Please change your first post and thread title to something reasonable.

Maybe something like this?


Currently your subject and message are pretty scammy. You can't boost my BTC, you don't have a system for winning, and you can't turn $5 into $7 with higher than 5/7 probability.

Nice.

But it turns out that you don't need the gamblebank to be a third party at all. It would be a patch to bitcoin-qt or a standalone webpage like bitaddress.org - then you can verify the code once and trust it after that.

Way to talk myself out of getting any service fees for running such a service.

You realise that's $3 per hour, right?


So you're working for less than half the US minimum wage, and asking people to help you work longer hours.

If you spent a little time learning a marketable skill you would be able to earn many times that amount, and do something that interested you.


I suppose that's another way of getting the same message across.

What if the "gamble bank" was written as a new feature in the bitcoin-core wallet?

You click "lock funds", it asks you how much, and for how long, then it does all the steps I previously outlined.

That way you're not trusting any 3rd party (once the code change has been reviewed and found to be legit) and you still get to have your funds irrevocably frozen for a period of time. You would need to be careful to make a safe backup of the timelocked transaction, because if your hard drive dies, your coins would die with it. Your existing wallet backup won't be of any use if it's making up a new key for the transaction and throwing it away as soon as it signs the timelocked transaction.

Would that satisfy your "everyone should be responsible for themselves" craving?

Pretty standard Ponzi stuff.

Things like "Get 110% back when the next person sends".

In fact the edge is better than regular dice.

The edge is between 0% and 1% based on your cashout point.

For multiplier M, the house edge is 100*(1 - 0.99*M / (M - 0.01)).

Some examples:

  >>> M=1.1; 100*(1 - 0.99*M / (M - 0.01))
  0.0917%

  >>> M=2; 100*(1 - 0.99*M / (M - 0.01))
  0.5025%

  >>> M=10; 100*(1 - 0.99*M / (M - 0.01))
  0.9009%

  >>> M=100; 100*(1 - 0.99*M / (M - 0.01))
  0.9901%

So at 2x payout the house edge is only 0.5025% compared to 1% at regular dice sites.

Bear in mind though that I haven't taken the bonus scheme into account. On average once in every 101 games the game crashes at 0x and every instantly loses. The bets from those games go to the house and are used to fund the bonus scheme, where on the other 100 out of 101 games a bonus is shared between the players. The total bonus is equal to 1% of all the bets made that round, and goes to the players who cash out successfully last. If you average a 1% bonus then you're getting the house edges I listed above. If you never get a bonus, you need to add about 1.0% to the house edges above. If you're careful, you can get bonuses of 2% or 3%, which result in an overall negative house edge for you.

I have been contacted by probably the largest investor. He wishes to remain anonymous, but is willing to offer a good reward for information leading to a favourable result.

I would PM you, but I have no details to share that I didn't already post publicly. Please feel free to PM me with anything you don't want to share here.

I don't really understand it. It seems dodgy that you have to pay to watch ads, and I'd be careful if I was you.

I expect you'll end up getting scammed and not being able to pay your investors back but maybe not.

That's true, but you're only trusting them for a few seconds. Once they send you the signed transaction back, you can check it and be sure that the coins are yours again. If they don't give you a valid signed transaction immediately, you can come here and tell everyone about it, so at least you are the only one who gets scammed.


Note that by doing this you are entrusting your coins to a 3rd party (and they are then entrusting them to more 3rd parties when they lend them out) for the whole duration. If bitfinex turns bad, they get to keep everyone's coins that are currently on deposit with them. The "gamblebank" I proposed only ever gets to scam a single person once, and even then they don't get to steal any coins - they just get to burn them.

On the other hand, at least with the bitfinex solution your coins are working for you while you wait. With the timelocked transaction they're just sitting idle.

Nope, it's slightly ruder than that.

I don't see a plan in my PMs. There are quite a few from you. The one you're probably talking about is quite hard to understand, but from what I can make out you're saying your plan was to buy mining contracts with the invested coins, and somehow make your money back before the next person sent their deposit.

That doesn't seem like it could possibly work. As I understand it, mining contracts rarely ever pay for themselves over their lifetime let alone within a few hours, or however long you have between deposits.

Be careful. The last two sites I trusted both ended up going bad.

They were both actively being developed, with friendly owners who interacted with the community.

They were also both provably fair.

One started cheating (provably fairness doesn't mean you can't cheat, it just means people can notice if you do cheat).
The other just disappeared one night.

I've no idea how to tell which sites are legit and which aren't.

I guess a good first step would be to check the owners' histories on the web of trust. Do the bikini guys even have web of trust accounts?

I'm curious to know that too. I suspect that most gamblers don't really care too much about the edge. All the bars in Canada have state-run gambling terminals where you can play Keno, lotto, some kind of fake poker, etc. Some games have a house edge as high as 50% and yet people still play them constantly.

From http://lotto.bclc.com/keno-and-keno-bonus/prizes-and-odds.html :



That top row though: you have a 1 in 4 chance of doubling your money.

House edge percentages for those 4 games:


Of course, that's different because the state has a monopoly on gambling. If you don't like the 40%-50% house edge they offer, there's no legal alternative other than not playing at all.


I thought the same. Giving 0.1% back in the form of a jackpot for rolling a specific number is easily forgotten, by virtue of the fact that it happens so rarely. It would have been much more visible if you just dropped the house edge to 0.9% instead. That also would have resulted in less variance for the house I think, than paying out the occasional big jackpot.


Did PD really launch that late? JD launched in June 2013 and I thought PD had already been around for a while then.


I saw the biggest two offchain sites at the time (coinroll and primedice) both having a 1% house edge. I didn't see any possibility other than to match it. I didn't want to get into a price war with either site by undercutting them, but also didn't think that charging a higher edge would work. If you guys had set the bar at 1.5% then I'm sure I would have followed suit.

My original concept for JD was that the investors would set their own house edge, like traders set their own price for BTC/USD on the exchanges. The ones offering the lowest house edge would be the ones who got the action, in the same way that the traders offering their BTC for sale at the lowest price on BitStamp are the ones who get matched first.

I didn't figure out a good way to present such a market to the players. It's probably too confusing to have the house edge bounce up and down as investors compete with each other for a bigger share of the betting action, so I didn't end up doing it. That would have been an interesting experiment, to see where the free-market would decide the house edge should be.

I hope so. It's looking like the first user will only get 75% of his deposit back. The rest will go to the miners.

I think you misunderstand.

You can't send a transaction to the p2p network until the timelock has expired.

Until then you keep the transaction somewhere safe, and wait.

I tested this with a transaction I made with an nLockTime 10 seconds in the future.

The first time I tried to broadcast it, it was still timelocked:


The second time, it worked:


Edit: there's a free 0.1 BTC for the first person to discover why I was giggling like a schoolboy when I made that transaction.

It really depends on the site.

If they are provably fair then you can verify your own dice rolls to make sure you're not being cheated.

Some sites make this easier than others. Search on the site for "provably fair" and read what they write about verifying your rolls.

We don't know for sure what's true. We do know the site was cheating players by skipping winning bets. But when they were caught they gave most of the crowd-funded bankroll back to its owners which doesn't seem like something a scam site would do.

So how about this:

1. You visit the gambling bank website
2. You give it the public key of an address you control
3. It makes a 2-of-2 multisig address using your public key and one it controls
4. You say how long you want your coins frozen for
5. You deposit coins to the multisig address
6. It immediately creates and signs a timelocked transaction returning those (currently unconfirmed) coins (minus transaction fee, and possibly a servie charge) to the address you gave in step 2 and sends it to you
7. You verify and confirm receipt of the signed transaction.
8. It deletes its private key

Step 5 means that nobody can steal and spend your coins.

Step 6 lets you know immediately whether you've been scammed or not. You don't have to wait for the freeze period to expire before realising that the gamblebank is a fraud.

Step 8 guarantees that there's no way your coins will be unlocked before the time is up - the server has deleted its private key already.

Between steps 6 and 7 there's the possibility that the gamblebank goes rogue. To reduce risk here you could split your coins into 10 smaller amounts and go through the steps for each part separately. Maybe steps 5 through 7 could be in a loop.

Maybe step 8 could be optional, under control of the user. If you want the gamblebank to be able to release the coins early under certain conditions, you could ask it not to delete its private key.

Apparently there is some kind of a limit:


I guess it's per second rather than per minute or per day. I'm sure it would be useful for bot authors to know what the limit actually is, so they can stay within it.

What Hufflepuff did was something like a 2% chance. Unlikely, but not unreasonable. He had a 1 in 50 chance of doing what he did.

The screenshot that was posted was something like a 1 in a quadrillion chance. Unreasonably unlikely.

We can say that it's plausible that Hufflepuff wasn't cheating, and that it's incredibly likely that the screenshot of 9 losing 98% bets in a row was fake.

A 1 in 50 shot is many orders of magnitude more likely to happen than 1 in 2 quadrillion.

We rely on math and probability for Bitcoin itself. There's a small but non-zero chance that I can guess the PD cold storage private key, but math tells us that's very unlikely, and so we trust that it won't happen.