If one wants to stake a bet with bitcoin or cryptocurrency with an individual offline is the service of an escrow employable or do escrow services avoid getting involved in gambling.
What are the best escrow services for this
Honestly there's a bunch of casinos that have a much longer and established history than most escrow agent you'll find (e.g. see the verified operators on cryptogambling.org ) and they all provide proof you weren't cheated (provably fair). No reputable escrow agent is going to get involved in a normal gambling deal as there's absolutely no way to mediate disputes (e.g. you can say you bet "low", the casino can say you bet "high" and the escrow agent can't objectively tell who's telling the truth). Although if you wanted to involve an escrow for a large bet, there are people can help you come up with bespoke air-tight contract that can be objectively judged (e.g. "The stretched-block-hash of the block the payment goes into must end in '0', and you win 15x your money ), but unless you're trying to do a bet that is significantly higher than the limits of bustadice (aiming to win > ~41 BTC profit) you're far better off just doing it there. |
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As VTC said, you do get some of your dilution fee back so it slightly helps your guys chances. A dilution fee is fine, but the breakeven point shouldn´t be reached after several
months for a new investor if we assume that the site makes a profit. Of course
you can´t protect new investors from a downturn due to players running better then
expected.
Honestly, I'm not really sure that's a bad thing. I think the larger point is that any public bankroll system is always going to sort of hit an equilibrium of where people leave / don't invest because expected returns / risks are too unattractive for people to invest. There's some advantage in tweaking it such that the equilibrium is a bit higher (e.g. higher max profit) as well as disadvantages (e.g. more liability). The way it is now, makes it more attractive for previous and long-term investors. I think that's pretty fair and reasonable. Obviously I'm pretty biased as a very early investors and any new investors disadvantage me due to dilution (although slightly compensate me for that with dilution fees). But this misses the obvious fact that many investors tend to gamble from time to time and investors going crazy (or simply trying to recoup investment losses by gambling) has been the fuel for a big percentage of site profits from time immemorial (the Just-Dice days  ). I've only thought about it for 30 seconds, so forgive me if I'm wrong. But in the current system investors can effectively borrow money against their bankroll investment, and then repay it (interest fee). Investors who wanted to gamble, could easily do that to gamble. To borrow X money against your bankroll investment, just go "Onsite: -X, Offsite: +X" and then to repay the loan, do: "Onsite: +X, Offsite: -X" and you'll pay 0 fees (no dilution or interest!) Maybe Daniel can make a simplified UI for "loans against your bankroll" rofl |
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It does, it's just that the jsfiddle doesn't "live reload". After making the code change (e.g. changing the salt) you need to hit "Run" and then redo the verification (and you'll see it prints out different busts) |
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To sum up what you said:
1. You are not saying we are cheating
2. There is a possibility for seed manipulation
3. Our scheme gives users no way to prove whether we are fair.
Correct =) But, based on what we discussed, which brings another question for us to think, users can't prove we are unfair while they can't prove we are fair either. Correct. But this the same situation as just using a random number generator (which is still unfortunately somewhat of a standard). It's impossible for the player to tell if they were cheated, or not cheated. While if I played at a site with a proper provably fair system, like PrimeDice or Bustabit -- I could actually check if I was cheated or not. And that's the whole point of the scheme =) |
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Nevertheless, If I'm wrong and your scheme is in fact working, why not then simply create a dozen of accounts and make them all cash out at 1, thereby increasing your expected profit?
My scheme does work, but it only works under a specific scenario (the one you created: where two players are trying to cash out high). Creating a dozen accounts and cashing out at 1x would be an absolutely terrible strategy though, because the person you're "targetting" would likely cash out early and collect lots of bonuses. 99% of the time, all strategies can be done with 2 or less accounts. I don't think there's anything wrong with multi-accounting either. But the real important thing to remember is that the whole bonus system is effectively "player-vs-player" and you are winning money from other players (or if you do badly: they're winning from you). And you have to bet them by a significant margin (as you're always also paying the house-edge to play). So generally the biggest problem is finding a good time to bet (how other people are betting, and enough volume). Anyway, you can pretty easily play around with the min-bet and see if you can get your average bonus above 1%, which means you're making more from the bonus system than you're losing to it. If your average cash out is 1x (there's no house edge at that multiplier) then you'd be playing profitably. If your average cash out is 2x, it means you need to have an average bonus of 1.5% to play profitably. If your average cash out is really high, you need an average bonus of like 1.9%. So there's a surprising amount of strategy to what looks like a simple game. (But the big problem is, you need a huge amount of action happening for it to be worth your time. If the bonus pool for a round of a game is $1, it's never going to make too much sense playing strictly for bonuses) |
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So you are basically saying that the bonuses you can earn if the game doesn't crash and you successfully wait over other players there can offset losses you suffer when you are terminated, right? If it is not so, then this "skill" is utterly irrelevant. Further, I'm not sure whether there is any skill involved at all as it is still luck, i.e. another player can just wait indefinitely until he is terminated by the crash. In this case, no amount of "skill" is going to help you. All in all, it is just another level of luck at play here, nothing else
No, actually there is something you can do! Let's say you're both betting X, and your opponent refuses to cashout before you. All you really need to do is set your cashout to something like 10x, then use a second account and cashout at 1x. Doing that your expected profit will be around ~0.4% (?) and thus a profitable strategy. Of course if your opponent is also playing for bonuses, he will notice you doing this and try take advantage of it. So it's quite dynamic, but probably the biggest part of the skill is knowing when and when it doesn't make sense to bet. But to put it in perspective, BaB originally had the same bonus scheme and through pure skilled play (i.e. +EV with good bankroll management) someone managed to net over a million dollars in a year in profit. |
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I've never played bustabit whatever
And how is the player supposed to cash out before it crashes if this is exactly how he is expected to lose? If you can beat the house with this skill, why isn't everybody playing there or rather, why hasn't the casino been ruined yet? I don't necessarily mean to say that there's no skill involved in the game, I just can't wrap my head around how it can be used in a purposeful way if it actually is
It's a bit confusing, but there's basically two games happening at the same time. One is 99% of the (average) payout, which is against the house and "try guess when the game busts". This purely luck, as there's no way to guess when the game will bust (or at least, there shouldn't be). But the interesting part is other 1% which is actually a player-vs-player game, which is you're competing against other players to cash out after them (but before the game busts). There's a surprising amount of possible strategy involved, and it's all pretty dynamic depending how other people are playing (and if they're ignoring you, or fighting you for the bonuses). Hopefully that puts enough context that if you read about how the bonuses, it'll make a bit more sense. |
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1. There is no manipulation on our seed picking.
I believe you, but we have no way to know that. Which is my entire point =) When we found out about Bustabit, we were wondering did they use any seed choice in version 1.0? We don’t think so, and that’s why we didn’t choose seed manipulation. You may wonder why, haha. I think you are misremembering. The very first iteration of bustabit was released in a way that wasn't provably fair at all. Then Dooglus (from this forum) suggested the idea of the hash-chain (the exact thing you are doing), but then espringe realized that wasn't provably fair either and came up with the block-chain hash modification -- which is what actually makes bustabit provably fair. Bustabit has been using this same concept for several years now, including in the "v1" of it. And like what I said, it has been almost a year since our foundation, and we haven’t changed our seed once. While this makes it less likely you're cheating, it doesn't offer players any concrete assurances. You very well could've searched for a seed the resulted in specific patterns (e.g. good games at the start, and the next year lower-than-expected). We simply have no idea. Just to be clear: I'm not accusing you of cheating. It's just that we have no idea. Which is the antithesis of provably fair. We don’t believe that additional seed will affect the result to the player in the long term
If you chose a seed fairly, then it'll mean there is no difference. But what it does is prevent you picking an unfair seed. So to sum up, we don’t think the additional seed is the solution and we are not and will be never use seed manipulation. Only math analysis and data comparison can tell you whether you are using a good one. Not saying we are 100% right, corrections are welcomed.
I think there's a language barrier, and you're not understanding the problem. Let's try simplify this. Let's imagine your system is only going to play 10 rounds: Do you think your system is "provably fair"? Well, no, it's obviously not. Because it's *trivial* to by-hand find a seed that gives super bad results. You just trial-and-error create a few seeds and see the results. But what about bustabit's scheme? Would that fair for 10 rounds? Yes! Because they commit to a *particular* hash-chain before knowing if it's good or bad. So this makes trial and error impossible. So now let's go back to your system: We have no idea how much "trial and error" you did to generate your seed. As an example, you could've tried a billion seeds, and found one that had a giant red-streak in 2 years, to wipe out any martingaler. You could've found a seed such that a particular game will be a particular result. We literally have no idea. So I think you'll agree: It's possible that under your scheme you picked a seed to achieve a particular result. And that it's impossible for us to ever tell if such manipulation happened. My calculations show you could relatively easy ~double your expected profit over (any) year period of time, by brute-force checking a few million different seeds. |
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Point 2, the site's method is found to be unfair, and demonstrated, so I guess the reward should be given to RHavar, but only if someone else can also confirm that this is true, I think. I am not defending anybody, I think RHavar deserves some kind of reward.
Just to add some nuance: it's not so much their method is unfair, it's just that it's not "provably fair". I actually doubt very much they've picked a bias hash chain, but we really have no way of knowing (hence not provably fair). |
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Not just a replica, in 2017 when we have started to engaging in the blockchain market, BC.Game accidentally discovered Bustabit, similar to our originally-created H5 game in 2015 —train crash, followed by a purchase authorization from Bustabit to hash.game with our strong determination on developing games in crypto world.
I'm pointing out the provably-fair scheme was taken from bustabit. I would know, because I am the person who created it  (Originally bustabit used to just be "provably predetermined" but I wrote the code to make it provably fair). So, does this help us reach a conclusion? While some strategies are good, some are not. We don’t believe that there is any best seed choice to affect the result.
The seed choice *absolutely* makes a difference, and it can be quite large. Let's say you randomly generate a seed, and generate a hash chain. We can reason pretty easily that the house edge should be 1%. However, it might be a lot lower (lets say there are lots of low multipliers, it's good for the site) and it might be a lot higher (if there's lots of high multipliers, it's good for players). But the house edge only looks at "average", so it doesn't matter and we can say the house edge is 1%. However that analysis is based around the idea of a random seed. To make it easy to demonstrate, I'm going to generate 3 hash chains, of length 5: Chain A: seed=680597CDC84B239A1C0475C89E0CC5380B1DDF367772C8F3055742C6ACB2C3FF Result: 4.63, 2.36, 1.22, 2.225, 2.56 Chain B: seed=6AA9D8D8BD428C4277F613E74AC1AAE2A81EAF7DAF24C4D459FA030AA63C03D5 Result: 1.04, 1.00, 1.07, 1.28, 1.02 Chain C: seed=60CC3C97D3C80396437AF43F3AAC84A460EF2EBA88E79C2D4AC1218DD1923002 Result: 1.76, 2.43, 15.27, 3.55, 1.09 Now from this, we can *clearly* see that B would be the best for the house. Of course the longer the game runs, the less the statistical differences are -- but for the few *years* of games, the house edge can easily have been manipulated to 2x what they should be. The cheating can easily be done with an algorithm: bestSeed = randomSeed();
bestResult = rank(bestSeed)
while (true) {
const seed = randomSeed();
const r = rank(seed);
if (r < bestResult) {
console.log("Found new best seed: ", seed, " with rank: ", r);
bestSeed = seed;
bestResult = r;
}
}
Where the rank function can be as simple as computing the median of the first few million hashes. Maybe you want to say that increasing the probability of the result lower than 2x on purpose by the website is to earn more. But this is not guaranteed in some strategies. Even with huge amount of data analysis, you will find that the result lower that 2x is not in high percentage, even less than 0.5%. Greater data provides a result closer to the theoretical. In addition, 10-million data need 10 years to run out. There is no assurance at all when the data distributed each day, week, month and year.
To sum up, no matter which hash seed you are using, it’s a fair game on the grounds that we never know what strategy the player will choose.
It doesn't matter how players are betting, you don't need to know before hand. Even if someone knew for a fact you purposely picked a hash-chain with an abnormal amount of low-crashes, it's impossible for anyone to cheat. It purely increases the house edge. We also welcome more specific analysis with data and algorithm worth 100ETH. You can run any test on GitHub. But opinion in one sentence is not enough.
I hope I've made my point clear: *) The choice of seed (exclusively) determines the game-crashes in your system *) The differences between a good-chain and bad-chain are very significant (on my laptop, in a few minutes I am able to double-the house edge for 1 year worth of hashes). *) We have no way of knowing if you fairly picked a seed or not The only advantage of seed choice is easier understanding for beginners; there is no effect on the fairness of the game. We are trying to use EOS+BTC seeds choices recently for players to make the seeds of this game more decentralized.
The best solution is to do what bustabit has done, use a *future* bitcoin-block hash as an additional seed (after committing to a single chain). This makes it impossible for you to run the "brute force" attack to pick a seed that is favorable to the house. If you're interested in more information: https://medium.com/@nekoz/generating-a-provably-fair-crash-point-8d502058e8bcBut because we don't know if you picked the seed fairly, your provably fair system isn't actually provably fair. |
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He also proceeded to say I'm not a legit player for only betting during competitions and investing to "further reduce my edge". It's not my fault he made the competition so ridiculously +EV. Honestly that should already have ringed my bells. He also forgot how I bet $10k on a single bet on his dice game a while back when there was no competition.
The irony is that he was here explicitly promoting the competition as currently being +EV. I actually looked at it, and would've participated myself, but then I remembered I would have had to deal with Dean if I won. |
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Bounty participants received only 1% of all tokens, not 5%.
When I log in, my tokens are there indeed. But what good does that do me without buy backs?
I hold about $700 worth of tokens. I didn't sell them earlier as it was supposed to be a hedge against Bitcoin price drops, given their stable dollar value.
Please tell me how I can sell them at the advertised dollar value.
I guess you can sell them on the on-site exchange, but the best offer is currently: 0.0000008 BTC which is only 3% (?!!) of the supposed face value. It's kind of funny how he can try pretend that investors haven't been screwed. When btc prices were higher than the "buy back price", he was more than happy to make a (personal) profit. And literally the minute things turned against him, he renegs. I actually have chat-logs of him assuring me that he would be being doing the buy backs "even if btc goes to $1" and when I pressed him on how he could possible afford that, he told me has systems in place to sell btc immediately as the price went down, so he could make sure he has funds to pay his investors. I strongly suspect Dean is actually insolvent. The supposed reason he wanted me to buy a large quantity of BKB him, was so that he could increase his long exposure to btc price, and that was just before the price crashed even more. When ever I asked him about using any sort of escrow structures or proving his funds, he would come up with bizarre (and sometimes contradictory) excuses. Fast forward a few days, and he was willing to trash his reputation to screw Dan on a 2 BTC license fee (even after having raised millions of dollars for supposed costs). Tries to raise more money with a half-baked ICO. Then he goes on to screw investors with the buy-back cancelation, and now players with the prize cancellation. |
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How have they been harmed if they lost no money? That makes zero sense.
You are quite literally not paying people their winnings, and still haven't offered a reasonable explanation for why you've voided the contest and bets. When you saw I was using it you even said "Imao it's the exact source of BaB 1." and I said "is that a problem?"
You then said "You could use it and hope Daniel doesn't notice lol"
Yet I'm in the wrong here yeah?
Yes. Obviously. You were the one that pirated the software, not me. Even though this is out taken out of context (where I go on to tell you it's best to buy a license, or comply with the terms). And this directly contradicts statements you repeatedly made Daniel and the CGF and then even publicly: You know we were under the opinion, wrongly, that we were able to use that code after discussing it with RHavar.
Blaming me for your piracy for no reason, based on conversations we had in-confidence after the fact. I very clearly never endorsed piracy (just pointed out you could get away with it if Daniel doesn't notice) and several times encouraged you to follow the license. You obviously thought very little of our "friendship" if you were willing to try stab me in the back so easily? You've told me about many actual pirated BaB sites and said you don't even bother going after them even when they were making millions of $ yet you jumped straight on BetKing when we had zero players playing in the game?
I don't care. I no longer own BaB. It's not my place to care. Almost everyone without fail who pirates copies of BaB ends up failing. Why? Because a gambling business is built upon trust, so by starting with known pirated software it almost guarantees you will never be trusted. You'll notice yours is falling apart because no one trusts you any more (and can you blame them? The last months you've done nothing but lie and walk back promises). The only reason I cared about you pirating BaB was because you were going around blaming me (why?!!) and repeatedly saying other falsehoods (e.g. you didn't know) along with a lot of other unethical behavior (e.g. running the pirated version for a week or so to see how well it did before "deciding" to comply with the license, even though Daniel repeatedly told you he was not ok with that that). And then you obfuscated the source (changing stuff like the canvas to an svg) and tried to pretend it was a reimplementation. I'm sorry, but all that's on you. And all that's behavior by someone hilariously untrustworthy. [Edit: fixed quote] |
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As usual no one in this forum has any idea what they are talking about including Ryan with his snarky comments.
Yet, you make no attempt of actual clarifying. Everyone posting about BKB when they don't know how many tokens I've bought back or own or how many people were happy to switch already to the new project or any actual internal running of the business.
Seems kind of irrelevant? You massively screwed BKB holders, I believe some investors were selling their BKB tokens at < 20% of their "buy back" price after you renegged on your promises. Even if a small amount of people were screwed, the fact is you still screwed your investors. (I also have a hard time believing it was an insignificant amount, or why would you even ruin your name over it?) Now we have people jumping to conclusions about the prizes and talking about multi accounting.
Where did I say the contest was cancelled only because of multi accounting?
You do realize that this is a forum? You can post your justification for the pretty insanely drastic action of reverting all the bets and not giving out the promised prizes? Complaining that no one one understands your reasons and refusing to provide them isn't exactly a good look. It's stupid for anyone to call it a scam when no one at all loses money.
Only need to see the posters though, 2 actual participants have posted and zero investors and zero token holders. Just trolls and haters. Pathetic.
I also know you're well-aware you have seriously disadvantaged some players with your bet/prize reversal. I talked to someone in private who is in this bucket as they should've won a significant amount from the wagering contest. kolloh from this forum (who did post) also appears to have been similarly been harmed. Considering your should've paid out 20 BTC + 50% EV (??) in prizes, but net player loss during Dec was pretty minor -- it's rather obvious the only reason you did the reversal is because you end up with a lot more money in your pocket than if you didn't. I'm really trying to be charitable here considering your long history in the bitcoin world, but I have trouble seeing what you're doing as anything other than first scamming investors and now your players. Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'd really like to be. |
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I don't there were any rules stating multiple accounts weren't allowed. At any rate, that isn't a reason to cancel the whole promotion and not pay out the players who placed fairly.
If anything, the wagers from multi-accounters should be combined which would push other people up the board more. I placed fairly and am quite upset the promotion isn't going to be paid out as described.
As far as I can tell there's 3 legitimate solutions to multi-accounting problem: a) Pay the payouts as promised, leaving all entries b) Remove all entries from accounts run by people who were multi-accounting, and pay out all the prizes to people who weren't multi-accounting c) Pay out prizes as if all multi-accounts bets were merged into a single account I think a) makes the most sense unless multi-accounting was clearly not allowed. b) makes the most sense if multi-accounting was clearly forbidden. And c) makes the most sense if the rules were a bit fuzzy, and it felt that multi-accounting was violating the spirit of the promotion. But on what planet is "revert all bets, and pay out no prizes!" a legitimate response o.0 |
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This "Christmas wager" scam has the same stench that the infamous "Win 50 BTC Jackpot To Celebreate betking re-launch" scam had: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4873939.0In that 2017 scam too he pulled in investors by stating there was a 50 BTC Jackpot for Dice Jackpot. Customers no doubt signed up because of that 50 BTC Jackpot claim. Can you please stop bringing this up? It just derails from legitimate criticism, and people stop taking your claims seriously. The 50 BTC jackpot was only winnable under certain circumstances, which no one hit and then he stopped offering the jackpot. Absolutely nothing was done wrong. It's business as usual. Now this on the other hand, is totally different: He had a program, people should've won it and then he decided to not pay and revert bets under the guise it was abused (even though he himself was promoting the fact it was +EV lol). I honestly don't see how it can be defended at all. Actually the whole inexplicable "..because abuse" scheme has a rich history with bitcoin scammers. Much like the moneypot scam, where they had the "perpetual" guaranteed price-floor for their token, and then renegged after it "was abused". What was the abuse? Someone asking for them to do the promised buy-back |
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This is interesting... What would the gambler have to do so that investor A has negative bankroll growth?
The specific scenario Dooglus was using that caused it: Suppose a whale plays for a long period with 50% chance of winning each bet. All bets are the maximum, aiming to win 1% of the bankroll.
Which is actually a slight simplification (it ignores BaB commissions, which causes the max profit to be a bit smaller than 1% ... but same logic applies with a max-bet). And iirc the BaB max-profit system has a few "soft" limits because of the multiplayer nature (e.g. it allows 2 players to aim for a higher max-profit than it would allow a single player to aim for) But more generally: The BaB investor system is designed to more or less be "optimal" (in terms of expected bankroll growth, which is actually what you care about) if you are at 1x leverage, assuming a whale is max-profit betting. The higher your "leverage" is > 1x, the worse expected bankroll growth you'll have until the point you hit 2x leverage where you'll have 0 expected bankroll growth. As your leverage is gets higher from there, the lower and lower your expected bankroll gets (e.g. further negative). But that's all based around the "worst case" of a player targeting the max-profit. If you know for a fact that no one is ever going to target more than half the max-profit, it's actually ideal to have an effective leverage at 2x for instance. |
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There's a problem with your provably fair method (you copied the bustabit scheme, without doing the "seeding event" to prove that the hash chain itself is fair). In other words: you are proving the games are predetermined, but you're not proving they're from a fair distribution. Does this qualify for the 100 ETH bounty?
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Can someone explain a little bit better how the onsite and offsite bankroll investing works? what I understand is that if I deposit 1 btc and put it in the bankroll and then say I have another 1 btc offsite then my 1 btc invested onsite becomes 2 by the power of leveraging? so if I would lose 50% of my investment then I would really loose 100% because I am leveraged by 2x by saying I have 1 btc offsite?
If this is like this then it means I can have 1 btc onsite and 9 btc offsite and then I would be leveraged by 10x and so my looses and wins would all move quicker and there is obviously a bigger chance of loosing it all by the high leverage you use
if this is true which is the maximum leverage I can use? 100x? please explain the offsite and onsite bankroll investment thanks
The offsite system is a bit complex, honestly I'd probably just recommend avoiding it. That way you can't burn yourself. The most important formula to remember is this: yourBankroll = onsite + offsite Where onsite is how much you physically have in the sites bankroll. It's the amount that is literally "onsite" as in, the amount bustabit has control over. When you make a profit, this number will increase (as you have more money onsite in the bankroll. When you lose money, this will decrease). And "yourBankroll" is just controlling how much you are risking per bet. Bustabit uses the kelly, so you'll be risking something like 0.75% (can't remember exactly...) of the "yourBankroll" value. Now the "offsite" thing is pretty much just an arbitrary number you can set. As you can see (from the above formula) it is used to tweak the "yourBankroll". The main motivation for supporting this is to allow investors to try expose themselves to more variance from gamblers while keeping the money safe in their own control (to limit counter-party risk for things like exit scams). Because it's a static number, (and not a leverage multiplier...) the best thing to do is set it to the amount of money you have "offsite" that you want to risk, but don't want to immediately deposit. But just be careful when doing it, as you expose yourself to a lot of other risks (like getting margin called) so make sure to go over all the FAQs before you do it. (Not that anyone asked, but in my opinion it's probably best to avoid using offsite. I'm a big fan of a very passive "invest a tiny amount you can afford to lose in the bankroll, then come back and check on it every few months", but offsite doesn't quite allow you to do that, as you always need to be monitoring your investment to top-up the onsite incase you're getting close to margin-called) |
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Please tell me if bitsler and primedice have open source code?
Just google "x verifier" and you'll find quite a few. The ones on jsfiddle are the easiest to see the source code of, although personally I'm a fan of dicesites.com which has a verifier there. It doesn't appear to be opensource, but it doesn't particularly matter if you trust it to be independent from the site you're verifying. You can also just save the page and run it offline if you're worried. The site's code is also pretty readable if you're familiar with jquery (after throwing it through a js formatter...) |
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