This happened:


It could go either way. OP was lucky.

Thanks for replying. Lets leave it like that, further discussion would be just posting the same all over again.

But for the record - I don't have a problem in changing my point of view if presented with reasonable arguments. That's my superpower. I've done it many times before.

In fact, when I first posted in this thread I was slightly in favour of migrating bitcoin to PoS, but now I think I'll rather stick to PoW.

Still keeping an open mind about other solutions tho.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Someone has just lost BTC152 on PRC. You just can't predict things like that... But they do seem to be getting a lot of action since the launch of 2.0.

Whoever said dice games are boring, wasn't talking about PRC.

Just logged in and what do I see?



"Loseall123" surely lived up to his name.

Feel sorry for the guy...

Hope he wins that console.

Sure, you could live low-key but that's not what you want when you have $5 mils. It's impossible to be unnoticed when you buy expensive car or house paying up-front.

I remember a story about some 18yo UK drug dealer who got busted shortly after buying an expensive Range-Rover.

Look, Ghash doesn't have 51% anymore. Look, Slush or Eligius, who were major pools are not such anymore. Look, now you're complaining about Discus Fish who were irrelevant not too long ago.

According to your theory (highlighted), such changes are not possible. So how did that happen?


But you/miners or even pool itself could take actions before it gets too big.


So your/kokoije's posts were pointless and didn't address ab8989's concerns?

----------------------

OK. To summarise, I'm not here to say PoW is better. I'm really happy that PoS coins exist. I joined this thread hoping for some constructive discussion. Ffs I even voted YES in the poll.

I'm not very familiar with PoS, so asked few questions. But it seems impossible to get any straight-forward answers here, other than hysterical reaction and arguments like "PoS is great because mining sucks".

I'll try again. This time let's do an exercise and pretend that PoW and mining doesn't exist and have never existed. Lets focus entirely on PoS and its design (no PoW or mining arguments). 3 simple questions:

1) Since anyone can own infinite number of wallets/addresses, how would you even know whether the coin is currently centralised or not? Is there anything more than just hopes and belief?

2) If at any point in the future (when the coin is established) it is revealed and proven that one person/entity/government owns say 40% and plays on maximising his stash. What can be done to prevent him from increasing his stake to 50% by simply stashing. Can anything be done or is it 'Game Over'?

3) Assuming PoS coin not fully issued from the start. There is a clear and strong incentive to hoard ('stake'). Who would spend such coin (sacrificing possible gains) and why? What would keep it alive? Is there anything more than hopes that majority of holders will see the 'greater good' and kept regularly spending some portion of their holdings? Even if that happens, aren't those who break out and don't spend rewarded even more?

They have to sell it slowly. There's no other way. No one will buy such amount with cash and if they start selling large amounts on any fiat/BTC exchange - that would immediately raise suspicion.

Even if they successfully convert to fiat, there's still a risk of a taxman asking where did you get the ~$5m from, or bank freezing your account etc.

I reckon all the process will take months if not years.

Highlighted the difference for you (in the post you quoted).
So you agree the PoS doesn't have any advantage in this matter?

Don't forget pools are just pools, they don't necessarily own any power. When things get ugly miners can choose to switch to other pool (P2Pool) or even create a separate one.

If the problem exist in PoS, all you can do is switch to other coin.


Yeah, I didn't realise that. You're saying that by staking 1 PoS coin I'll get the same (small) reward as someone with 1,000,000? If so - that's brilliant. If not - that's completely irrelevant to ab8989's post (to which kokoije replied).

Nice to see separate website just for dice sites.

But you really need to update it, remove Ninja and Dicebitco.in and add the new ones.
You don't have to invest in every single one of them to make a review.

It would be useful to update the current reviews when appropriate. You really should mention multiple investment risk options on the new PRC site (and give them some extra points for that).


I don't know what's the issue with IceDice, but if you don't feel comfortable keeping any funds there - just divest! And invest in any of the new sites instead (if you trust them enough).

Just put an asterisk (*) next to the name and appropriate footnotes, i.e.:

* divested on [date] because of..
** invested X BTC on [date].

something like that.

And if you decide to invest in new sites, you don't need to put whole 1 BTC on each. 0.1 or 0.01 would give the same % return value.

I don't think updating the table (divesting/new investments) will mess up the results. You'll have to do it anyway, sooner or later, if you want to provide meaningful, up-to-date insight.

One of the new sites worth checking is https://safedice.com/, their official thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=868275.0

Friendly operators, responsive and quick with fixing bugs and implementing new features. House edge is only 0.5% (variable) so that's their advantage over others. They could focus a bit more on promoting tho.

They're accepting investments upon request (with no minimum).

Sure. But what does matter is if any of them gains too much power, there are actions you can take to change the current state.

What doesn't matter are the stats you've quoted. They don't show "persons or accounts" they show "accounts" only.

How many people control what stake? You don't know and you'll never know, until the biggest holders reveal themselves and prove their holdings.

Who in the right mind, holding 40%, 50% or 60% of coins, would keep them all in one wallet? Would you?

And that's another problem with PoS.

Also, remember that we're discussing bitcoin as PoS, so comparing to NXT can be pointless (all the NXT coins have already been issued etc). And we need to look also at theoretical long-term threats.

The difference is that dominating pools/miners change all the time. Right now it's Discuss Fish, not too long ago it was GHash, before that BTC Guid, Eligius, Slush etc.

They had significant % share in hashrate but lost it to others.

If you have PoS holder controlling significant % of all coins - there's nothing you or anyone can do about it. Unless he willingly give up some of his stake, he will remain with his % and will be slowly increasing his market share.

You can't do much with physical gold, but there's plenty of ways to invest BTC and there's nothing wrong with that.

So what happens to bitcoin if everyone treats it like an investment on its own, everyone just holds and no one uses it? Price will skyrocket right?

It has already dived under $260 few days ago. Why do you think it's not probable?

Hard to say what will happen when BitStamp re-opens. They'll likely have to buy back the stolen 19,000 (if they didn't already). This can drive the price up or down.

But yes, if you're bullish on bitcoin and are here for the long-run, then the current price movement doesn't matter too much.

No one knows (apart from them). What you see in the first post of this thread is all the financial info publicly available at the moment. As a small company they were entitled to present abbreviated accounts, so pretty much only the balance sheet.


That's probably a good point.

It's the registered office (London), it doesn't have to be their operational office, and probably isn't.

Were did you get those 7 executives from? I only see 5 directors + 1 secretary (they don't have to be exec, and exec doesn't have to be official director).

Exec's salary is just a guessing game. It could be zero, or minimal wage (if the exec is also a shareholder, in such case he'll get most through dividends), it could be performance-related salary etc. They'd have to be really stupid to sign up an exec for ridiculous fixed salary without tying it to performance.

Not a good idea. Would work if they had monopoly or were at least the major player, but they're not anymore. It's a very competitive market atm.

Right now they need to fix the problem and re-build trust, which is not easy. If they were to increase tx fees, they'll be effectively punishing customers for their own mistake, that's not wise move.

This thread gives quite good insight:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=826466.0

Note: Win88 have min 1 BTC investment.

I'm invested in pocketrocketscasino.eu (formerly PRCDice) - they have the biggest crowd-funded bankroll and give multiple risk option for investments (read FAQ before investing) and safedice.com - small, new site with only 0.5% variable house edge, since their bankroll is quite low, you can get bigger %share in profits with a small investment.

If they're operating in Slovenia, the total annual operating costs (for 20 staff) should easily close within $1 million (excluding execs' salaries, as this could be anything). And it's probably much less. It's a straight-forward business, don't think they need 20 employees, and office space rental (with internet + electricity + basic equipment) is not that expensive.

There's no way they could make a profit (and they did in 2013) with $5-10m expenses. They've never had enough volume for that.


Why $20m? 10 (already invested) + 5 (stolen) = $15m.

The question is why they've invested $10m in the first place. It doesn't look like BitStamp ever needed that kind of money shot.
Possibly Pantera threw some money in and obliged themselves to provide further support/guarantee, all totalling $10m. Just my guess.

Anyhow, I can't imagine Pantera writing off $10m and giving up on profit-making business.


That's what I meant:

Thanks for the link.

I was referring to 'net profit' (assumed $1m, after tax). If I'm not mistaken, they can charge the amount of stolen bitcoins as an expense and do the same with interest on the (hypothetical) $5m loan, effectively reducing taxable profit (to a loss) and don't pay any tax (for a few years) which could speed up the loan repayment.

Wasn't aware of that $10m from Pantera. That's indeed a lot. And if that's true, they're likely to have a lot of that left (depends on the terms of the funding), so they don't need any extra funds to cover the hacked wallet.

Also, if Pantera invested such capital, you can be sure they won't let BitStamp die.


If BitStamp goes under, the $10m will be lost forever, so it makes perfect sense for Pantera to further capitalise the business (if that's needed) and have realistic chance for ROI, even if it takes a long time.

Edit. The loans are not repaid from net profit, so it can take less than 5 years to get those $5m back.