I don't think this is really true. I've been invested in a few casinos bankrolls, and they've all so far been profitable (*touch wood*), just the main problem has been most of them having pretty low bankroll turn over.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but crypto-games seems to fall into this category for me a bit. I believe bitcoin investors made 52 bitcoin in the last 6 months (which is absolutely nothing to complain about) but in the same period  bustadice investors made 479 BTC (and based on a smaller bankroll in fact too) and bustabit investors made 1250 (although ~750 is probably a better number due to some huge whale action that happened exactly 6 months ago today).

But anyway, I agree with the rest of the stuff said here. Probably the thing I appreciate the most about crypto-games is how this thread is kept non-self-moderated so it's pretty easy to check in and get the full story of what's going on (without worrying they're being deleted) and in over a year of following it, it seems like a very honestly run business.

Wait, are you seriously running that in production? As you've intentionally gone out of your way to obfuscate the history by squashing everything into a single commit, I can't be bothered to diff it and look. But a quick look at the gameserver code makes me believe you've managed to use an obscenely outdated version of the bustabit source. The very least you could do is base it off a much later opensource version (which was last updated 2.5 years ago), then go through the dependencies and update them to something modern as several of them contain some known serious problems, like DoS vulnerabilities (and probably worse).

I have had no reason to post about it much, but as many of you know I have been acting as bustadice's "auditor" which allows me to offer reasonably strong guarantees to investors (assuming they trust me to not be malicious) by verifying bets/wins and having one of the multisig keys to the cold wallet to approve the movement there.  During this time I can confidently say that there's been no funny-business with bustadice, and can attest to investors being treated fairly.

Anyway, some of you might have noticed a brief outage of bustadice on August 8th. The cause was actually my fault, as my audit server went down (it's on the critical path for a bet, as bustadice itself can't figure out the result of a bet without it).  I can now confidently diagnose the cause as a hardware failure, and as a result I lost a few seconds of logs. (To keep latency low, the audit server will give the requested data to bustadice before it has guaranteed the logs are persisted/flushed to disk)

But to be clear, it's an extremely minor issue. This has no impact on players or investors, it just means there's a handful of bets in which I can not audit for investors, however none of the bets are a significant size (we're talking less than a few hundred dollars).  I am mainly just posting this to try offer total transparency. I was originally planning on calculating the exact amount of the worst-case audit mismatch and paying that out to investors (on account of it being such a small amount) but I have decided against it as  a) It would create precedent that would confuse my role as auditor with something more akin to "insurance" and b) the cause of the failure was hardware related, I believe it would've been almost impossible to predict or abuse.

And not to mention, investors are doing great! Up a staggering 474.2 BTC (3% more than expected value!)

I'm honestly quite impressed that after 3454 posts here, you haven't accidentally learned how the forum works.

If this doesn't happen, will you finally stop your "postings"?

I disagree with "self moderated" threads as I think it's misleading that that viewers of the thread can't tell what's been removed or not.

However I'm really not sure also why game-protect is allowed to derail threads with his nonsense. Which by the way is all a transparent attempt to trick people into signing up to casinos with his referral links, thinking they are "protected" when the reality couldn't be further from the truth (at the most basic level he is not a lawyer, and thus not able to offer legal services).

Yup, dicesite's is is really the only decent option out there. Also if you check https://dicesites.com/graphs it'll also show sites that are not strictly dice sites but have open stats (like bustabit, which is probably the most popular casino (with open stats?))


Yeah, thebitcoinstrip used to be good. But it was sold to a new owner who only really cares about pushing ref links. I wouldn't take anything it says very seriously

Your proposed system would allow you to batch verify that N games were predetermined. However it besides the usability problems (you need to collect the result hash, then collect all N games hashes before you can verify) it also suffers a critical flaw:  it doesn't prove the hashes are drawn from a fair distribution. If your scheme was used, Daniel could just pick all bad hashes and then commit to them.

As scant says, the hash chain method is far more elegant and offers all the guarantees yours does, plus more.

Daniel already has!

The current game is: 664966, which has a hash of `74543360092eac88c1ff6fcaf74328cce1e93900fbfef9204b5458365eeb2b1a`. What this means is game 664967 when hashed will be `74543360092eac88c1ff6fcaf74328cce1e93900fbfef9204b5458365eeb2b1a`. And you can verify this as soon as game 664967 ends.

But more than this, when game 664967 ends it gives you not only enough information to verify it (check it hashes to 74543360092eac88c1ff6fcaf74328cce1e93900fbfef9204b5458365eeb2b1a) but it also commits to the next game. This is why it's known as a hash chain, and can be repeated until the very end.


So more generally, all games commit to all future games -- and allow you to verify that.


And the next piece of the puzzle is a function that can convert a hash into a game result in a fair way (i.e. having the advertised house edge) and importantly has no concept of a "good" and "bad" hash before the hash chain was created (to avoid daniel creating a biased hash chain), hence the use of the blockchain for a client seed.

The expected median should indeed be 1.98x, but the actual median is going to vary significantly over a finite amount of games.  


That system is known as "provably fair" and contains absolutely everything you need to prove the game is fair. While i do admit it requires quite a bit of technical knowledge, it has the advantage that anyone can verify the game for everyone. So if you can find someone who understands how the maths primitives work, it should be easy to verify =)


If I was in his position, I would not do it either. If that knowledge affects your actions, I would say it's pretty unethical (as it'll either advantage/disadvantage  investors/gamblers). If that knowledge doesn't affect your actions, it's kind of pointless to know. I would definitely not want to put myself in a position where I could get influenced by it.


BTW, Daniel actually makes more money when the games are good than when the games are bad. His profit is a function of the amount wagered, and players are able to turn over a lot more when they're not getting raped.


The house edge can be 1%, but players lose 2%  .... but that doesn't mean there was cheating, it means there was variance. The provably fair system proves that the game outcomes have been decided from a probability distribution function that results in a 1% house edge. It's totally normal and expected that the games will be "good" and "bad" over a finite period of time

I'd encourage you to do the maths, or get someone to do it for you. Variance is far more of a bitch than almost everyone realizes. In the end, bustabit has done all that is possible to allow you to verify the games and the maths and check things -- the ball is really in your court on this one.

Is that really the version you're using? I don't really see any real upgrades, and the templates doesn't really match:

e.g. https://github.com/alibag/bitcrash-webserver/blob/83630f94ad5e6b39306fe3b477fbc7ae06c561dc/views/index.html#L78

If I understand right, should be outputting: "Bustabit.com is fully owned and operated by..." on the homepage, but that's not actually what I see

Did you by any chance see the investor profit chart? It's not proof of foul play, but I would be willing to be it wasn't on the up and up. It's not an understatement to say it got continually pillaged in a way (that as a casino owner of 3+ years) have never seen.


No one even knows the structure of the MoneyPot company  (especially so after the "acquisition" )


rubies was literally like a 100% a premine, and MP owns(owned?) half (?) of betterbets which allowed them to profit off it. It would be awfully naive to think that MP decided to pump rubies out of the good of their hearts.


The use of "trusted escrows" in the ICO was clearly just a plan to try make the ICO look more legitimate. It's pretty common, and generally the escrow agents are bound such that they can offer no material protections to investors (actually why I have refused to act as escrow in a large amount of ICOs)

It's also clear now that at the time of the ICO moneypot was insolvent (and not disclosing this to investors). The whole thing was obviously done in bad faith


I think it's clear they didn't intend to scam from the get go, but they should be held accountable for what they actually did. In the real world, if you rape someone you don't get any points because you didn't kill them after.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with crypto-games -- could you explain how multi-accounting is able to cheat investors?

There's a difference between a failed business and a scam though. Perhaps there was some criminality involved, but it's not obviously so.


That's the clear scam territory. MoneyPot made a hard promise to support the price of rubies, directly and indirectly profited on it -- and then when it came time to fulfill their promise -- they just laughed at people who believed them (and DogeDigital has even gone so far as to leave negative trust on two people who complained about being scammed). This puts it in unambiguous scam territory.

My hypothesis is that MP will/is buy backing back the now worthless rubies for cents on the dollar and then once they acquire enough announce they are "now" honoring their promise, and thus they did nothing wrong and banking on people forgetting how they screwed their most loyal customers.

I don't quite understand what you mean, that functionality should be working in v2 (or at least is for me?) as well as v2 having a PM system too



I'm just telling you the reality of how people played. I used to cringe every time I saw a whale getting his bonuses taken each game, and didn't care (generally it's pretty trivial to change the way you play to screw the bots) and there was a bot that primarily made it's money targeting people like that that netted something like 1M USD in a year.



I was going to leave this, but it would be a bit unfair to Daniel. First of all, I think I have too much trust issues to do what you said (hell, in all my time I never even trusted anyone to handle customer support...) but if I did, I certainly wouldn't present them as an owner -- as if they screwed up or did something wrong that would be fatal. If you care enough, you can ask any of the major casino owners -- as I shopped the offer around to everyone I was aware of that I thought would be honest and competent (although I avoided the whole "open" sale thing, to avoid a repeat of the moneypot disaster).

BTW, I think you've drastically overestimated bustabit's value. In all my time owning it, I netted about ~3000 bitcoin -- but the number I was looking at selling for was closer to a ~year's of net. Perhaps I valued it too little, but I have no regrets. Daniel is doing a fantastic job, and I've been able to do new things with my life (like I just finished living 6 months on the beach).

It sounds like it, but it's not really. There's really two different types of "players", let's call them "advantage players" (people trying to make a profit through the bonus system) and "gambling players" (people who played bonus oblivious, just trying to gamble). Previously bustabit tried to cater to both, but now only caters to "gambling players". Previously "gambling players" might have had an effective average house edge of say 1.5% (not sure exactly, but the 0-1% house edge + 0-1% losing in pvp), while now they have a house edge of 1%.

So I'd say with a high level of confidence the "gambling players" are better off, even though significantly less wager volume is returned.

What do you mean by this? Were you ever able to open multiple chat windows? 


Yeah, it's always been. Originally it was there just for SEO purposes, but it actually works really well for helping prevent DDoS attacks too (I can explain via PM if interested)



Anyway, regarding your larger point about the bonus system -- I very much agree with you. The old system was very unique and cool, and I'd love to see it come back. However; in its previous form it was pretty unfair to casual gamblers (the vast majority who just totally ignored it, and got taken advantage of) and it should be added as an additional game play mode. Everyone who plays with it, should really understand what's happening and actively playing for the bonuses.

It seems to still be extremely popular: https://dicesites.com/bustabit  -- I'm actually not even aware of a site with more volume than that (although I wouldn't be surprised, they just don't have open stats). As for players losing in general, that's not totally unexpected in a casino -- but over the entire history players have actually performed significantly better than expected. But fortunately bustabit also gives you the option to invest in the bankroll (like I have done; which so far has paid off nicely)

I'd go through the list on: https://www.bustabit.com/license.txt

(and generally avoid the ones unlicensed)


AFAIK Daniel is only selling licenses for the v1 of bustabit, which contains the bonus program you like 

One of the good things about dice, is that connection issues should have a pretty small impact. The provably fair system proves that all games have been predetermined and the nonce guarantees that the <bet you wanted to do> will have the same result no matter when you do it. (e.g. if the site is offline for X period of time, the next game outcome will always be the next game outcome).

Ahh cool! It's always great to see new ideas being developed. Hope it takes off!