Is there something about 0.6+ that refuses to read block chain files copied in from earlier versions? Just built it, but every time I run it, it ignores the blk*.dat files and deletes the __db.* files from the configuration directory. Then it tries to reload the whole block chain off the network. I wouldn't mind doing that on a spare machine, but now I'm worried if I do let it run, then when I copy the directory over to a hot machine it'll just start all over again.

Has anyone else run into this problem?

Another 10 BTC weekend prize is underway on our leaderboard... get in, get a win and take home the top spot!

Excuse me, Zhou. We haven't met, but I run StrikeSapphire. I think it's great the way you built your site from scratch, like I did with mine, and it's nice to hear you're happy to be moving on to bigger and better things.

But I want to know when we're getting back the $900-1000 or so that were in USD on your site. As a site owner myself, I feel a responsibility to my users to have several times their current funds on tap. While we run on dedicated servers, we don't keep a lot in our hot wallet; instead we rely on services like Bitcoinica where we trust we can keep our backup cash and fluidly move it in and out of BTC. And we pay a premium in transaction fees for that safety.

I think the priority here is getting money back to people. Period. There is no other conversation to be had before that happens. We would have had a lot more money with your site, but you never wrote back to me after I repeatedly requested confirmation of the verification docs I sent, which I assume are now compromised as well.

Right now, what I want to hear is that our USD is being returned to us, and specifically when and how it's being returned. Once that's done, I wish you the best and know you'll be successful in your next ventures. But this is not an appropriate time to look ahead, before you've made your customers whole.

Tonight - 9:30pm GMT - $20 Guarantee, $5 buyin, and this one will probably crown the 10 BTC leaderboard winner!

Our first 10 Bitcoin weekend tournament is up and running!!! Just win the most over the weekend to claim 10 BTC! Someone better give dooglus a run for his money...

Follow the leaderboard here...

We can definitely cancel out your referral bonus if you want so it isn't held against your account. If you did so straight off without gambling it, I'm inclined to say we'd give you 20% of it w/o hold, since we expect you to probably keep at least that much. As far as deferring it, we've actually never been asked. It's not policy. We might do that on a case-by-case basis, but obviously this was set up in this way for a reason which is, to put it very bluntly, we don't expect you to keep all of it every time. It's a gamble. We also want that referral to come back and play more; the number of referrals isn't really relevant... the aggregate play volume of who each affiliate refers is more important. So we're more flexible if you refer a lot of good players than if we get a lot of one-off hits who never come back. And again, if it's a case where you want to set up a serious referral program and send a lot of high-quality traffic, this all becomes irrelevant because we'll do a revenue share with you. But - short answer - no, we won't defer them unless we have an agreement to do so. And, you can always withdraw and cancel them that way, with whatever profit you've made off the capital. They don't eat into your winnings unless you lose; it's just an extra margin you get to play with until you don't want to play with it anymore.

A gratuity clearance of remaining WR is done only as a courtesy, and usually when a player wants to deposit again without facing overhanging requirements. It's intentionally a vague policy because there are a lot of edge cases here, and it depends on whether we actually want someone to deposit again. Even though we have a liberal policy about withdrawing prior to clearing a whole bonus, those wagering requirements do continue to ride on a rolling basis until a player either withdraws winnings or runs out of cash, not when one particular bonus runs out. The reason is, once you have more than one bonus it's hard to tell where the cash on one stops and the other ones begin. If you have a $40 bonus and a $20 bonus, and go down $40, which one do we charge first? Neither. The wagering requirements are the same as if you had one single $60 bonus, and if you lose both the withholding continues to stay against any other balance, because we can't clearly say whether prior winnings were made off one or the other. This goes to your question about referrals adding up. Yes, wagering requirements are cumulative. Statistically the odds are the same, but for players who take one after another we don't clear requirements whenever one bonus runs out; we clear them wholesale when the player withdraws winnings or hits null. "Entire deposit" in the case of the TOS means entire deposit. Not just the deposit associated with the bonus.

That's true. The upshot is that we have rolling wagering requirements, and unlike most casinos we don't require you to play through the whole thing before you're able to withdraw.

Consider it like this: The 30x requirement is a withholding against that original $20. So lets say you bet $3, your withholding goes to $19.90, and 10¢ of the bonus capital becomes available for immediate withdrawal. Now suppose you win that $3 bet and double it. You have a $23 balance, of which only $19.90 is withheld. Because the withholding only continues to go down, any winnings are withdrawable immediately, assuming you're willing to forfeit the rest of the withholding. Often once people double their bonus amount, they just forfeit the first half and walk with the winnings, which is not a bad strategy. As far as I know, we're the only online casino that allows you to withdraw your bonus winnings and a portion of the capital without clearing the whole of the actual bonus. We're basically giving you a chance to beat us with our own money, which is different from just giving out money directly.

Also to the player's advantage, in most cases we will waive any leftover wagering requirements whenever a player's account goes to zero without a withdrawal taking place. This prevents wagering requirements from counting against the next referral or bonus. What this means is your long-term odds are better if you play each referral through before the next one comes in; and it's safer not to take deposit bonuses on top of existing balances. It's important to note that this is a courtesy we extend to players and not an official policy, but it is our standard practice.

Lastly: We do have revenue-sharing plans available for large affiliates outside the normal referral channels. These contracts require a background check and access to site demographics, and pay monthly based on the affiliate's ability to drive high-value players to our site. Owner/operators of affiliate websites with good page rankings and volume traffic are invited to contact help (at) strikesapphire.com for more information.

Hey mem, see the list is evolving... here's some more info on StrikeSapphire:

Our minimum deposit is 0.01 BTC. Minimum withdrawal is $5 USD. Here are the ranges of bets for different types of games:

Table games (all are multiplayer, each of these ranges represents a table min-max):
Craps - $0.10-$1, $0.25-$5, $0.50-$10* (+ 3x Odds when backing up Pass Line/Don't bets)
Roulette - $0.01-$5, $0.10-$50*
Blackjack - $0.10-$5, $1-$25* (Per Seat. Up to 3 seats per player.)
Three Card Poker - $0.25-$1, $1-$5, $2-10* (Per Seat. Up to 3 seats per player.)
Sapphire Rummy - $0.25-$1, $1-$5
Mayan Gold - $0.10-$1, $0.25-$5 (Progressive) (Per Seat. Up to 3 seats per player.)
*Silver or Gold star VIP players only.

Poker:
Ring NL/PL/Limit (Holdem, Mississippi, Omaha, 7CS) - $0.02/$0.04 up to $500/$1000.
Sit & Go buyins - $0.40 up to $10,000

ChipWars (board game) - $0.10 up to $25 buyins (2-10 players).

Single-player games:
Scuba Cube 3D Slots (Progressive) - $0.05/$0.25 per unit (1-5 units)
UltraKeno - $0.05/$0.25 per unit (1-5 units)
NSlots - $0.05/$0.25 per line (1-3 lines)
Sixty Watt Slots - $0.05/$0.25 per line (1-17 lines)
Jacks or Better - $0.05/$0.25 per unit (1-5 units)
Deuces Wild - $0.05/$0.25 per unit (1-5 units)
5 Hand Bonus VP - $0.05 per unit (5-25 units) + up to 64x win multiplier

Congratulations to player Dooglus who just won our 4th weekend, 5 Bitcoin tournament prize, on a combination of freeroll poker, blackjack and willpower!!! We'll be back with more...

StrikeSapphire has 4 freerolls nightly ($1 @ 7pm & 11pm GMT, $3 @ 8pm & 10pm GMT) - which usually attract a full table, sometimes a bit more. We don't have a lot of ring games, but they do occasionally spring up during peak hours. We also award +5 BTC extra to the top winner (in all casino games, including poker freerolls) at the end of each weekend.

Poker's not our "main thing" - for finding a ring game, Seals is your best bet - but we have an interesting (and different) tounament/freeroll crowd and a friendly atmosphere, and we're pleased to offer an alternative place for Bitcoiners to relax & play.

Hi Mem,

I'm the owner of StrikeSapphire and also a standing member of the forum. We've been running since July, 2011.

To clarify, as our accounts are denominated in USD once Bitcoins are deposited, our minimum bets are: $0.01 on Roulette, $0.02/0.04 in Poker, $0.05 in most slots and video poker games, and $0.10 in Craps.

Also, as far as mathematical verification -- if you mean full-blown auditing and certification as done by eCOGRA, or similar, then to my knowledge there is no currently operating Bitcoin casino which has gone through this (very expensive) process yet. However, we're the only casino we know of to publish every single hand of cards dealt, every roulette spin and craps roll, daily. It's available at https://strikesapphire.com/reports/ .

We've also made more in-depth data available to Jacobson Gaming, who (though not a full audit) has confirmed the results to be fair and random. See this thread at Casinomeister for a lot more info:

http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/casino-complaints-non-bonus-issues/46964-possible-issue-blr-tech-casinos-craps-software-8.html

Moreover, we have lots of happy players around the forums who you can ask about our service. Our total return to player, since opening (including bonuses and freerolls) is a whopping 99.6% !

So, I hope you'll consider modifying our entry in the list to reflect that we *are* an awesome place to play... and I left one thing out: You should note that we're not open to players in the US. We get lots of complaints about it, but while we're based in Costa Rica, we comply with American law.

After a short hiatus, we're back this weekend with a whole new casino-wide tournament, and another 5 BTC prize will be awarded to the top winner between Thursday and Sunday!

Winnings that count towards the grand prize, as always, include whatever you get from our poker freerolls, plus whatever you win at our Bitcoin Roulette tables, Blackjack and any other game in the house!

Follow the leaderboard on our blog.

I think this whole thread is kinda funny, btw. If I were about to launch a site, I'd be tempted to pay for the list. But I'm guessing most of the 4000 or so IPs we've collected are already on it. Anyway, ours are mostly bots trying random ports. As long as you're running a tight firewall, or denyhosts, fail2ban, even cphulk, it's really not a problem. And an IP address for a failed SSH login alone isn't very valuable. Most of ours are from China, and who gives a shit what the commies do. They're welcome to beat their brains out on our root login for the next 40 years if they want. There aren't enough IPs in China to brute it at one permanent attempt each.

However, if you can correlate the more interesting attempts and whittle those down until you find some that match actual users signed up for your site, who tie into a pattern of abuse from a particular geographic area, then you might have something pretty valuable. Especially if it came with a set of email addresses and usernames, and the names of their friends. Such lists are around; mainstream casino networks have kept and maintained them for years. Our blacklist is relatively small, although I'm sure the hackers who've tried various shenanigans on us have also tried them on Andrew and Freemoney.

Congrats to Dooglus on winning the second 5 Bitcoin tournament!

Just a quick note - we're putting the weekend tourney on pause for Easter weekend, and picking up the next week. Thanks to all our new players and fans!

Out of curiosity, how do you plan to accept PayPal deposits when they're reversible, and PayPal has consistently frozen accounts of people who use it to buy Bitcoins?

Keeping running balances without checking them frequently against sums is not safe when building a site that deals with real money. What if your application or your database goes down in the middle of an update? Moreover, timestamps can and do change on bitcoin transactions after they've shown up in a wallet. You can't just look at the last timestamp and take all the transactions that happened in it, or you'll end up polling the same transactions twice and adding them to the user's running database sum. So for data consistency you'd then need to compare the TXID against all TXIDs you've processed before, which is a much slower operation than a simple SUM of the user's transactions compared to that user's wallet account balance.

We use (basically) the SUM(AMOUNT) strategy. If you're worried about speed when you have a million users, partition your transactional database by user IDs, or shard it over multiple instances. If you're running bitcoind, you should be running it on a separate dedicated machine anyway, and it's doubtful you'll have a very efficient system if you're running one instance with a million wallets anyway. So have a db over there on each bitcoind machine that does the summing for a particular group of users (100k would probably be an upward reasonable limit), and then opens a socket to send the results to your game server. SUM() on a primary key is plenty fast over millions of rows even without partitioning.

Also bear in mind that if you ever find yourself running a successful Bitcoin casino with millions of users, you will probably have plenty of spare cash for server upgrades. Writing NoSQL or non-ACID code that trusts your application layer to never miss or repeat a single real-money transaction will create its own scaling problems and is very, very unsafe.

Our second All-Casino 5 BTC Weekend is underway...

(S)he who wins the most casino-wide from now through Sunday also wins the 5 Bitcoin prize.

Follow the leaderboard on our blog.

Freerolls have been moved back to 7pm ($1), 8pm ($3), 10pm ($3) and 11pm ($1) GMT, and the $3 freerolls have been expanded to two tables. See you there!

Quick note - tonight's freerolls at 9pm and 11pm will be for $6 each instead of the usual $3 

That. Is. Fucking. AWESOME.

I had no idea. Maybe it's time to consider moving back from France?

If only they'd legalize unpasteurized dairy products and pull the fucking fluoride out of the water supply...