It's back up, but was down for about 2-3 hours. Other than availability impact, the effect on players has been minimal. Fortunately the hot wallet was considerable and handled the bankrun without issue as well. I'm still trying to piece together what happened, but just prior to shutdown I can see the server connection count surge to 940 connections while the joined players plunges to 23. Very little bandwidth used in that time (< 700 kb/s), so not a typical DoS or anything. Still looking it it.

All winnings and losings are distributed  to investors proportional to their contribution to the casino max-loss per game. If investor A contributes 1 BTC and investor B contributes 0.5 BTC, then what ever the casino wins or loses that game will be given twice as much to investor A then B.

The amount an investor contributes to a game is limited by the amount they actually have in onsite investment. i.e. it doesn't if you have a 1M bitcoins offsite, if you only have 1 BTC in onsite investment, the max you can ever contribute to the max-loss is 1 BTC

The investments will be handled by me


It is quite different. For the sake of argument let's say someone is attempting to hit the max-loss, and there is only one investor.


Scenario A: Investor with 0 BTC offsite, 1 BTC onsite, 100% risk

A gambler comes in, bets the 1 BTC max-loss hoping to win the max-loss but loses. Investor now has 2 BTC onsite. The investor is now risking 100%, which is 2 BTC. The gambler goes for another max-loss bet, but loses again. The investor now has 4 BTC. The investor is now risking 100%, which is 4 BTC. The gambler goes for another max-loss and wins: The investor has 0, and is dead.

Scenario B: Investor with 9 BTC offsite, 1 BTC onsite, 10% risk

A gambler comes in, bets the 1 BTC max-loss hoping to win the max-loss but loses. Investor now has 2 BTC onsite (and 9 offsite). The investor is now risking 10%, which is 1.1 BTC. The gambler goes for another max-loss bet, but loses again. The investor now has 3.1 BTC (and 9 offsite). The investor is now risking 10%, which is 1.21 BTC. The gambler goes for another max-loss and wins: The investor has 1.89 BTC onsite (and 9 offsite), and is very much alive and well.




See the difference?

Eric covered that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=709185.msg9399161#msg9399161

He missed out that commission structure which still hasn't been finalized or published to github,  but works just like Just-Dice's without the tax-free credits, but it shouldn't effect the case of a whale winning.

In the formula Eric gave, there's a min() there to prevent the need for anyone to act as a counter-party to the investor. The most an investor can contribute to the max game loss is the amount we actually are holding of theirs. The amount can go to zero, but never under so we never are in the awful position of trying to chase debts or guarantee investors.

It is not the intention of the system, but rather a side-effect. A leveraged investment is not much more than a +EV gamble, and one of the reservations that Dooglus raised early on was that if you let people do +EV gambles with the investor system you risk cannibalizing the gambling side of the site. Not only this, but due to leveraging they can easily push out the more stable investors, all-the-whilst bust easily, taking the sites max-loss down with them. We're going to disincentivize this by not offering "tax credits" on losses; which means if you chose to divest at a loss, you will not be given a credit to offset any future investment earnings.  It will not effect long-term investors, but will significantly penalize the gambling day-trading-investors.

The sort of investors I am after are ones in the position such as: "I have have 1000 BTC which I'd feel comfortable investing, with a 0.1% max-loss per game. But the counter-party risk of giving it all to a gambling operator is absurd; but drip-feeding 10 BTC at a time, where the max risked is based on my entire amount I have seems fine".

If people do however want to use our investor system to gamble or leverage, they were welcome to do so and it certainly will create quite interesting absurdly high and unstable max-losses per game, but it's not the real purpose of the the scheme, which is to minimize the counter-party risk for investors.

Large enough. Since the last limits tightening the site profit have grown 20 BTC, so we're sitting in a rather comfortable place. We continually monitor the site bankroll, and are committed to either readjusting the limits (as we did last time) or even pausing game play to ensure we are never insolvent.

Once the investor system is finished, which is developing nicely, the bankroll and breakdown between balances and invested will be publicly shown (and visible in a cold storage address) along with limits that are a function of that.

Fantastic work Dooglus. For anyone interested, I've created a subreddit for posting, discussing and requesting strategies (or any other money pot style stuff)

The long awaited strategy editor now makes it's debut in pre-alpha quality. Lots of people have been wanting to play around with an early release, so now you have it. As one of the few gambling games that make it possible for +EV style game play, allowing bots is quite interesting. If you want to share or request strategies: http://www.reddit.com/r/moneypot is a good place to collect them.

I think dooglus' post is rather self explanatory, but just to add more color: Someone let me the know the hot wallet was empty, so I sent 15 BTC at it, and took a look at the pending withdrawals. There was an 11 BTC withdrawal queued up, nothing extremely out of the ordinary but was interested in how he got the money. Checked the accounts deposits, and there were none, and checked his game history -- and the winnings were very small. In a panic I ran the auditing script, and identified 23 accounts that weren't balancing out. I freaked out a bit, and disconnected the withdrawal system and paused all game play.

Within a minute, i quickly realised that I was just a moron -- and had been connected to the dev server, and not the production one. The balances on the dev server hadn't been auditing because of dirty hacks that have been made to it. I did a quick check against production, everything balanced, I resumed gameplay and processed withdrawals.

Sorry about the stupidity and inconvenience, I just panicked a little.

The gambling requirement only would cost an abuser an expected 1% as they are able to gamble it on a 9900x multiplier.

Just out of curiosity, how many hours do you think it would take to build your gambling site? And how much do you think a decent developer would get paid an hour? In all likelihood you would have greater success in offering nothing than a couple of orders of magnitude less than a decent rate.

Wow, this conversation has really degenerated. When the new major version is out, I'll create a self-moderated thread for it.