Did you read my recent posts in this thread?

Suppose you have 3 choices:

1) bet 127 BTC at 98.2265625% to win 1 BTC with 98.2% chance of success
2) bet 7.21 BTC at 86.94% to win 1 BTC with 86.94% chance of success
3) bet a 1,2,4,...,64 BTC martingale sequence at 49.5% to win 1 BTC with 99.1% chance of success.

Which of these 3 is the best?

2 and 3 both risk an expected 7.21 BTC, but 3 wins more often
1 and 3 both risk a maximum of 127 BTC, but 3 wins more often

Isn't 3 clearly the best of the options?

... until they stop.

No, they didn't. Did anyone say they did?

I was making a joke about how they posted pictures of a guy peering into a microscope taken from stock footage of an IC plant taken before Cryptory even existed, and passed it off as photos of their own work.


It wasn't news, it was garbage. They claim that Bitcoin miners compute the same hashes over and over, and that their have eliminated this redundancy. That is ridiculous on its face and yet you suckers believe it. To go along with their lies they posted 4 year old frames from video of an IC plant.


I'm a little sick at the moment, and having to take painkillers. They render me incapable of working on anything very complex, so I'm spending too much time on the forums instead. I figure that warning newbies about the danger of scams like Cryptory isn't a bad use of my time given that I'm rendered unable to be productive in better ways right now.

Why are you here promoting their scam?

Even if it isn't a scam, and they really do make you a profit from mining, why would you want to encourage anyone else to get involved? That would only increase the global difficulty and reduce your profits.

Do you have any proof?

I would love to see it, because then I would invest my coins and make massive amounts of profit.

The problem is that I've seen absolutely no evidence that they're not running a Ponzi scam.

Your definition is a little off. It doesn't need to be a plan to run away with investors' money. It can end up with no profit at all. The defining characteristic is that there's no economic activity making the returns they promise, and they simply pay old investor returns using new investor deposits.

Can you prove that they're not doing exactly that?

cf. This is the best unexploded bomb I've ever found. It's been like half a year and it's still ticking!

It's like an analogy.  Get it?

Note that post numbers change if any of the preceding 328 posts are deleted, but links to posts continue to work, so it's best to link to them, like this:

Please check #329 to #331 to get some laughs.

Sorry to say, but withdrawals are really slowing down:


Just 4 BTC taken out in the last 12 hours, and only 34 BTC in the last 24 hours.

Do you know anyone who had coins in Just-Dice? Please spread the word that they need to withdraw.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-Serpent-programming-language-operations has a typo on it, making it look like this:



It looks like the wiki github repo has "Issues" disabled.

I don't see any way to make a "pull request" since I'm unable to clone the wiki.

What's the recommended way of submitting a fix?

It's just a missing backtick here:

* `msg(to, value, gas, datastart, datalen, outputstart, outputlen)` - sends a message [...]

and hopefully to Ponzis in general. If you were to make an Etherium Ponzi with a 1% fee, someone would just clone it but change the fee to 0.5%, and so on. Since it's trustless the only thing you can compete on is fee, and so it's a race to the bottom. The fee would have to end up at zero.

See also: dice sites, exchanges, and anything else currently taking a fee for a service that can be decentralised and made trust-less.

It seems like blockchain.info is having some "technical problems" at the moment. I expect they have a bunch of guys in masks from 2010 peering into microscopes right now trying to fix it.

Here's how the link should look:

If you were respectfully disagreeing, you would actually engage some of the arguments I have made rather than ignoring them.

What you are doing is disrespectfully disagreeing.

To turn 127 into 135 with a single bet, you would have to use a 93.133333% bet:

>>> 99 / (135/127.0)
93.13333333333333

That obviously has a 93.133333% chance of success.

To do the same thing with the 1,2,4,8,16,32,64 martingale, we need to play (and win) 8 times.

We know that the chance of winning any single time is:

>>> 1 - 0.505**7
0.991623942561664

so the chance of succeeding 8 times in a row is:

>>> (1 - 0.505**7) ** 8
0.934923407802361

or 93.49234%

So yes, you're still slightly better off (93.49% vs 93.13%) to run the 1,2,4,...,64 martingale 8 times in a row.

In fact it's better to use the 1 BTC martingale over and over for all profits up to 11 BTC, but for 12 BTC a single large bet is better:

>>> p=8; (99 / ((127+p)/127.0), (1 - 0.505**7) ** p * 100)
(93.13333333333333, 93.4923407802361)

>>> p=9; (99 / ((127+p)/127.0), (1 - 0.505**7) ** p * 100)
(92.4485294117647, 92.70924356381637)

>>> p=10; (99 / ((127+p)/127.0), (1 - 0.505**7) ** p * 100)
(91.77372262773721, 91.93270561466116)

>>> p=11; (99 / ((127+p)/127.0), (1 - 0.505**7) ** p * 100)
(91.1086956521739, 91.16267199197111)

>>> p=12; (99 / ((127+p)/127.0), (1 - 0.505**7) ** p * 100)
(90.45323741007194, 90.39908821513419)

Edit:


So that's weird. The martingale risks an average 7.21 per game, whereas the large bet risks 127.  127 / 7.21 = 17.6. So the martingale risks 17 times less, on average. So why does running it just 12 times give a lower chance of success? That seems wrong to me. Maybe it's because failing the 12'th martingale leaves you with the 11 you won from the first 11 successes, whereas failing the single large bet leaves you with nothing.

I've seen weird 'spikes' in the CaVirtex chart a couple of times recently.

For example:



I had a sell order at $698.00 when the spike up to $719 happened, but none of it was matched.

Is this a bug in BitcoinWisdom? Or in CaVirtex?

Edit: their website claims the daily and weekly high was $692:

So what do you use?

listreceivedbyaddress dumps the entire list of transactions ever received, so you can't really use that except maybe once at startup.
-walletnotify is unreliable, in that it can tell you about the same transaction twice, and tells you about unconfirmed transactions

So what's left?

I like 'listaccounts' and am sad it is going away.

But that's the problem. There are plenty of people dumb enough to fall for it.

I had people send me over 60,000 BTC without knowing where I am or how to get hold of me. I'm not saying they were stupid to trust me (they all got their coins back in the end) but I just don't understand how people can be so trusting of a stranger. It's kind of mind boggling.

Of course they are paying now. How else would they attract new suckers?

One day they will stop paying.

It helps you lose less, not win more...

What I showed is that if you want to turn 127 BTC into 128 BTC then it's better (as in better chance of success) to do a 49.5% 2x martingale from 1 BTC up to 64 BTC than it is to risk the whole 127 BTC on a 98.2265625% bet to make 1 BTC profit.

That's because the martingale allows you to risk less, in most cases, and so your expected loss is smaller.

If they would change from a Ponzi scheme to something else, that would be good.

Time always tells how these things go. How they always go is "down".

Let me guess, they're still paying too?

Your arguments are getting tired.

As I understand it, it's like Bitcoin except that you can add arbitrarily complex (turing complete) rules to addresses. So you could write things like "each time there's a deposit to this address, split it between all the previous depositors to this address in proportion to the site of their deposit, until they have received 150% of the amount of their deposit back" into the blockchain. Then everyone can see the rule and be sure that the Ponzi was "fair".

Obviously it's still a Ponzi, and some people are going to end up out of pocket, but at least there's no OP taking his 1%, and there's no risk that OP will run off, because he never gets access to the coins.