A bet was just created on BitBet on this very topic:

https://bitbet.us/bet/1395/bch-btc-parity-before-2018/

Did you somehow miss our post?

We are not gone for good, nor did we commit a crime.
We were down for too long indeed, but we believe you are jumping to conclusions too fast.

We are back up

Mircea Popescu has sold BitBet to us about a year ago and is in no way shape or form involved with BitBet.

Unless being under a ddos attack counts as "bad management" in your book, that is not what happened here. BitBet is and has been profitable, and not a satoshi of our user's funds has been lost.

Hello,

https://bitbet.us is back online.

We experienced yet another DDos and request for ransom (which we - as usual - refused to pay).

It took us way too long to get back online, our apologies for that, but we're now fully back up and running.

As usual, all customer funds are safe and sound as these are kept in cold storage.

Words of wisdom. And send them to your wallet via a mixer.

It seems their track your coins 3 hops away, according to some accounts we've heard on Reddit.

+1000

That's assuming they won't track that as well.

We've never heard of a bank that tells people what they can and can't do with their money.

Thanks for the links, we didn't realize Coinbase was in the business of telling customers what they can and can't do with their own money.

This is really amazing, they're basically eliminating 90% of what makes bitcoin useful ... why would anyone use their service ?

When someone draw cash at a US bank, does the teller explain that they are not allowed to gamble with it and that he will close the account if he suspects the money will be used to gamble ?

Also, it'd be interesting to conduct an experiment to see if they still do this if a user first transfers the coins to a wallet on their own computer prior to placing the bet.

Hello,

We are the admin team for https://bitbet.us, and it has come to our attention that Coinbase has silently started tracking how their customers spend the coins purchased on their site.

One of our users what threatened by Coinbase with account closure after he placed a bet on our site.

The implication is basically that Coinbase is now officially in the business of deciding what you can and can't do with your own money.

They've essentially lowered themselves to the level of the likes of VISA and Paypal.

Should you decide to spend your coins on dildos and should Coinbase tomorrow decide that dildos are something they disapprove of, you may face account closure.

Caveat Emptor.

We certainly won't allow late bets into the pool as they are blatant abuse of the legitimate bettor.

We tend to agree with the "refund late bets" policy (that's what we've actually been doing in practice since taking on management of the site). It seems like the right thing to do.

However, this amounts to manually beating scammers away with a stick, a fairly time consuming affair.

Our current thinking is that we're going to refund late bets, but with a much higher fee than normal to discourage would-be abusers. It feels like a nice middle-of-the-road between the current, fairly extreme
approach and the "laissez-faire, BitBet mods will clean up the mess" approach.

Thoughts ?

It's never too late to give it a try

Well, the problem these days is that blocks are full, and knowing when your TX will actually confirm
has become an absolute crapshoot unless you add very large fees (which does not work for small bets).

Also, although made very explicit when you place a bet on the site, the rule has created a lot
of controversy and hurt feelings (real or simulated) in the past. We're trying to design the best
possible experience for our users:
    - on the one hand we want to protect legitimate bettors from skimmers
    - on the other hand, we do not want legitimate bettors who just bet late
       to be unjustly penalized by the rule

The "old" rule is in fact still in vigor. We are currently considering changing it,
hence this thread.

The rule in question is described here: https://bitbet.us/faq/#1121

In short, it states that bets received (where "receives" means "transaction is included in a block")
after betting closes or after the resolution event occurs will be considered "donations" to BitBet.

Yes, we do have plans for new features, but mostly related to presentation.
We are however, open to suggestions.

Dear BitBet users,

As you know, BitBet is under new management, and we are currently discussing whether
to keep or change the very controversial policy around bets received (where received means
included in a block) after betting closes or after the resolution event has already occurred.

The current policy, which we are given to understand created a lot of frustration in the past
was designed to discourage users to try and take advantage of the other users by betting large
sums on "obvious" bets late in the game or even after the event occurred.
 
Our current policy is to review all such bets manually and to refund them on a case by case basis.
We typically refund such bets unless they are a blatant attempt at taking advantage of the other
bettors by betting on an event where the outcome is known.

This process has unfortunately become necessary these days where transaction confirmation
has become highly unpredictable because of full blocks (even when fat fees are included).

Please see this comment :

https://bitbet.us/bet/1254/bitcoin-value-at-or-above-600-on-jul/#c6150

And please also see this resolved bet:

https://bitbet.us/bet/1269/bitcoin-value-at-or-above-525-before-june

where we did refund a very late bet even though it could in fact have been
construed as a skimming attempt.

We would appreciate your perspective on this topic.

The BitBet management team.