146khash/sec means that every second your computer checks 146,000 numbers to see if they work. Think of that as 146000 lottery tickets per second. If you had more cpu power you could check more tickets each second. To give you an idea of how bad your chances are, I've generated 9 blocks in 9 weeks with an average of 3000khash. It's worse than that though because the difficulty has gone up considerable over this time. You should expect to wait 242 days of running 24/7 on average if the difficulty does not increase. Of course about 3% of time you will make one this week.

Ah, cool, thanks for explaining.

Why doesn't the pick3 pot update quickly? I thought it was the 6 block thing, but I think it's been longer than that now.

Meaning a silver coin with the bitcoin logo? That would be neat. I like some of the coins they have, but they were overpriced last I looked (if I'm even thinking of the right site). I realize it costs money to set up and unless they sell a ton they have to be quite a bit over.

This is something I'd like to see.

A site offers to sell some standard unit of silver, SAE in good condition, for example, at some price with shipping already included. The purchaser gets silver credited to their account and can request that it be mailed anytime they wish, they can also sell their silver to others using a market similar to the one at MtGox.

Being able to convert between BTC and metal would be pretty cool imo.

Oh, that's not bad then. Someone lost 9k a while ago, that sucks.

That's too bad. Do you know how many coins it was?

2000 at least imo, but my guess is 8500.

The correct fee is so small right now that the psychological detriment far outweighs the benefits of charging it imo. It's like that damn place that charges me a quarter a tiny cup of water when I buy a $9 meal. Yes, I know there are costs to pressing the button, but now I don't like you anyway.

I expect it will be a long time before a high % of nodes require a fee for normal transactions. This means most users will not attach a fee, being willing to wait 4 blocks on average or whatever. So for a good while charging a fee simply means not putting transactions in blocks, this will make bitcoin slightly less appealing and slightly reduce use which will slightly reduce the value of coins. So anyone who has coins can self interestedly include transactions for free.

Jgarzik, do you have a guess as to the resource costs of a normal transaction?

That would be annoying if someone was trying to play immediately and didn't want money locked up for a week, or if they were trying to be part of a big jackpot and the next one was small.

But that isn't what he's talking about, he means the pick 3.

I had bets canceled, does that mean it was won within 6 of my bet?

I say you turn off the wait of 6 and make only random bets accepted. Then no one can game it and you don't need refunds ever. It was not a fluke it will happen all the time if this gets big.

Glad to help. I think 50 is wise. It is important to keep projects from burning out so we can hit a critical mass of things to do and buy. Getting automated is a good step in that direction, I think you have the right idea.

Should receive something tiny from me, Kupan.

Again, this could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Kind of bad news:

If you seed 100BTC and take .5BTC per entry you need 7 tickets to be purchased between each block in order to profit by 1BTC/cycle. This seems quite an unlikely level to reach anytime soon.

And your upside isn't that great either. If you get to 20 tickets bought between each block you will profit only 66BTC/cycle. Though the cycle length will decrease by a lot, so maybe that isn't so bad.

Actually that is a pretty large redeeming quality. When you are bleeding money cycles will take much longer than when you are raking it in.

At 20 bought per block half of your cycles will last fewer than 16 blocks and 99% will last fewer than 40. So it would be a cash cow at that point or even a bit before.

Now if you drop your seed amount to 50BTC you can profit by 5BTC/cycle while only selling 2 tickets per block.

Selling 1 ticket per block will cost you less than 10BTC (the accuracy is bad on this one because of the long tail I'm cutting off), but 10BTC is the most -EV it could be.

If there are people who buy chunks all at once early this will help you too.

Ah, I just remembered that the pot is often rounded down a tad by the increments of 10 required to bump the pot. This is in your favor of course, but I am not going to redo the calcs right now.

So all things considered putting out 50BTC is probably going to be a very small outlay compared to putting out 100BTC which will be a loss until you get quite large interest. Obviously having a small seed amount will draw fewer players too, but I can't tell by how much and that is not accounted for here.

Haha, I'll put it to good use buying silver on bidding pond and donating to MtGox.

I did this quick, so no guarantees on accuracy.

If one ticket is purchased between every block the chance that you will break even or better (sell 200 tickets before a winner is chosen) is only .0068 = .68%

Half of the time you will sell more than 75 tickets and half of the time fewer.

Keep in mind the exact path of purchases does affect your expected outcomes. For example selling 3 every 3 blocks until a winner is found is better for you than 1 every one block.

Selling 2 every block gives you an 8% chance of breaking even or better.

tickets/block -- chance of even or better
3 -- 18.3%
4 -- 28.1%
5 -- 36.1%
6 -- 41.2%
7 -- 46.9%
8 -- 52.4%
10 -- 59.3%
15 -- 67.6%

Now this is not really the most relevant info. What you want is expected value. This is kind of like me telling you that in the game of Heads you win 10 and Tails you lose 1 you are 50% to break even or better; It is true but not the whole picture at all.

I've been drinking some, but maybe I can figure out an easy way to calculate or estimate that in a minute here.

I just noticed my winnings! Thanks.

Cool, I hope it ends up being sustainable.

I'm going to do a little math and try to answer questions like "If one ticket is purchased every block what is the operator's expected value?"

I'll let you know if I get anything that might be of interest to you.

Seriously, it's like free money right now so stay away and let me collect for a while.

I think I won the pick 3, but I haven't been credited. If you seed the next one too I'll buy even more, it's a damn good deal right now.

Ah, okay.