1% for max bet is not a problem.

The only problem playing against large players is time. Some of them play till they are ruined,
and it takes time to get them ruined. In other words, imagine a player with a bankroll big enough
to take away 2000 win with 95% probability (chose your favorite strategy for him - a martingale,
just constant bets 50/50 - whatever, with a big bankroll anything works).
 Then only 1 in 20 of such players will not make it, and "not making it" means he loses everything.
And so far we've seen only how many whale-plays? 5? well.

How about adding to the leaderboard the "Highest risk taken"
where "risk" is measured as the variance of the wager (or sqrt thereof).

Just a way to compare 1 BTC staked on 0.1% and 100 BTC staked on 98% -
the first one has higher variance, and is indeed more "risky"

Then we'll see some of those crazy lottery bets coming up in the leaderboard

that's odd. May be he has some different understanding of what "betting pool" means.
Otherwise, he'd be essentially saying - "if you win that 0.1 bet on 64000x then I'm broke and can't pay you."
That doesn't seem reasonable. At the same time, SD has made over 70k btc profit (which I know only thanks to your graphs), and their max bets has been growing over time  - I'd expect, in accordance with the total profit.
But then, some of the profit is paid to shareholders, so I don't really know what estimate to use.

probably meant "a little over 1%."
The optimal for SD to risk on each bet is 1.9% - their house edge.
Probably they know about it and do exactly that.

and how were we supposed to know about that? By reading the forum continuously?

I made a throw-away inputs account that happened to be using the same email as my coinlenders
account, forgot the password to inputs, and now I can't withdraw from coinlenders.

Excellent! everyone please read all the forum regularly, to see if TF comes up with
a new great idea and blocks your BTC to promote it.

so do I understand it right that if I haven't heard from you till now, and I left ample contact information with my claim (forum name, email, phone), it means that everything is ok with it?  By "everything ok" I mean that you have no questions about the ownership of my addresses and are going to pay  out in full the amount claimed?

I have  a proposition.

How about adding a possibility to bet more, with a higher house edge?
Like, 2% house edge, double the max profit.
OR 10% house edge, 10x the max profit.

May be also make a smaller multiplier bracket for these.
like, 1.25x to 100x

May the whales flow in!

1) removes the rationale of "being your own cold storage".
For example, I was thinking rather than having 100 BTC invested at 1 percent, having 10 invested at 10% and leave 90BTC in my wallet, ready
to adjust the investment whenever needed. Now this won't work with 1.
Also, this strategy means that one would risk more than 1% only on highest bets - a strategy that is strictly less profitable than 1% fixed.

2) may  push more "sane" investors to increase their stake to get any share at all.  Indeed, with many risky investors
 the max profit increases uncontrollably (think something like 1000 BTC) and hardly anyone will ever challenge that;
 so those invested at 1% will never be getting their 1%, and will have to increase their stake.
I think this kind of game of who invests more is highly undesirable, because it can eventually ruin everyone.

So actually I'm coming to the conclusion that 1% fixed rate may be better for all...

Sure. At 1% those features are totally unnecessary.



I would not,  at >2% investment.  Small bets are not what I was having in mind.
If you only consider *largest* bets, you, as a house, will be losing money in the long run
if you allow bets over 2%.

This may seem paradoxical - the odds are in your favour;  your expected return grows exponentially, yet your actual capital decreases with certainty.
The effect is obvious if you consider a simple game: 75% chance to double your stake,  and you stake
all capital every time (corresponding to 100% investment, the largest bet every time, 50% house edge).  After N plays, your expected capital is skyrocketing: (3/2)^N  (assuming you start with 1), yet
with overwhelming probability (1- (3/4)^N) you are ruined- your capital is 0.

And this is not an artefact of 100% investment.  Consider 50% investment, largest bets: when you lose your
capital is divided by 2, but you win it's multiplied by 1.5.  Make some imaginary plays (at a small, ~1% house edge) and you see how fast it decreases. But it does increase at 50% house edge.

The optimal investment percentage on largest bets, at house edge 1%,  is 1%.  You are not losing (as a house) when investing at under 2%.  The optimal overall (all size bets) of course depends on the distribution of the bets. Speaking of which, it'd be interesting to look at the empirical distribution of bet size so far.

I can explain how I got 2% and 1%, but I better say where I got them from: from this paper.
Yes, this is a mathematical paper, but  it's very readable (and you can ignore the information-theoretic interpretations if they don't make sense to you).

Edit: as has been pointed out by others before, this does not make the feature of higher investments percents useless. You can use it but you have to manage your investment manually, alimenting and withdrawing in order to maintain a safe percent overall. Hence my request for those features.

I think with this feature it's very important to have some investment management tools, such as
- (email?) alerts when the investment goes below or above a certain threshold
- automatic divestment when above  a certain threshold
- an investment-only pay-in address - funds sent there are automatically invested.

This is needed for those that want to be their own "cold storage", that is, maintain
an investment of (for example) 1%  but keep most their funds off-site.

The alerts feature is the most important. Without it  it's easy to be losing money on higher-percentage investments.

And if you are wondering reading this - yes, it's possible to be losing money in the long run
being on the "house" side.

Dabs, at what percentage of investment in this pot does it turn to a win-win for you, given your (presumed) investment at JD?

1) you are almost as likely to start with a loss as to start with a win.  So "starting with a loss" will happen to many investors, with certainty
2) Investement has been continuing to increase so far.   All "long-run" arguments assume infinite play for simplicity. For example, the argument that, with a fixed pool, an investor will make profit, also assumes that. This assumption is for simplicity only, it's easy to work out probability estimation over finite time.

3) I don't need that assumption. Bet volume is irrelevant. What is relevant is the size and volume  of the *largest bets*.  Yes, these have to increase slower then invesment. I don't see why it's "extremely unlikely" though.  The history so far is too short to make predictions, but  so far this has been clearly the case.

so have deterministic wallets been implemented in the reference client?

just wondering how often I have to update my backups ...

 So I figured out that an investor can actually be losing money, even in the long-run, because of the increasing pool of investment.

Say, you invest a certain amount, and the site's profit goes down, so you loose some money.  If the total investment pool stays constant, then all you have to do is to wait: at some point, with certainty, you will regain your investment and make a profit. However, if the pool is increasing, and keeps increasing, then your share decreases and so does your profit. It is easy to see that at some rate of pool growth you will never be able to make up even a small loss.  With the current investment growth, I think the threat is quite real.

So it seems to me some sort of early-investor prioritizing is needed.

just to make sure: I'm not complaining about my investment - I'm up, thanks, dooglus!- just bringing up a concern that one can easily overlook reading the JD faq.
(In fact, I think prioritizing early investors at this point will lower my profits.)

still just as vulnerable to the Finney attack, unless you require your MAIT to reject new *blocks* that double-spend the transactions they accepted. And this introduces a risk of a fork. So, no.

btw, dooglus, since you are holding investors' coins on the site, can you add a section in the FAQ about security measures you take?

A typical investor wants to be reassured his money won't be lost due to one of those hacks so frequent in the btc world.

also, ID 1228.

well, if you can "use your skills" to win 1000 BTC (having only 1000BTC to begin with), then you can just go on and become infinitely rich.

I don't see how that could be a problem. If you divest and then reinvest then of course your investement moves all the way to the end of the line, and will be earning less. Wheter you gamble in between doesn't matter.

Here's how to make people who invested earlier gain more:

Imaging a user bid 1 BTC on 50/50. This means, out of the pool of JD, 1 BTC is wagered against him (well, actually 0.99 BTC but for simplicity I put 1).

The question is: whose BTC is being wagered against the user? Right now, it is taken from all the investements in equal proportion. What can be done instead, is that it is taken from all investments *weighted* by the time they invested they made the investment. For example, 1/5 BTC from the first month's investments, 1/4 form the second etc. In fact, better use slower decreasing weights to make the investement attractive for new users as well. For example,  [1/k(k+1) - 1/N(N+1)] weight for the BTC number k, with N being total number BTC invested.
Obviously, the wins/losses then are devided in this proportions.

lowered the price for the last time