at 1x (0% house edge)  or a super high autocashout (normally ~0.9%).

Anyway, a few people have been asking for it, so here's our updated chart:

One thing I like about JD/clam is that there's virtual zero chance, or incentive for a big-exit scam. That's in comparison to most bitcoin investment sites, were there's strong financial incentives to do it.

Dooglus will probably hate me for saying this, but I see just-dice investing/clams as an epic version of bustabit. You can buy-in (polo), or claim the faucet (dig) and now the goal is to hold on (invest) while making phenomenal returns. You can cashout anytime, or risk the giant bust

SPV wallets are pretty simple, they just download the whole blockchain but throw away transactions they don't "care" about. But because they throw away transactions they don't care about, they're unable to tell if the block is valid or not (e.g. a transaction could be fabricating bitcoins). But because they know a lot of work went into creating the block (you can check the hash), they know that it's sort-of-maybe-probably is going to be valid. After a lot of other blocks are made on top of this, you have even a much higher confidence it's valid (or at least, people are spending a lot of hash power to make it look so).

But however, if you change your definition of "what you care about" (aka importing addresses), you'll need to re-download the blockchain, from the earliest point you think interesting transactions could be. Although, that doesn't have to be a big deal at all. As an optimization you can  push a (bloom) filter up to the bitcoin client you're downloading from and ask them to pre-filter your results. That saves a *lot* of bandwidth, and allows you to power through the blockchain pretty fast. That's a little bit of a hack though, because with the current structure you have no way of knowing if they over-filtered or not)

Yeah, that would be quite interesting. One thing about BaB is that it uses a dynamic house edge, but not all the information is known (when someone would have cashed out). But it could be conservatively estimated by assuming they would've cashed out at +0.01 of what they busted.  (And an over-estimate could be calculated by assuming they were exclusively relying on their autocashout)

I'll try get around to that tomorrow, as I'm actually interested in this very much =)

This is how crazy things have been:

Oh very nice! This is quite different. With some hotkeys, I can see this as being pretty relaxing and hypnotic

I noticed you verify the bets on behalf of users, which is a good thing -- but it also relies on randomizing a client seed (otherwise theoretically MP could predict the direction people are going to bet (although doing such would expose us to untold risk)). This is the function I recommend sites to use:

https://gist.github.com/RHavar/a6511dea4d4c41aeb1eb

to generate the client seed. Optimally the client seed should be stored in local storage, so if there's ever a network error or what not, the same client seed would be re-used (to avoid MP feigning errors until you pick a more favorable client seed (another strategy that would expose us to untold risk)).

Note to self: Create a blog post about provably fair best practices


Good luck with the site! And if you need anything, you can get a hold of me on the slack channel (get an invite on slack.moneypot.com)  =)

Molloype on BetterBets is tearing the place apart! BetterBets has a pretty cool spyglass feature if you want to watch him in action. In the last 24h he's wagered 1794 BTC, and in the process made a profit of 18.94 BTC. We've paid 8.944 BTC to the app in commissions, which means investors have taken a -27.885 BTC hit from him (although slightly offset by some of the other action). Ouch.


Yeah, fair enough. I've lost 250 BTC in the last week bankrolling bustabit, taking 6 months of my income, so that +EV certainly doesn't come easy. But as people divest, it should increase the returns for people still in which I hope means it reaches a nice happy equilibrium. Also I think the vast majority of investors tend to over-invest, it really shouldn't an all-or-nothing proposition.

I think that's far too complex for most people to understand.

I think a simple 2 (non-recursive) step process is best to convince people it's even possible.


* Get half your bet (0.5 BTC) and bet at @  3x.
*  If you win (33%), you've made a profit of 1 BTC, and have terminated the sequence! Congratulations!
*  If you lost the first bet (67%), you'll still have 0.5 BTC. This time bet it at 4x  (to win back your loss from step 1, and make a net profit of 1 btc).
   *  If you win the second bet  (24.75%), you'll have made by your loss from the first bet, and be up 1 BTC, and terminated the sequence. Congratulations!
   *  If you lost the second bet (75.25%), you'll be out of money, and have terminated the sequence. Awww


So basically there's 3 possible outcomes:

1.  You won 1 BTC with 1 bet (33%)
2.  You won 1 BTC after 2 bets (67%*24.75% = 16.5825%)
3.  You lost 1 BTC by losing both bets (67%*75.25% = 50.4175%)


In other words, you have a 49.5825% of winning, compared to the traditional 49.5%!


(Or course, Dooglus' solution is better. But it works in pretty much exactly the same way by minimizing the amount you wager)

Probably the anti-DoS browser check rom cloudflare killing it. I'll try lower the setting, and see if MP doesn't die =)

Ahh touché, forgot I wrote that. I can't remember if you own dooglus on mp or if that's an imposter, so I've credited the 0.1 btc to dooglus on bustabit. Enjoy!

I'm not really sure what you mean. What they're doing is figuring out the answer to questions like: "I made 1686 bets @ 2.06x, but only won 777 of them. How unlucky was I?"

If you want to know if you were cheated or not, really what you need to do is look at the provably fair system (like the analysis I posted a page earlier). In the end, you can hit a 1-in-a-million bad luck run, but that doesn't mean you were cheated at all.

Or if you want to know the probability of a single outcome, you can use shiba's command

!prob <condition>


like:

!prob >= 2.23x
!prob < 1.3x
!probt = 3.4x
etc.

Thanks guys! Nice seeing some solid statistic analysis =)

Ouch. Well, at least you have the honor of being the one who pushed the investor profit over 100 BTC

If you choose to invest again, you might want to look at using the investment lock feature it might help you make a plan and stick to it. (Actually, the whole reason I built it was because I scared the shit out of myself doing exactly what you did on another investment site, although I happened to win my very final bet that I could have made)