Any news re. having the client automatically reconnect after disconnection?

I'm surprised to see the site's still up.  That must mean someone's still paying the hosting bill.

I don't know if it's actively scamming people.  The trading is "frozen", and I'm not allowed to deposit:

"Please identify yourself or pay a fee to remain anonymous. before initiating any Deposits"

I guess it's possible some people might pay the fee.  I am curious to know what's going on with WBX now though.  My guess is that nothing's going on, and that the fee is paid by some automatic payment that's been forgotten.

I'm sure the amounts that could be made in the short term using such an attack are very attractive to some people.  Not everyone lives in a developed country and has a well paying job after all.

'They' know we're onto them, and have started losing again to cover their tracks... 

Again, this argument goes nowhere. Suppose this is true. Your damages are $0. So what difference does it make? Yes, if they could somehow have guessed correctly when Pirate would default, they could make a ton of money that way and nobody would have been harmed by it. So what?
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It's basically a case of the smart PPT operator realising that BS&T was a ponzi scheme and deciding that instead of losing his clients' coins to Pirate's ponzi he would keep them for himself, effectively running his own ponzi.  So long as pirate's ponzi closes up shop before the PPT operator runs out of funds it all works out well for the PPT operator.

I don't know if you're suggesting you need 51% of the network to carry out this attack, but you don't.  Even if you had just 1% you could carry out this attack about once per day.  You don't need the 1% yourself, either.  You can run a mining pool.  Play something like "lessthan 8000" rather than a 50/50 bet.  Then you don't end up throwing away many of the blocks your miners find for you.  But occasionally you'll win the "lessthan 8000" bet, in which case you just don't submit the block, and get to keep the winning bet.

The thing is, for a long time I was monitoring the Bitcoin network, looking specifically for double-spend attempts against Satoshi Dice, and didn't find a single one.

It could be that while I was monitoring, no double spends happened, but that recently they've started again.  I expect the site operators have a similar monitoring system in place, and would have shut down operations if they were being ripped off by such a scheme.  They are in an excellent position to know whether they are having an unusual number of large losing bets never confirming.  I very much doubt they would still be allowing 0-confirmation bets if they were seeing such an attack happening.

I'm using PDT times, and wasn't online at pmpoker until after 5pm.  The game I signed up for was definitely playing after the client reconnected me - I just wasn't in it any more.

I've noticed before that the client no longer auto-reconnects me when I disconnect.

I remember a week or two ago it was very diligent about reconnecting me, and would eventually give an error like "too many disconnections" and just quit (my Internet connection isn't great here - it goes up and down, so auto-reconnection is a must for me) but I've not seen that recently.  It now seems I have to do something like register for a new tournament before it even realises I'm disconnected.  I guess when I'm looking through the lists of players registered for tournaments it's using old cached lists, and not realising for some reason that I'm disconnected.

It just occurred to me that not all the bets are independent events.  You can't tell from the data I provided, but it's possible to place multiple bets within a single transaction.  All such bets get the same 'magic number'.

I don't know what impact that would have on your calculations.  If you like, I could add a txid to each bet so you can tell which are grouped with which.

Probably http://sealswithclubs.org/

They currently have 89 players on 13 tables according to the banner on their website.  I signed in to see if that's right, and found the following ring games running:



Edit: note that the chips are worth 0.001 BTC each, or approx $0.01 US.

So the most popular game is 2nl, but there's a 200nl game with 6 players, and someone waiting to play some 1200nl too.

Not just that, but they aren't even sat out of the game, so we have to wait for them to time out every hand, sometimes multiple times per hand (if they're in the big blind position and nobody bets).

I signed up for the 7pm and 9pm games.  I got knocked out in the first hand of the 7pm so waited 2 hours for the 9pm.  I kept checking the clock as it approached 9pm.  At 9:02pm I noticed it had gone 9pm and the table hadn't opened.  I could still click around the client to see who was registered in the various games.

I noticed I hadn't registered for the 11pm, so I clicked 'buy in' and the client then told me I was disconnected and reconnected me.  By then I had been removed from the 9pm game for being "offline" I guess.

I was online all the time.  The client should notice if it thinks I am disconnected and reconnect me.  It shouldn't be the player's responsibility to babysit it to avoid being thrown out of games they've registered for.  This was only a freeroll, but it would suck if players pay to register for a game and then get removed because the client doesn't reconnect automatically when it disconnects from the server.

I disagree with this completely.

SD can (and currently do) suffer steady losses, but not because people are using a different site for the small martingale bets.  That would make no difference to the expected house edge at SD.  It would reduce the amount of throughput, so reduce the expected winnings, but in no way could it damage their expected house edge.


No, what makes the casino profitable is that every bet they offer has slightly worse payouts than the true odds of winning the bet.  The 1-in-2 bet should pay out 2x, but only pays out 1.99x.

Suppose someone plays 0.3, 0.6, and 1.2 bets at your site before moving on to SD if they lose all 3, and then play 2.4, etc. at SD.  That looks exactly the same to SD as someone starting at 2.4 BTC and using the (losing!) martingale strategy.  It makes no difference to them that the player has played on your site first, in the same way they don't care what you had for breakfast.

My account is set to use uBTC so everything I see is in uBTC until I go to withdraw - then I have to type a value in whole BTC.  Is that intentional?

Satoshi Dice has been having terrible luck for the last 10 days or so.  Either that or someone has figured out how to cheat.

I post graphs of their winnings over time.  Here's todays:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80312.msg1307533#msg1307533

OK, I made a text file of the bets from the last 1500 blocks or so (since the decline started) here (both the same, the 2nd is gzip compressed)

http://dooglus.rincevent.net/random/details.txt (4955 KB)
http://dooglus.rincevent.net/random/details.txt.gz (299 KB)

In doing so, I noticed that the SD bottom line has dropped further since this morning's stats post.  Now it's:

SD Profit after fees:        8122.86383142 BTC (0.772%)

Here's the first 7 lines from the file, where things started going downhill:


That's block_number,time_and_date,target,result,stake,return

So the first line is a "lessthan 6000" bet winning, and so is the 2nd line.  2 separate bets, both winning:

http://www.satoshidice.com/lookup.php?tx=0a4d8505e11b3af56f31016c8d738927a0a62aececc0b0e8c81dd8d471ef8f83
http://www.satoshidice.com/lookup.php?tx=b6723d3c2227c288910088dff5f332fff675014b12e46dddb75278aa1efc8d03

What fields do you want to see per bet?

block number, date, bet type, stake, result, return?

Anything else?

No.  The problem is that each time you win, you win the minimum amount, but the one time you lose, you lose everything.  The millions of min bets you win aren't quite enough to make up for the one huge loss when you lose 20 times in a row and get wiped out.

The bottom line is that there is no way to profit in the long run from betting on a game which always has a negative expectation no matter how you vary your bet size.

The only reason people can make a living playing blackjack is that some of the time it has a positive expectation (which you can determine by counting cards), and those are the times to bet big.  With SD, the expectation is always negative, so betting big at some times won't help you.