To rectify the problem, all that FortuneJack needs to do is provide the to-be-generated server seed in hashed form before any user input. This makes sure that the casino side is not able to change the results in their favor reliably.

That's just a matter of mindset/behavior. If it takes $30 for them to take something seriously, then that's on them, but why would you not test out your strategies in a risk-free playing field before experimenting with anything tangible?

If you can't test your 'emotional intelligence' with trades, then so be it: test your procedures instead.

The previous two days showed the participant pool dropping by 2, from 104 to 102. Those that were dropped are the following:


Those that were added are the following:

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Remaining participants just got their final prize increased by 1.9%, to 9.80 mBTC.

We're close to two-digits, but this zer****n character is certainly mysterious.

This makes some sense, but even without an incentive to do more research, virtual trading can be a safe measure of determining your aptitude if you do expend the same amount of effort trading as you would with a real balance.

Besides, you don't want to fall prey to your own cognitive biases and start gambling without knowing the odds.

There's the idea of "scared money" in poker. If you're playing with money that you're scared of losing, then you have already become attached to the bankroll that you're wagering. When you are making bets or trades, you are prepared for the worst-case scenario, otherwise you would not (or, for most people, should not) have performed the action.

That's one reason why some people like to hide their balance, so their behaviors are not influenced by any psychological factors during volatile swings.

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A lot of people get the whole "emotionless trading" schtick completely wrong: you aren't emotionless. Instead, you're risk-averse and seeking to maximize your expected gains. This means deducing conclusions through reliable processes, and not falling for any fallacious thinking that can negatively skew one's perspective.

It looks like the user was removed on the next update.

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The previous two days showed the participant pool dropping by 3, from 107 to 104. Those that were dropped are the following:

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Remaining participants just got their final prize increased by 2.88%, to 9.61 mBTC.

They're barely substantial in the eyes of all moderators and some campaign managers. You get an incentive to do these 'easy posts' because all you have to do is just write in a search engine some key words related to cryptocurrency, and then you can find an article to republish and link at the bottom of your thread.

You can't say it doesn't bring out some discussion, but at the same time you don't want to reward such lazy thread-bearing behavior.

A single report can lead to a post's deletion. You don't need multiple sources to get a post deleted, though it may add duplicate entries in the report queue.

What a sucker! If only he knew that he was a few merit away from joining the cycling club, and becoming a part of the all-powerful, awesome gang.

Can't really understand their sentences fully, but it looks like they're asking for merit to directly enter into some signature campaign.

Weird.

actmyname (Legendary)

(skip past post)

Questions:
1. When and why did you become interested in cryptocurrencies?

"I think it was around late 2014 or early 2015 that I started hearing about Bitcoin, probably due to some loose news from post-Gox FUD. One of the first things that I tried was a faucet (of course) since we all love exchanging electricity for fractions of pennies, and I wouldn't find Bitcointalk until months later. Even after experimenting with it shortly, I had no desire to tinker with it any more since I only had a very rough understanding of the technology: I knew how to spend Bitcoin, and I loosely knew how blocks were handled and mined. It wouldn't be until far later in the summer of 2015 that I actually decided to look into the technical details of Bitcoin's design. After reading the Developer Guide on Bitcoin.org? I was fascinated."

2. When and why did you buy your first bitcoin?

"It wouldn't be until late 2018 that I actually decided to spend fiat for Bitcoin. Most of the coins that I held up until that time were all from services, contests, or sales and profits. I decided that I wanted to buy some more collectibles. Shiny rocks have aroused the curiosity of mankind for ages, and it won't stop even if we digitize our money."

3. How did you get on the forum?

"Honestly, I can't remember the reason I ever joined. I took a huge break from before I decided to actually start posting anything significant."

4.1. You actively participate in the discussion of reputation issues on the forum. In your opinion, is the DT system fair or has flaws?

"Fairness, justice, it's difficult to define these terms so those pedantic peters will have to excuse the lack of rigor when I say, the DT system is unfair, flawed, and absolutely chaotic.

Imagine you are developing a society and you consider the options. Your previous attempt at a government was a small group - a selected council of members hand-picked by yourself. These members were the absolute measure of trust when it came to your society, and thus those that they trusted directly were deemed to have a holy judgment. Those secondary members too became powerful rulers of the society, and you had a three-layered structure for how the average citizen trusted others.

Now, you have changed the system. Rather than self-appointed rulers, you decided to create a popularity system. This system was designed to create a numerical value for the popularity of individuals, to determine if their opinions were worthy to be appointed a new rank. This was weighted by a factor of 1:2. For each point of popularity you gave to someone, they could only give out half back to someone else. To create a parallel to the previous system, you decide to appoint popularity leaders which can generate popularity points to send to others. However, the generated points cannot be directly sent to themselves.

The second part of this is now to determine your new government: The Tribune of the Hundred. It is difficult to shift members onto a new status quo, but you can do it by forcing participation at the risk of being shunned: to have a chance to be elected to the tribune, you have to take part in the trust experiment, by trusting others and being trusted by popular people. You also force these members to remain active on your main platform to generate more activity, and add in a clause that allows you to exclude members so that you can go back to the old system if necessary. It has been 20 months since the start of this government, and you notice that the number of people that are given absolute trust has grown massively. In fact, the old system which allowed you to view a detailed listing of all members in your government has grown in size to such a degree that you fail to load the list. No problem!"

4.2. How do you think mass advertising of gambling projects has a positive effect on the development of the forum or harms the community?

"Gambling as an industry is a net negative. I think anyone who advocates for gambling without being aware of that is being absolutely willfully ignorant. It's a zero-sum game, and it's favored towards the house: it's an incredible form of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich. I think, though, gamblers are a sticky bunch. They enjoy losing and they enjoy the culture of gambling, which can serve as some consistent traffic - it also does help that the forum gets a lot of ad money from those sites.

But let's not stop at gambling. What about the fact that the forum has an Investor-based games board? It's like saying, 'yeah, but I had to give my kid a chocolate bar or else he wouldn't stop crying!'

Right..."

5. What do you think of the current Merit system and signature campaigns?  Do they harm the forum?

"Merit, no. Signature campaigns, yes. It's obvious, and people can try to equivocate and try to distance themselves from the whole spam front, but if you take a look at most of the forum discussion threads, they are so abhorrent that if you gave a 1.1x return on if a random post was spam or not you would be broke within hours.

The altcoin bounties need to be scrapped. They are a 0-cost way for developers to make a quick dollar and spam up the forum. Seriously."

6. The most useful forum topic? Most helpful users?

"[EDU] How to spot a scammer (Read this before doing any transactions!)

Why this one in particular? Because the people that need the most help are the ones who don't know how to avoid scams. This covers 90% of cases.

@LoyceV is helpful but his oceans of data threads take up all the space on my screen.
@marlboroza is helpful and meticulous in investigation, but his quote spacing is like that of a child.
@mprep is helpful and one of the most valuable members of Bitcointalk. I think the forum would be significantly worse without their presence. That being said, he banned me once so we clearly have to be arch-enemies for eternity.
@TwitchySeal is helpful but his incredible skill with scam-busting is obviously the development of an obsession which was catalyzed by a childhood event: probably something involving clowns!"

7. 3 things you would implement on the forum?

"You need to maintain privacy standards on the forum, which I respect theymos for doing. Additionally, the security concerns are valid and preventing those features from being problematic makes sense in their disabling. I miss that stats page, though - you could sleuth out some suspected alts with more circumstantial evidence, keeping track of their activity.

I would make the search function better. The current way it works is at a thread-granular level, meaning that it cannot comb through individual messages within a thread that contain your key words. That's absolutely unacceptable.

Better mod and reporter tools would probably help to curb spam more. After all, the 4 second delay has already impacted my efficiency.

And the Bounties section is going to go."

8. Do you trade on exchanges or invest in projects?

"No. Trading is for gamblers or wealthy people and investing in someone else's business means that you're taking the opportunity cost of not doing exactly what they are."

9. Tell a story about your big profit or big loss?

"It's hard to come up with a particular situation, since most of my movements are very shallow - I try to play +ev positions without embracing too much volatility. There have been a few times, however, where my team's card counting equity was 8x that of the statistical expectation for the week. I suppose those would be the big profits. No amounts, sorry "

10. What do you think about the DEFI ecosystem?

"Possible to function but you need clever engineering to reduce the cost. Not I nor the 99.9% of people in this forum that don't have deep technical knowledge should be inclined to start appraising it."

11. Is your anonymity a vital necessity or precaution?

"In a perfect world, anonymity would be no different from reality. In such a world, anonymity would be a vital necessity for society to function. For this world, it is a precaution. However, truly think to yourself whether anonymity being a precaution dictates a situation that is better than it being a necessity."

12. The last cryptocurrency book you read?

"Mastering Monero."

13. Advise 3 cryptocurrencies/tokens for investment in the next 1-2 years?

"BTC. XMR. The other coins I have deemed either irrelevant or I have insufficient knowledge of their (hopefully) useful protocols to determine their value."

14. How much will Bitcoin cost at the end of 2020?

"I am expecting 12600-13800 levels. Fairly optimistic."

15. P.S. (Optional)

"Read and be forcibly pedantic to yourself, but charitable to others. I may have been quite cynical in this one, so I look forward to corrections."

(back to top)

Something curious happened with this leaderboard update. Since it was two days delayed, we only got the August 22 and August 20 lists.

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The previous two days showed the participant pool dropping by 10, from 117 to 107. Those that were dropped are the following:


Those that were added are the following:

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Remaining participants just got their final prize increased by 9.3%, to 9.34 mBTC.

Methods of... what? You might want to move the thread once you edit in the relevant details, probably to something in the Services or Digital goods section.

Those surprise packages are pretty low in terms of the rewards you're getting, but the real reward is from the 1 BTC pool. That's where I handled my +ev calculations, and right now I'm expecting at least 0.01 per player.

It's up to you to do the math. Even if you were to wager purely for the contest and taking the statistical loss, you're profiting by a factor of 3.

I agree. Having no back-and-forth conversation makes this more of an announcement, rather than an interview.

Some members can elaborate their answers and articulate them well, but it doesn't mean they'll exhaust all of the queries that people have.

Well, humans aren't exactly ideals, right? That's why we always use rational agents in our strategic planning.

Shitposters aside, the intent of making such a rule can be seen as reasonable.

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Another case of how status quo thinking with signature campaigns has made it worse.

This makes sense to me, though. If you aim to switch campaigns, then clearly you're confident in your writing skills, to a degree where you're willing to take an interim period to establish yourself in a (probably) better campaign. Interestingly enough, from a service provider standpoint, it's actually worse for them to add these requirements as it does remove some incentive to apply to the campaign, especially if you write quality posts. Though, I don't think that the best posters here switch campaigns that often.

Problem with anything skill-based is that you want to avoid any huge advantages from a botting/automation perspective. For example, chess engines that have trumped the best players have been around for years and it's only going to get more insane as the ML engines are seeing development as well, like lc0.

Even if it's something novel, if it is worth exploiting, then it will be exploited eventually. Pure skill-based PvP without luck playing a large part (in the core game mechanic, not the metagame strategy) will mean a lot of people developing competitive advantages.

Lottery games are pretty easy to pull off, usually. You can even make it non-raffle-style, typical to a regular match-n lotto game.

You just simply divide the pay denominations to a percentage of the pool, across all winning tickets. Could easily incorporate a small house edge to the game and it would be reasonable considering how actual lottery tickets have an insane edge. With that in mind, it would totally be reasonable to add some small initial prize and a minimum purchase limit or ticket cost.

Example: flat 'registration fee' of $3 for purchasing tickets that cost $1 each; initial prize fund of $25.

Large enough sites like Stake will have people willing to PvP in those 'winner gets all' lotto games, but let's have some creativity.

The previous day showed the participant pool dropping by 4, from 121 to 117. Those that were dropped are the following:

Jet****e
Lov****e
Sha****7
sth****d

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Remaining participants just got their final prize increased by 3.4%, to 8.54 mBTC. The competition may well close below three digits within the first month.