The only problem with that is that the "jackpot" (ie. maximum win) at Just-Dice is only 0.5% of the bankroll.  Currently the bankroll is around 50k BTC, and so the most you can win per roll is 250 BTC.  At a little under $600 per coin that is worth a little less than $150,000 which doesn't go far when shared by a large group of workers pooling their stakes.

So you deposited to a Ponzi and lost your coins?

If only someone posted a warning in the thread!

Ffs. 

Do you have any kind of response other than calling me names?

Do you admit that you are running a Ponzi scheme?

Do you admit that you use deposits from new investors to pay out old investors?

Do you understand how it isn't possible to double every deposit?

You can do better than just "this guy is stupid".

And you're right.  I don't have any business with you.  I'm not *that* stupid. 

Do you even know what a Ponzi scheme is or how it works?

The fact the you have doubled your money successfully with this scheme is evidence *towards* it being a Ponzi scheme, not against.

The scheme will continue to pay out until required payments exceed new deposits, and then it will slow down and stop, leaving the most recent victims out of pocket.

Exactly.

People sometimes look at the sequence of bets he made, and use a monte-carlo simulation to calculate the chance of him winning as much as he did, given the bets that he made.

But I think that's kind of flawed - because if he hadn't won more than he lost early on, he wouldn't have been able to afford to even make that many bets.

When we look at the actual site profit (19k) and compare it to 1% of the total amount wagered (53k) we see that actual profits fall 34k short of expectation.  And so the natural question is "where is the missing 34k?  who won 34k?".  The answer is (roughly) "he won 10k, and failed to lose 25k (and we made up the extra 1k by being lucky)".

What if someone pre-flipped a coin until getting 20 heads in a row before a soccer match.

Then they could easily win the toss that decides who gets to kick-off by calling tails! 

Here's a list of the bets in the losing streak of length 16 from earlier today.  He bet L L H H L L H H all the way through.  Notice he would have won the 65.536 bet if he had made it and followed the same pattern:

I too recommend Python as a first language to learn.  You might not end up using it, but it's a great way to get started.

Turns out it's not for everyone however.  Just this morning:

This is your fundamental misunderstanding.

The statistics don't have to balance out in the way you think they do.  They balance out, but in a way that gives you no predictive power.

Here's why they really balance out:

Suppose you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads only twice.  20% when it's meant to be 50% is way off.  So you would say "keep playing and it has to balance out".  Which is kind of true, but not for the reason you think.

If I play a thousand more times, I expect to get about 500 heads and 500 tails.  That brings the totals to 502 heads and 508 tails.

Now 49.7% of the flips have been heads.  Yay, it has "balanced out" from 20% heads to 49.7% heads even though we saw exactly 500 of both heads and tails.

And that's why it "balances out".  Not because you can predict an excess of tails in the coming rolls to balance it, but because you can predict that the 2 vs 8 weirdness you saw at the start will become insignificant over time as you flip more and more times.

I think it wouldn't be exactly straight, even connecting the peaks, because a:
  -1 -2 +4
and a
  -1 -2 -4 -8 -16 +32
both add 1 to the total bankroll, but take different numbers of steps to do so.

I've seen people play like:
 -1 -3 -7 -15 -31 +63
before, which *does* lead to a perfect straight line, since the net gain is equal to the number of steps.  The 6 numbers in the previous line sum to 6.  It's equivalent to starting a new martingale of size 1 each bet:

First bet, bet 1 (and lose)
Second bet, bet 2 for the first martingale, and 1 for the new one you're starting: so 3 in total
Third bet, bet 4 for the first, 2 for the 2nd and 1 for the new one: 7 in total
...
Sixth bet: bet 32 for the 1st, 16 for the 2nd, ..., and 1 for the new one and this time we win, finishing off all 6 concurrent martingales at once.

I think the first person I noticed playing this way was the owner of the BTC Guild poll, Eleuthria.  It didn't work out too well for him in the end, and unfortunately I can't remember his account number to show the chart.

Edit: I forgot your 2nd question.  I'm sure there must be, but I don't know of it.  The number of rolls you can withstand before busting only goes up in whole numbers.  Most wins don't help you survive longer, because they don't give you enough extra to make a whole extra bet.  So I'm not sure how to work out the probability.  Other than that the probability of busting is 1 if you play long enough...

I think the novelty is wearing off for sure.

Also, most of the people who had large amounts of coins to lose have already lost them...

Please be careful out there.  A lot of people make clones of JD as short term scams.  The plan seems to be:

1) take 'investment'
2) run away

It's simple, but effective.

Alternatively this works too:

1) take 'investment'
2) get 'hacked'

Don't risk significant amounts with people you don't trust.

Another in the anecdotal series of "Does martingale really works?"

This time I present evidence for the "no, it bloody doesn't!" side of the argument:





Edit2: here's how this loss fits in with the rest of the week's gains and losses so far on JD:



Edit: here are the actual profits and losses.  Note that he's playing at 45% chance to win, with a payout of 2.2x, so the positive profits are 20% higher than the corresponding negative ones (-0.01 and +0.012 for example):

I think they sold their travel company *to* expedia.


I don't have exact numbers, because I don't know for sure which accounts were his.  But I estimate that he risked 2.5 million BTC and won 10k BTC.  The 2.5 million he risked should have netted the house 25k BTC.

So the current profit is 35k BTC short of where it should be, due to the BTC he won (10k) and the BTC he should have lost and didn't (25k).

That's probably where you're getting the '30000' number from.

Compounding isn't really relevant.  Your profits are automatically added to your share of the bankroll, but so are everyone else's, so your share of the bankroll, and thus share of the profits remains constant.

Over the last year everyone who was with us the whole year made about 43%, but that's in the past.  In the future it could get better or worse.

A fork from before the most recent checkpoint isn't really a fork, since all the Bitcoin core clients won't even acknowledge it.  That's what checkpoints are for.

Most of the SPV Android clients presumably talk to Bitcoin core servers which won't see the fork either.  And those that don't will be connecting to a server which will be fixed to know about the checkpoint if they don't already.

I would never suggest such a thing.

But yes.  That would be best. 

Not strictly true.

If the attacker *ever* owned your coins in the past, they can start their attack from before they sold them and rewrite history from that point forward.  Then you never bought them and your cold wallet is empty.

I'm surprised that bet was authorised.  It's a little underspecified:


Which timezone are you using to say when the months end?  What are you using to determine the profit?  Are you talking about profit before or after commission?

You ought to clear all this up before things get messy!  I guess if you could prove where you got the 821 and 600 numbers from then you could make a reasonable case for using the same source for June.

Also, http://bitbet.us/ is the place to make such bets - they wouldn't let you get away with such a sloppy bet specification.


Funny stuff.  I don't understand the "Ashy Larry" joke.  There's a lot of laughter when he first comes on screen (1:13), but what's funny?  Is it because he's in his underwear?  "Why do they call him Ashy Larry?  Well there's your answer".  I don't get it.

We had a player/investor called Ashy Larry a while back, and I didn't get the reference until now. 


The game is for regulars on the site.  Type /poker in the chat to see if your account qualifies.  If so, you'll be given a unique invitation code.


Every split second.  You get to share in the profit or loss made by every single bet.


We've tried these kinds of "milestone" things before, and they never work out too well.  You get a quick bust of activity, causing lots of lag, and then it's back to normal.

Also you have to be careful designing them.  If you say "first bet to win at 10%" it'll be someone betting 0 BTC.  If you say "get your stake refunded", everyone bets at 98.99%.  Etc.  People are very smart at working out how best to benefit from incentives.

It's by no means guaranteed to fill up.  Over 2000 accounts qualify for a ticket, but many will have been discarded.  I've no idea how players we'll get, but we have plenty already so I don't think I'll need to relax the qualifying criteria at all.


Oh, I was speaking as the investor who was trying to make the site look less attractive for other investors, to prevent himself getting diluted.  Failed joke I guess.


If you can tell me your account number or username I can tell you if you qualify.

Also, I made a post about how the site lost 100 BTC to a Martingale player last night over in the Martingale thread.