Something in between I think.

After a few days Erik usually posts that the delay was caused by an error and that it has now been fixed and the problem won't happen again. 

Now that there are lots of games running it might be better to show the results in reverse order, so that I don't have to keep scrolling to the bottom of the page to see the most recent results.

Maybe also by default only show the 25 (or whatever) most recent games, but offer a link that shows them all, or pages through them 25 at a time.

I'm currently seeing 855.9465 BTC worth of bets which haven't been paid out yet, with their pending payouts totalling 3839.90678494 BTC, for a net loss to the site of 2983.96028494 BTC.

That would put the site's overall profits after fees at around the 17000 BTC mark.

What if I could double-spend just my losing bets?  That would cost them plenty.

Thinking further about this, why even ask for a withdraw address and amount if I've already used my 10 withdraws for the day?  You can tell as soon as I click 'withdraw' that I'm not going to be allowed to withdraw, so tell me then that I need to wait x hours, rather than asking for the details then denying my request.

I finally managed to withdraw the 2 BTC you gifted me yesterday.  I lost the 250 mBTC sign-up bonus while trying to 'clear' the 2 BTC bonus but that's still a decent result.  Thanks again. 

I see new icons on the home page after logging in.

I clicked 'settings'.

It told me:



I have an account.  I'm logged in to it.  It even shows my name and balance in the corner of the complaining screen.

Notice that it's easy to pay out on a losing bet.  All you need is the losing bet as the transaction input.  You send part of it back to the losing player and the rest to a satoshidice change address.  So it doesn't matter if the satoshidice wallet is full of inputs that will never confirm; that doesn't impact their ability to pay out losing bets.  It does hinder their ability to pay out winners however.

This imbalance means that if you only look at fully confirmed bet+payout pairs, you'll see mostly losing bets showing up.  This is reflected in the graph of their profits over time.  Notice that for the last day or two their profits have been pretty much straight up.  Also notice that they're about 20,000 BTC in the black.  That doesn't look like bankruptcy to me.

There are currently 1374 bets that have been confirmed which haven't had their payouts confirmed yet:

http://pastebin.ca/2262402 (it's too big to include in this post - I never hit the 64000 byte post size limit before)

It looks like SatoshiDice is being swamped by thousands of tiny bets which they're not able to deal with in a timely manner.

The blockage was probably initially caused by a double-spend attempt, which can have a large knock-on effect:  when you make a transaction using a double-spent bet as an input, all the outputs are doomed to never confirm.  Each of the transactions which you subsequently make using any of those outputs are also doomed to never confirm.  And so on.  Before you know it you have a huge tree of payouts which eventually just vanish because they depend on a double-spent bet.

Eventually some kind of a clean-up script will run at SatoshiDice and all the missing payouts will be redone.

It kind of sucks that you're having to wait, but you're not alone...

The reward is all the payments that get into the first block.

In the case you're looking at, the first player-created bit got confirmed *before* the initial 0.1 bid!

See http://blockchain.info/address/1Y4xaSKCVmRCxP5a9Lfp85SwNP4zocQCZ?filter=2

I notice that the website is still linking to blockexplorer.com for the 'bid address' column.  The above type of link is much nice - it only shows deposits from the given address, and is as a result clearer to read.

Also, the table on the website doesn't list the 'initial bid' amount.  That would be interesting to see.  Also consider adding "start time" (or "game duration") and possibly "number of bids in winning block", "total number of bids", "value of late bids" (where the last 2 would possibly continue to rise after the game was over).

I looked at the biggest one, with the payout of 320.01518000.  It's http://satoshidice.com/full.php?tx=4ab33817fa25f8e1fb3c783009f2411f96a15086d47354893c61d9c53d3fb137

The bet tx is http://blockchain.info/tx-index/35187069 and has (as of now) 59 confirmations.  There's no way that's going to disappear:



The outputs shown as 'spent' are the ones that have been paid out, and the 'unspent' ones are stuck for some reason.

Very nice overnight profit for SatoshiDice!

I see you've made some improvements, and approve. 

I'm still getting "You have reached the limit of daily withdraws. Please wait and try it again."

It would be nice if it could tell me how long I have to wait for the day to end.  I have no idea what timezone the server uses.

"Please wait at least 5 hours and 23 minutes and try it again" for instance would make things clearer.

(Or I could just not hit the withdrawals page over and over in a greedy attempt to steal all your coins I suppose, then I wouldn't be having this problem...  )

That's almost painful to watch.  Poor kid has no idea.

He can't be trolling them; can he?

It is easier to win when you're the only one playing...  

Have you considered what happens in the event of a blockchain reorganisation?  It's not unheard of for some blocks that have been found to be replaced by completely different blocks with different sets of transactions.

See http://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks for a list of when this has happened.  It happens on a daily basis, and can easily change the result of your game.  History gets rewritten and the big payment that you thought hadn't made it into the first block now is in the first block...

Edit: the obvious solution is to wait for 6 confirmations before paying out the winner.  Reorgs almost never rewrite that much history.  Can your script handle starting a new game while the previous one is still awaiting confirmations to be sure you got the correct winner and prize amount?

I would also:

* display the user's balance on the home page - currently I can only see my balance if I go to the coinflip page
* make it clear that part of the balance is considered a bonus which isn't available to be withdrawn until it has been played through; if there's a bonus to play through show that fact on the home screen.  I had no idea what was going on when I was first trying to withdraw - it would allow me to withdraw 74 but not 75.  Turns out that's because I had won a total of 74 chips, but I didn't understand that from the little information I was given.
* make the 'heads' and 'tails' images clickable, rather than having me target a tiny radio button thingy.
* put some cell padding around the items in the deposit table.  the "Transaction ID" runs right into the date:



* what is that transaction ID anyway?  Is that some kind of internal reference ID?  I don't see myself ever using it when it's the bitcoin txid that I see in my wallet.

Thanks!


Do you plan to make the clickable items visually different than the rest of the content?  Currently it's hard to know what to do.  Maybe make the clickable things look more traditionally like a button?


OK, I get it now, thanks.  You have shuffled and decided how the coin is going to land before I even decide how much to bet, and that's what you're proving to me; that you didn't change your mind when you what side I picked.  There's no proof that you decided how the coin would land in any fair way, just that you didn't change the result based on my choice and/or stake.


I hadn't noticed that I could chose.  But even now I know that, you could still be arranging things so that 5% of all tosses land on the "edge" so I'm bound to lose.  It's possible to get around that possibility, and prove to your users that you aren't cheating.  See https://techblog.bitzino.com/2012-06-30-provably-fair-shuffling-through-cryptography.html for how bitZino does it by having both the casino and the user provide part of the seed used to shuffle.

Also:


Can be done using?

That's confusing to me.  It only makes sense if going back in time is going further.  I think it would be clearer if you said "all previous secrets from that point" or, better, "all secrets before that point".

I don't know of a good way of removing unconfirmed transactions other than using the PyWallet program which is a little awkward to use.  But if you want to try, there are instructions in the first post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0  See "Delete transactions from your wallet".

Close down bitcoin and make a backup of your wallet before you try it.

If you take that transaction ID and search on blockchain.info for it like this:
  http://blockchain.info/search?search=b80ee0c2d01f40731a48bf0f5ca97004602a4357da4e2fd9fb3dac43b77818e0
you get to see the 3 outputs.

You'll see that all 3 are marked as 'spent', including the two satoshidice outputs:



That means they've processed the bets and payed you out.

Click the two 'spent' links next to the two satoshidice bets to see how much they paid.

The 0.001 bet to the long-shot address lost:



and the 0.01 bet to the 50/50 address won:



So maybe you just didn't notice the payouts in your wallet?  Or are you sure they're not there?