I think it makes more sense to have a separate round of activity between the flop being shown and the flop betting round in which each folded player in turn, starting with the SB, is asked whether they want to unfold or not. Each player's answer is shown to all players, so folding the button gives you position on those who folded in earlier positions.

"Provably fair betting means that we give you a hash of the bet outcome before you make the bet to prove that we did not cheat."

That's presumably copy/pasted from one of your other sites. It doesn't apply to this game.


Needs a question mark at the end. Same for other questions - a few are missing question marks. And "How many confirmations needed" is missing an "are".

"The draw actually ends in the xxxxx000 block" - I'd use 3 x's, since block numbers are 6 digits at the moment, and will be for years to come.

"There's quite a few reasons for this" - there is reasons?

I second this. Please let's try to discuss this rationally like adults.


I hear you. But the first question that needs answering is "should we have a vote to decide this?"

I'm not asking how you would vote, but whether we should vote. Lots of people say "we should leave it how it is", but that's one of the options in the vote. I don't see anyone (with the possible exception of BAC) directly saying "we should overrule what the majority wants and try to force an unpopular rule set on the majority".

First we need to be clear about whether this is a democracy, and if it is then we can make a list of the candidates and start voting for them.

If it isn't then I guess we carry on as before, and just have xploited and creative change the rules however and whenever they like. I don't see that as a better system to be honest, and I don't think they do either. Although it would be nice if they would chime in and say what they think about how CLAM governance should be working.


It doesn't make much difference to me personally. Sure I hold some CLAM of my own, but it's nothing compared to my BTC and other holdings. I am much more interested in making the majority happy than with my own greedy self interest. If the majority want to keep things just how they are then that's fine with me.


I'd like to see that answered in public too. I chatted a little with Creative in JD after my long post a few night ago, but I don't think she's made a public post addressing it.


While it's true that it is possible for the majority to be wrong about what's best for them, do you have a better idea? Is there any guarantee that doing whatever micalith thinks is best for example is any better than doing what the majority wants?


You're saying that having a discussion about whether we should do whatever the majority wants or not is pointless, because in a distributed system like CLAM "whatever the majority wants" is exactly what we always do whether we like it or not? If the majority wants to stop digging, they will make a fork where digging is prohibited, and being the majority, their fork will win?

While that makes sense in theory, I think for the most part people are too passive to make the change they want to see, and will go along with whatever "the official release" does. Sure they'll bitch and moan if they don't like it ("waaah, CLAM is dying, stop the digger") but won't actually do anything about it.


I had to look up "plebiscite". It means "a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to vote on a particular proposal".

Instead of voting, we could simply have people make a series of forks, and have everyone run whichever fork they like best. If it's at all close, we'll have a lot of blockchain reorgs as the forks compete with each other, and a lot of mess as previously confirmed transactions become unconfirmed as the forks battle for dominance.

The point of having a probably fair on-chain vote is to avoid that mess. If one proposal gets a clear majority of the votes, and everyone sees that that is the case, then "we" can make a new official release implementing that most popular proposal and have a good expectation that the majority will switch to running that code. Obviously we can't enforce that result, but since it is by definition the most popular result, we won't have to.


What do you mean by 'mirror' here? I'm sorry, but you lost me.


None. You can spend unconfirmed coins if you want to.


OK. But the question is whether you would be OK to go along with the majority if it turns out their opinion is different.


Staking benefits all holders proportionally. If you have 1% of the CLAM market cap and then everyone's holdings increase by 10% due to staking, then you still hold 1% of the CLAM market cap afterwards and your CLAMs should be worth the same. Each CLAM would be worth 10% less, but you'd have 10% more of them. So I don't think your point about wanting staking to stop is valid.


You have to bear in mind that he spent time and money building his clamchecker.com site, where he hopes to make a lot of money buying people's private keys and digging with them. I think that's where most of his passion is coming from - it's in line with his own bottom line.

I would certainly appreciate it if we could debate this based on logical arguments and without resorting to personal attacks.


Exactly this. Please present your arguments without attacking people.


Whether that is true or not isn't relevant here. Please let's talk about CLAM, not who's the biggest dick. (It might be me, after all).


So that's a vote against preventing digging. Are you OK with putting it to the vote and going along with the majority decision?


I guess you mean 1 dig per day per person? How are we to tell which digs are made by which people? There's only 1 dig allowed per address already, and there's no way of knowing which addresses are owned by which people so I don't see how such a limit would work. Or do you mean to limit it to 1 dig per day globally? The 'digger' has enough addresses to create a 20 year tailback if that's the case.


The two camps we're trying to pick between are:

a) have a vote and do what the majority decide
b) ignore the majority, and if they want to change the rules then try to force them to follow rules they are no longer happy with, as if they couldn't just make their own fork

Is there a third camp? Which camp are you in?

I'll try addressing the BAC posts separately if I can muster the energy.

Why not just make it that bets need 5 or 6 confs to count, effectively eliminating this attack completely? So bets in block xxx996 to yyy995 are in the zzz000 draw.


Your typos are getting funner.

I think you should probably have something in place asap despite it not being perfect.

The pot size could escalate very quickly towards the end of the week.

Imagine someone seeing the current pot of 0.59 BTC and buying 10 BTC worth of tickets to try to make a quick almost guaranteed +EV profit. It only takes one more player to go to 50 BTC, following the same thinking and then you have a pot worth block-withholding to win.

Oh, and it's even worse. As a miner, I see a 50 BTC pot, so I create but do not broadcast a 5000 BTC bet. I try mining block xxx000 including my secret bet transaction. If I manage it, I check whether it wins (it probably does) and broadcast the block if it does. If it doesn't win, I don't broadcast the block, so I lose the 25 BTC block reward, but I never lose my 5000 BTC bet. So in the event that I am able to mine that block, I have a 99% chance of winning 75 BTC and a 1% chance of losing 25 BTC. That's very +EV since I've eliminated the possibility of losing anything but the block reward.

It really does need to be impossible for a miner (or anyone else) to know who won until half an hour after the xxx000 block is mined.

No, the amount the sponsors add is fixed before each round begins.

This week the sponsors are adding 0.17658 BTC.

If you play alone, and bet 1 BTC, you get back 1.17658 BTC. That's 0.17658 BTC more than you bet.

If you play alone, and bet 1000 BTC, you get back 1000.17658 BTC. That's 0.17658 BTC more than you bet.

See how that works? The prize pool is bigger than the sum of the bets by a fixed amount, so the game is +EV to play.


The game itself is +EV for Ryan, since he has no risk and gets 10% of the sponsor money. But then he has to pay for hosting and other expenses out of that. I would guess there's quite a low cap on how much people are willing to pay as sponsors, and so quite a low cap on Ryan's take from the site. I can imagine the pot itself growing quite large, and Ryan making very little from it. But ass we see from bustabit he's probably happy taking a small amount.

More typos:

"This can only be done from a bitcoin wallet which you can both receive and sign a message from the sending address" -- you mean "with which ..." I think. But even then that's a confusing sentence.

"for every satoshi sent, is one chance of winning" -- that's not grammatical either

"So lets say you send 0.01 BTC" -- "let's"

"This transaction is the wining transaction"

Either way would work. Making the sidepots seems a little confusing to me at the moment, but would probably work out OK in practice.

So I was thinking about the provable fairness, and how to prevent the miner from gaining an edge by withholding his block if it causes him to lose.


I bolded some typos.

I'm trying to think of a method that prevents the miner from instantly knowing whether his newly solved block results in him winning the lottery or not, without also making the verification of the provable fairness overly burdensome for the players. The bcrypt idea above has the problem that everyone attempting to verify the result also has to run millions of iterations of bcrypt.

I came up with this:

You know how it's really hard to go from a Bitcoin public key to a Bitcoin private key (like *really* hard), but very quick and easy to go the other way... Could we use the same idea but made easier to solve this problem?

Instead of using the secp256k1 curve that Bitcoin uses, use a 48 bit curve or some such, and treat the last 48 bits of the miner's block hash as the public key. Then the proof-of-work to determine the winner involves searching for the corresponding 48 bit private key. Once found, append the private key to the block hash, hash the result, and that's your 256 bit value for deciding who won.

The advantage of this method over the million-bcrypts method is that it takes no work for anyone to verify that the private key matches the public key, but it takes a lot of work to go the other way.

Oh, but it has two problems:

1) the search is easily parallelized - so someone with a lot of hardware (a miner, say) could search quicker than others
2) I'm not sure that there's any guarantee that there's only one private key for each public key

I wonder if it's possible to find a solution which isn't able to be parallelised, takes a long time to solve, but no time to verify.

http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/9331 looks promising. It gives us:

* slow for the miner to compute
* quick for the users to verify
* not possible to parallelize

but with the disadvantage of the pevpot site having to keep a secret until after the draw, and being able to cheat (by removing the slowness) if it colludes with a miner

So would you prefer not to have the current holders be allowed to vote for what they want?

To be clear, I'm not trying to push any particular change to the rules. I have lots of people asking me to stop CLAM dying, and lots of others saying to leave it alone. You can't please all the people, but you can let the community as a whole vote and implement the most popular choice. CLAM is a community coin after all, so that seems like the fairest way to do things.

If you are against the idea of having the most popular idea be implemented, why is that?

I guess knowing your username would be useful. Or your deposit address. Or a deposit transaction ID.

There's an email address at the end of the FAQ tab for customer support if you prefer to have this conversation there.

How can you say this is unfair? It's not just your opponent who get the unfold button, you get it too, so it's totally fair.

By your logic Omaha is unfair because your opponent gets 4 hole cards instead of 2!


Well, maybe he's unfolding to bluff you off your hand. He might not have a 2 or 7 at all.

"Unfold" changes the game a lot, and maybe in a bad way, but it would be fun to try it anyway.

That's a good solution. I'm curious to know if you have such a function (easy to verify) in mind.

An almost-but-not-quite solution would be to hash (blockhash + nonce) with nonce=0, 1, 2, ... until the hash starts with a suitable number of zeroes, and then use hash(hash(blockhash+nonce)) as the number to determine the winner. Then you search for the nonce and publish it along with the blockhash.

It's easy to verify that the published nonce gives the correct number of prefix zeroes, but it's not easy to verify that it is the lowest such nonce.

Can you do better?

--

"All transactions that are included in the draw are first sorted by their hash (txid)" -- a few nitpicks that it's probably worth clarifying: you don't say anything about how many confirmations a deposit needs to be included in the draw. What do you do if block xxx000 is reorged out of the chain by a different xxx000, changing which transactions are considered part of the draw. What about transaction malleability? I presume you use the txid as it shows up in the blockchain, rather than the txid your client saw first.

You should spellcheck the site:

"you can both recieve and sign a message"

Is that a typo? Do you mean "without"? Using the block hash is provably fair unless you think a miner is going to withhold a block (and lose 25 BTC) to have a better chance of winning.


So the first draw will about a week from now, at block 384000?

There's something wrong with the stats in the chat box area in the web-based client.

I transferred 1000 chips to my poker account, bought in to a ring game for 100 chips, with auto-rebuy on.

The first hand I played I was big blind (1 chip) and got a walk.
The second hand I was small blind (0.5 chips) and folded pre.
My net profit after that should have been 0, but the chat box stats said I was 0.5 chips down already.

I lost a bit, auto-rebought 22 chips to top my stack up to 100, then won my losses back ending up with a stack of 122.1 chips.

That's a net gain of 0.1 chips, but this tells me I'm down 19.90:



The wallet view is correct - the total balance is 0.1 chips higher than I started with:



I can't believe I won 19 out of 38 hands either. I doubt I even played that many, and with 5 or 6 players I'm never winning 50% of hands.

And the 1001 CLAMs was a tip for staking your CLAMs for you before Just-Dice had launched. There was never any hint that it was "a payoff" or "protection money". I wouldn't have accepted it if there was any suggestion that it came with strings attached. Maybe I missed the "verbal agreement" or whatever. It seemed to me like you were just very happy with the return you were making from staking:


Unfortunately I can't post logs about rat4's dox, because no such conversation ever happened between us.

xploited seems to think that creative found his name for you, but I wasn't party to that conversation.

I did read your post. Sorry for skipping over most of it in my reply.

I don't think it's really feasible to determine which wallets are "big commercial" and which aren't. Then there are the big commercial entities like poloniex who dug their large wallet and shared the CLAMs with their users. That should be OK with us, right? So then we have to be able to determine who is sharing their CLAMs and who isn't. And it all becomes a giant mess, with 'us' having to snoop into 'their' business to determine who gets to dig and who doesn't.

It was 1001 CLAMs. Here's the transaction:
  http://khashier.com/tx/e717d753d434552738710d08aeef32528db29300043658a0eb6f57cfc0ba9f58

I never had rat4's dox and don't condone you "shaking" people.

I think he meant "too bad", and "don't".

MoneyPot is basically just an API. They don't let you use anything other than scripts for gambling - but most (if not all) of the moneypot casinos don't explicitly support scripted gambling. You know how bustabit lets you write your own script? Maybe he's looking for something like that.