It's so bad, that I have trouble imagining how anyone even thought it was a good idea o.0  Especially when they can just copy the dozen+ casinos who do it properly.


Well, I don't think it really matters. Either way the player could be getting undetectably cheated.  I'm not sure players really care who is doing the cheating if they're getting cheated (not to mention players don't even know if Betplay and Spribe are actually different entities).

But besides all that, people are connecting (first) to Betplay, not Spribe. If betplay wanted to cheat, it's pretty easy: It could target a person by serving them with an page that mimics the appearance and behavior of Spribes game and abuses the broken provably fair scheme to cheat.


Indeed. I guess they could float something over the iframe though, lmao. Although in reality they should be vetting what they put on their website and serving to customers.



Indeed. I agree their provably fair system does not allow players to cheat the casino, only the casino to cheat players.  

I'm not sure this is entirely relevant. You can't put a game on your website that falsely advertises itself as provably fair and then wash your hands of it.



Or even just hack the DOM to remove that, lol.


I've never heard of their game provider, https://spribe.co/, so I had a look at their website. They call "aviator" their flagship game, and pat themselves pretty hard for cloning bustabit, and changing the provably fair system to one that offers literally no guarantees at all


and unsurprisingly are licensed by the UK Gambling Commission,  probably one (the?) of the worst gambling regulatory bodies out there. With my dealings with them, they couldn't even bother pretending they care about players interests. So while I have reported Spribe to them for false-advertising, I am almost 100% sure they couldn't care less.  


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Interestingly, the very first iteration of bustabit had a vastly improved "fairness" scheme. Which was simply when the round began, it broadcasted a hash of the (salted) game outcome. This took like ~5 lines of code, really. While it had some benefits (it proved the game was predetermined), it did not prove that it came from a fair distribution. So at the time it was called "provably predetermined" and until (I) implemented figured out how to make it come from a fair distribution it was never marketed as "provably fair". Meanwhile "aviator" offers zero guarantees, yet calls itself "provably fair" ><

I was taking a look at your "aviator" game, it looks pretty, but kind of shocks me that you'd clone bustabit, which has a robust and established provably fair system and then change it to something that is not only obviously not provably fair (the casino can trivially cheat) but something that would also be a PITA to verify.

I'd suggest you either fix it, or not falsely advertise it as provably fair

The lightning aspect of your site is pretty cool, hopefully that becomes standard as lightning adoption increases

Ah, that brings back memories. At least I feel like time has proven I'm not Ryan Moolah, considering that since then he has reportedly been jailed


and I assume they don't get internet access there

I think it was 2013 or 2014, and there was this dude BBmmBB (aka owlman or something) and was rather obsessed about proving that virtually all the bitcoin casino owners were the same person. Guy always ended up getting to me, I spent hours arguing with his incoherent accusations in the chat and forums ... and made me feel a little unappreciated that my productivity is apparently so low that someone thinks I must be running half a dozen sites with all different alts ><

I'd like to claim it was some higher-order humor to obfuscate the word obfuscate, but the truth is I never learned the English very well and my browsers spell checker is set to another language. Anyway, thank you for the correction -- I hope I won't make the same spelling mistake again.

The idea of the "special drawing rights" is that it's like a stable version of "fiat money". Right now 1 XDR is (0.58252 USD + 0.38671 EUR + 1.0174 CNY + 11.9 JPY + 0.085946 GBP). Picking a single currency would be simpler, but less stable.



I don't think it is Daniel intention is to obsfucate how it works, like on the "bankroll" page (which you use to invest/divest), it pretty prominently shows:



and he has made a lot of stats available as an .csv which makes it pretty simple for anyone who can use excel to work with

I guess the part I struggle with, is assuming stake (incorrectly) allowed you to gamble again ... does that really make them responsible for the (direct) course of actions that happened after (i.e. you losing your money)?

I honestly don't know, I feel like I can make a strong argument both ways. But I don't really think a public forum is an ideal way to solve an issue like this. I notice in Stake's Terms of Service they offer the option to seek arbitration with the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre.  If you can't reach an amicable solution, it seems like it might be best to let a 3rd party decide?

Is that a problem? If they make permanent bans/self-exclusions actually permanent, then there's nothing to exploit.


While it sounds like stake probably never should've unbanned the account -- if we're being realistic had stake not unbanned the account -- I am pretty the OP would've found a way to gamble either at stake on a new account, or at another casino.

Gambling addictions are no joke, I really hope the OP takes it seriously and gets the help he needs.  

I think it's pretty clear all the stats are faked. You can jump back 1 day in the game history and see here:


https://bitcrasha.com/game/1024633 <-- no one playing
https://bitcrasha.com/game/1024634 <-- mistries starts playing, and never stops
https://bitcrasha.com/game/1024636 <-- genie starts playing, and never stops
https://bitcrasha.com/game/1024637 <-- soldier starts playing and never stops
https://bitcrasha.com/game/1024638 <-- pokemon starts playing, and never stops
...etc...

None of the data looks remotely legitimate.


I kind of understand the desire to "fake it until you make it", but with trust being such a critical part of casinos -- being anything but a 100% straight shooter seems like shooting your own foot

Oh wow, thanks for that. That's actually really helpful.

Also if anyone needs an easy way to format it, you can copy&paste it into google spreadsheets or even gist.github.com: https://gist.github.com/RHavar/b915276d257175172369e3c8648f051b

which makes it a bit easier to read 

Yeah, exactly. I think of it as the investor is first investing 98% of his funds  ... and everyone's stake gets adjusted according to that. And THEN the 2% gets added to the bankroll (without affecting anyones stake)

Imagine the existing bankroll is 1 BTC, and you are going to invest 1 BTC.

You are given a stake of:

($yourInvestment * 0.98) / ($bankroll + ($yourInvestment * 0.98))
= 0.98 / 1.98
= 49.49%

But the bankroll increases by 1 BTC (AKA the new bankroll is 2 BTC)


So your stake is worth 0.98989 BTC.  (AKA you only lost ~1% even though the dilution fee was 2%)


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The high-level reasoning behind it is that if you didn't recoup some of your own dilution fee, it would incentivize people to "fragment" their large investment into tiny ones (possibly over multiple accounts?).  So the dilution fee is split amongst all investors (including yourself), so that the smart way to invest a lot of money is just simply invest a lot of money.

Try run the simulation script again against the same hashes used by the game. The result should be *identical* (assuming no issues like connection loss, etc.)

Then after verifying that, try verify the game hashes to make sure they are fair. One easy enough way is to hash each game hash $gameId times [1] and you should arrive to the same $terminatingHash (from the seeding event).




[1] (Or it might be $gameId+1 or $gameId-1), too lazy to think about it 

I think around 9381  ? (I tried to guess the 360 day moving average of BTCUSD and divided by 1.4 which i got by ballparking ). I might be wrong

So if the commission started today, it should be about: 4252.4 * 9381 / 55,000,000  = 0.725%  ... which is quite the leap.  If my calculation is correct, I don't see how I could not be divesting most (?) of my investment. But I guess that's the goal of the change to push some investors out.  I think the formula could be tweaked a little so that we don't see such an abrupt change on day 1 though?  Like using a longer moving average, or higher cap ?

I suspect the reason the bankroll has been decreasing is just related to the value of bitcoin has been going up. Daniels last rule change has (accidentally?) strictly benefited investors, so I doubt there's been much divestment because of it



Well the bread-and-butter of the casino are people who put a chunk of their paycheck into the casino each month. So if you plot "amount wagered" in BTC and USD, you'll find it's far stabler in USD. So from that point of view, it makes much more sense targeting a fiat amount.

I think the (strong?) counter-argument to that would be that the (large) bankroll isn't needed to service the typical customer -- it's there to service whales. I strongly suspect the average bustabit whale *isn't* buying BTC to gamble, but already has acquired the bitcoin (probably a long time ago). So from that sense, it makes sense to target a BTC amount? (Or at least a moving average with an extremely long tail)




Yeah, I hope before the change happens we have much clearer information and examples. Also a page that just clearly says what the current commission is, and what it has been every day of the past.

Just-Dice has a pretty nice thing:
https://just-dice.com/misc/wagered.txt

It would be good to have something like that, extended with all the commission information

One issue I have with the complexity, is that it's pretty annoying to do the calculations. Like I'm not sure exactly where to even get XDR information (admittedly, I've only heard of it just now). I see on XE: https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=XDR&To=XBT

1XDR = 0.0000402910 bitcoin


Which means you're effectively targeting a cap of ~2216 BTC (at current value) bankroll, which effectively gets phased in over a year.  I don't really know how to see what the "360-day moving average of BTCXDR" is, so it's hard to see what the commission will start off as.


I think it's important to make that information easily available via:
bustabit.com/investing-stats.txt

Which updates every day with something like:


date | current_commission_% | bankroll_in_btc | bankroll_profit_in_btc | BTCXDR |  BTCXDR_MOVING_AVERAGE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Otherwise, honestly it's a real PITA to figure out what's going on.


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Regarding mandatory email (2fa). It's a shame you had to do that, but with all the bustabit phishing sites I guess there was no real alternative. I kind of wonder if it's be possible when registering to opt-out by signing some sort of disclaimer about the risks of phishing [etc]. Or since you already support totp 2fa, you can bypass mandatory email if you enable totp 2fa. While totp doesn't protect against phishing really, no one is going to both trying to phish the 1% of users who use totp 2fa -- and it'd allow the people who don't want to link their email to gambling account a nice solution

I'm a bit late to the question, but as other people have pointed out the stats are public (https://www.bustabit.com/statistics) which gets archived (and graphed) by sites like dicesites.com

I have seen bustabit clones for sale that come with builtin stat/player faking as a selling point. And there's even established casinos (e.g. roobet) that have notable players playing with effectively fake money.

So I think it's a pretty reasonable question. But I think bustabit is one of the most transparent sites out there, and would be substantially more difficult to fake stats -- because bustabit with a public bankroll it actually needs to pay investors. Like personally I've take out a lot more than I've put into the bankroll -- and right now bustabit has given a significantly higher return than would be expected -- which is the opposite of what you'd expect to see if volume was being faked.

That said, there's no way to ever know 100% sure the other players are real or not or shills -- so you should probably always just assume you're the only one playing and not let other peoples bets influence yours

You should use bustabit.com/support  to get support from Daniel directly.

I really wish bustabit would run ad-block detection and warn people to enable adblockers. Google is almost virtually complicit in promoting phishing/malware these days, and adblockers are a very effective way to filter that shit out.

I've probably dealt a dozen+ times with people doing the "lets use escrow" bluff. I think largely they hope the procedure is sufficiently inconvenient you don't actually use it, or the mere negotiating or offering of it legitimizes them.


If the dude really had a winning strategy he'd either abuse it himself, or ask Daniel directly for a bug bounty. Just like the previous 1000 times people are selling (or giving away) exploits, the only thing they exploit is the people silly enough to trust them.