Hey! Just wanted to give you props for being in business and honest for so long. I've always been really harsh on review sites, as they as a rule always end up going around asking for money or realize it's profitable to promote bullshit. So thought I'd congratulate you on bucking the industry trend, and give you a link in my signature (partly because I have nothing better to do with my signature, partly because I think your site is the best resource for someone to get an idea of what sites to play at)

You can read about it on their bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199911.msg56811557#msg56811557 pretty much the last 10 pages are to do with it.


Besides that not being the case, you avoided my question: how much higher is their house edge than bustabit's? And how did you figure it out?

I've got zero problems with high house-edges or affiliate links or what ever, as long as sites are upfront about it.


I think a good example of an honest review site might be engadget's: https://www.engadget.com/reviews/ They review a lot of products, they have a lot of affiliate links, but they disclose there are affiliate links and do not use the presence or payout of affiliate earnings to influence their reviews/score.

In the crypto scene, in the gambling scene I think the only good example I've seen is https://GamblingSiteFinder.com and https://dicesites.com . And there also used to be thebitcoinstrip.com which offered unbiased reviews/rankings, until it was sold to a new owner who apparently figured out all the typical corrupt shit pays better. Sad.


Edit: This post has inspired me to put GamblingSiteFinder.com in my signature. I never knew what I could do with my signature, and feel they deserve a bit more credit than they are getting.

Well, the obvious problem is these "review" sites are dishonest. They purport to tell people which are the best places to play, but in reality have intentional omissions and re-sorting based on what makes the "review" site more money. I think it's rather simple, there's nothing inherently wrong with affiliate links, but if you claim "these are the best" any deviation from what you think is actually the best is dishonest.



lmao, it's only tough if you have a conflict of interest  For everyone else, it's pretty easy to say "umm don't play there, there are strictly better options"

Oh. I apologize. This is my fault. I misread what you wrote, I thought you said you only review casinos you've worked for, but you said the opposite. 100% my fault, I misread your post.



I guess you're not too familiar with them Pretty much everyone is subject to some level of KYC. They also make an effort to hide their house-edge, but it's pretty easy to calculate from their provably fair. But even just hiding the house edge is a terrible practice. Homework question: What is the house edge of their bustabit clone? What is the house edge of bustabit?



I admit their UI is slick, but it's pretty much the least important part of a casino. They might not be an evil company (e.g. bitstarz) but there's literally no reason anyone should use it. Really the whole point of a review site is to let people know where they should and shouldn't be playing. Whether intentional or not, you're doing a terrible job at that and a misservice to anyone who reads your list, and are just a collection of affiliate links  

Bustadice players have been extraordinary luckily lately (see: dicesites.com/bustadice) which means investors have not. As I am running the bustadice audit sever, I just want to confirm I have actually been auditing the bets. Even if Daniel was malicious (or hacked) I do not believe the results of the audit server could possible be tampered with so I feel quite confident they are all legitimate.

Anyway, I guess that's my yearly audit update 



[Full disclosure: there was a couple of technical hiccups with some server issues and as a result a couple of bets that I can't audit. But fortunately they were all tiny bets, and even assuming they were all illegitimate, it works out to like < 0.001 BTC ]

Not to be overly frank, but c'mon. All the links are just undisclosed ref links, and you exclude some of the best and biggest sites (imo bustabit, bustadice) because they don't offer an affiliate program.



Are you trying to say you've "actively worked for" all these casinos in the past year? I find that so hard to believe, that I wouldn't even know what position would allow you to do that? 0.0
I also kind of doubt you've worked in the industry at all based on your reviews. Like take the your roobet 4.5/5 rating. It's almost unconscionable to recommend them for any number of reasons. Their house edge is often multiple times greater than their competitors for the same thing, their KYC policies are many times worse, and have a history of highly unethical behavior of giving effectively fake money to streamers to promote their casino.



I actually was once thinking of this. If you talk to some of the real insiders (e.g. some big casino owners), they know a lot interesting of stuff that isn't public and they wouldn't want to come back to them.  One idea I had was you could ask each of the main insiders for a public key, and you could create a (1,n)-threshold scheme where any one of the participants can sign a message but it's impossible to tell which. That way you could get candid information from someone who actually knows what they are talking about, while they know it can't be attributed to them.

I was involved in creation the system that bustabit & bustadice uses for withdrawals and fees. The way its system works is insanely efficient (vastly more than any others). Users deposits go into a hot wallet, those funds are used by the bespoke coinselection algorithm to make change-less withdrawals. Amounts that can't be used for a long time are scheduled in an ultra-low priority consolidation transactions.

But the interesting about the bustadice/bustabit system, is that the fees users pay is exactly the costs of running the system for how the user uses it. e.g. On other sites you might get banned for making lots of small deposits. On bustabit/bustadice, you can deposit 1000 bits of dust and no one cares. On other sites they have withdrawal restrictions (e.g. max per time period, wager reqs) while on bustabit/bustadice you can do 1000 in a day and no one will care.

Obviously a little biased, but I think the no-bullshit style of bustabit/bustadice is the absolute best way for a casino to run their withdrawal system.

Amusingly, you might be right. At least I couldn't find anything in the terms-of-service that says "the operator has the right to refuse service to anyone at his own discretion". Although I think it's pretty much implied. But if it did contain that clause, would that make you happy?   

@symg I think the only appropriate thing to do with your accusation against StackGod is to refer it directly to law enforcement. Things of that nature are serious and something that law enforcement does tend to take quite seriously. Public accusations on the other hand just lead to a shit-show and are often pretty unfair on the accused as it leaves their name tainted even if there claim is totally meritless.

With regards to your money, why don't you just withdraw it to a different establishment that would better value the business of a gentlemen like yourself? It's not like bustabit/bustadice is the only game in town

My understanding is that Mr. StackGod is on the heavy-set side, which diminished both the appeal of contractional fulfillment along with the logistical risks of being chased. But for the full details of the story you'll have to talk to him, but it was pretty entertaining.

I'm not sure what that screenshot shows, but I regret trying even trying to understand what's happening there. But I'm guessing that you and Mr. StackGod don't like each other. What I don't get is why you even care? Or think anyone else would want to get involved in some personal spat.

Just so you know, I believe Mr. StackGod is the guy who got robbed by a hooker. Went in with cash and high-hopes and left with only his virginity.

So from what I see, you're a dude who somehow managed to get a casino to not even want to take your money. And you're feuding with a dude who quite literally can't get a professional hooker to sleep with him.  Like, Jesus Christ, man, you might want to re-evaluate your life-choices.

My rough guess:

Over the last 30 days, an average of 195.113741 BTC/day has been wagered. With 90% commission, that means investors should on average make:  0.195113741 BTC/day.

1 BTC would give you 0.029722% of the bankroll.  So you'd make 0.000058 BTC/day. 365 days of that, and you're at 0.0212 BTC.  

So basically 2% apy?  Makes me feel less bad about the 5 BTC I divested to play some rock-paper-scissors with @scenekingsuit  

lmao. I'm not sure what's more shocking, that 154 bitcoin is now 9 million USD?! or that people are happy paying over 80% commission.

But seriously, Daniel has really struck gold. iirc when Dooglus started the whole casino bankrolling he charged investors 10% commission. Pretty funny compared to where we are now  

It should work, because I believe dicesites is showing the post-commissions investor profit.


But anyway, I wouldn't worry about it too much. With hindsight, there's probably a million good investments you could've made. Beating yourself up over missing one is probably not overly productive.

Yeah, I tend to think if you're launching something really unique -- it's way better to launch early  -- as you can use that early feedback to see if the whole thing has legs or not. But if you're going into an established market, you really need to launch with a "wow!" style product or I don't see how you can even know if you can compete or not.


Since I'm giving unsolicited advice, I'm going to also suggest you're really not going to be able to compete in the dice market. It's really done to death. If I was in your shoes, I'd try do something outrageous. Like offer a 0% house edge. Have an open bankroll (with no commission -- and no EV) and allow 0% house edge bets. That would be unprecedented, and a real marketing point you could actually drive. No one is going to even be crazy enough to try copy you. Now obviously with 0 house edge, you also have 0 expected profit -- but honestly, I don't think that's a problem. If you get a bunch of players, there's a lot of ways to easily monetize the site (sell vanity shit like a free game, maybe allow larger bets against the bankroll if you agree to a 1% edge, etc.)

I'm not sure the opportunity costs are that high? I divested a fair chunk when the new commissions came in, but all that is just now sitting in my trezor making 0 returns. I literally don't even know what else to do with the bitcoin -- and if I did -- I can immediately divest from busta* for it.

For me at least, it just boils down to trying to guess the ROI (which is very hard if you try consider counterparty risk) and then apportioning my investment based on that (e.g. kelly my total investable networth).

So the way I figure it, it's still marginally profitable to stay in the bankroll, but if you have any suggestions of better uses of my bitcoin (while still being exposed to btc price), I'm all ears

I'm glad you're using the bustadice style multiplier, it's clearly a better design imo. But just skimming your site, I really struggled to find a single reason someone would want to use your site over the half a dozen other sites that offer essentially the same service. And worse than that, your site is clearly not ready (half the links don't work, or give a "coming soon"). It's really a terrible idea to launch a half-finished product into a crowded market, all you will do is burn-out the subset of "early adopter" style people.

No offence or anything, but if I were you'd I'd probably just take down the site and really think of how you can really drive some value-add. Then get the site polished and ready, and launch it and really push that value-add that you have that no one else does.

I'm sure you already know about it, but you can use `estimaterawfee` and pick your own threshold. If you pick a low threshold (e.g. 0.5 ) you will get pretty reasonable fee rates, but you got to be prepared to feebump because they will be getting stuck


You're definitely right that that there is different transaction volume on weekends/weekdays and ideally the model would take that into account.  I however don't think there's huge gains to be had, while if rewriting bitcoin core's coinselection results in huge gains. Easily save 50% on transaction costs, if not more.

--


I think the fundamental problem is everyone wants to just "fire & forget" their bitcoin transaction. The only real way to do this, is using stupidly high fees. And if everyone is doing this, it gets a bit stupid.

I never had the chance to do it, but I always wanted to make a service where you create N transactions each with a progressively higher nlocktime and fee for a payment. And the service waits until the nlocktime and broadcasts the new transaction.

So effectively, say I wanted to pay you -- I'd could create 3 transaction:
* Pay BayAreaCoins with 10 sat/vbyte now
* Pay  BayAreaCoins with 20 sat/vbyte with a nlocktime of in 3 hours
* Pay  BayAreaCoins with 50 sat/vbyte with a nlocktime of in 5 hours
* Pay  BayAreaCoins with 70 sat/vbyte with a nlocktime of in 10 hours
...


And then I could go offline, and know that eventually you'll get paid

I'm not quite sure that's a problem. It's just that under the current set of rules bitcoin is running at "full" capacity. So if miners included zero-fee transactions (which they can) they would be doing it at a direct cost to themselves (as they could've included transactions with fee).

One way to solve this would be change the block-limit from a static 4M weight, to one that varied depending on how many "coin days destroyed" for instance. This might work in theory, if you were careful to design the rules to not encourage backchannels for transaction creators to pay miners out-of-band,  but in practice it would never work:

a) You'd never get consensus on such a change
b) It potentially makes coin selection & fee selection for transaction creators a complex bitch
c) It makes transaction selection for miners more complex

I've spent a lot of time on it, and honestly bitcoin core's algorithm is actually quite good. There's little things you can do to improve it, but it's probably not worth it.


Often it looks stupidly high, but let's say you are using the default conservative estimate, (a 95% confidence?) -- it implicitly takes into consideration occurrences like "What if there's no blocks for the next 30 minutes, and everyone is out bidding each other". If that doesn't happen, your fee will indeed be stupidly high. But otherwise, it would've ended up stuck


If you want to save money on fees, there's a few good things you can do (both are annoying and a bit of a PITA though):


1) Batching
2) Low-Ball the fee (target a long-range with economical) and keep bumpfee it until it ends up confirmed
3) Cap the (initial) fee rate you're paying, so you're never too early in the mempool. If you're doing 2) you can bump it later as required, but you don't want to ever really be one of the highest fee rate transactions if you can avoid it