That was in early March of 2011 - Bitcoins were worth less than $0.50 at the time, so his 800 BTC win was only worth about $400 at the time.

Teppy

The withdraw actually depleted the hot wallet last night, so the tx will show once I get in to the office this morning. (Several other players had significant wins yesterday as well.)

But yes, the win was real - a 0.6 BTC bet on a grave that paid 88x.

Dragon's Tale is (AFAIK) the longest running Bitcoin enterprise in the world. We've been in continuous operation since October 2010 back when Bitcoins were worth pennies each - we have reserves to cover bets far higher than this.

Teppy

Just letting everyone know that the server is down right now, might be a few hours until we're back up. I'm seeing a sort of "soft crash" where things slow down dramatically, and rather than take it down and restart it, I want to analyze how it got into this state (taking it down and restarting would destroy that information.)

Teppy

I have just released a new series of Tournaments specifically to teach new players about Dragon's Tale.

You'll be able to play three games: Silly Monkey, Shrines, and Drinking. There are prizes for having the greatest overall winnings on Shrines, the highest single jackpots in Drinking, and the greatest winnings and highest individual jackpots in Silly Monkey.

Each of the 90 tournaments (one every 8 hours, for the next month) has 18 BTM (0.018) in prizes. To make these "free," I've limited the bets to a cumulative 0.1 BTM per player per tournament, which is an amount that you can easily get for free within Dragon's Tale itself, with a bit of exploration. You can search Soldiers, scout Herbs, quaff Mineral Waters, or even make friends with established Dragon's Tale players (many of whom will gift 0.1 BTM to a friendly new player.)

Glad to answer any questions about these new tournaments.

Teppy

By special arrangement, yes, we can handle even larger bets. In the past I've done this specifically for Wishing Wells, though never to accommodate something as high at a 4000 BTC jackpot. If you're really serious about gambling at this level, contact me in-game and I may be able to arrange that.

Wishing Wells is actually an unusual case because it is (debatably) a strategy game where the player is still able to pick their bet level: The maximum jackpot on a given well is intentionally kept secret from the player; dynamically changing the menu would leak this information.

 

There's a maximum jackpot amount that varies as people play. Right now, Dragon's Tale can pay jackpots of up to ~600 BTC, and the game will only accept bets that have a theoretical max jackpot of whatever this number is. That could be a bet for 6 BTC that pays up to 100:1, or a bet for 100 Bitcoins that pays up to 6:1.

Yesterday afternoon Aston won 124 Bitcoins on a single bet. He wagered 3 BTC on an approximately 41:1 monkey maze tile which hit - that's the highest USD value jackpot in Dragon's Tale's nearly 5 year history, worth about $34,000. Previously we've had at least one $25,000 value jackpot, which was higher in numbers of Bitcoins (I think it was in the days of $12 Bitcoins. Jase, if you're still around, care to confirm?)

I'm hoping someone has videos of the subsequent after-parties - if so, please post here! I have never seen so many cigars, drinks, rounds of shots and festival boxes happen in one day.

Anyone care to try to break this new record??

So if I'm understand this correctly, a miner's profit using the outlined attack is as follows. Note that currently no transaction fees are "burned" - miners keep all of them.

L=Share of legitimate transactions
H=Share of hashing amount that the attacker controls
B=Share of the fees that must be burned

Profit=(L*H*(1-B))-(1-L)*(1-H)

Suppose there was a change to the Bitcoin protocol as follows: Every newly mined block must send half the transaction fees to a "burn" address. So we'll increase B from 0 (current protocol) to 1/2:

Under the original example L=2/3, H=1/2, B=0 and so Profit=1/6

Under the proposed change L=2/3, H=1/2, B=1/2 and so Profit=0

However, as L approaches 1 it doesn't matter how high you set B to, there is still profit to be extracted from this attack.

Setting B=0.5 protects the network from attacks where L<2/3, whereas before the network was only safe where L<1/2, so it's an improvement, but not the final solution.

Thoughts?

I don't recall letting a Level 3 player on to Tiki - do you remember who it was? (Not saying that didn't make some exception for some reason, I just don't recall doing that.)

Teppy

I have a radically new idea, would like to discuss with anyone that does not care for the "no splits allowed" proposal. Call me at 412-973-7914. If I don't answer it's because I'm already taking to someone else.

Teppy

The explanation above wasn't quite right; we have several machines that serve resources; one of them had an old file on it that pointed to a different compute server.

Everything is now running smoothly- sorry for the downtime.

Teppy

The server that checks the client version and updates it (and serves all the graphics resources) is down, and I can't ping it. Trying to figure out what's going on - if the machine is dead, then we do have spare machines; working on a fix now. Once I know the cause, I'll update here with an ETA.

Teppy

Dragon's Tale is an MMORPG where the content is almost entirely gambling instead of, say, combat. You level up by completing gambling quests, explore to unlock new gambling games, compete in (and even organize) gambling tournaments with interesting rules.

Every 3D object in the world is a novel gambling game, 68 different types so far, many with variations.

Teppy

I've just released the first version of Mineral Waters, a new game in Dragon's Tale where veteran players place "bets" on new players.

If you enter the game as a new player and interact with existing players, there is a very good chance that you will be gifted some Mineral Waters. These are special drinks that cost the provider nothing, but pay off in Bitcoin to the one receiving them. Veteran players get several each day to distribute as they see fit.

Each time a veteran player gives you a Mineral Water, they're betting that you will eventually do a certain amount of gambling in the game. If they're accurate, they can win in-game and real-life prizes.

The Bitcoins in the drink are provided by the house: We're placing a bet that you'll love Dragon's Tale and  join our little community. We've been in continuous operation since October 2010, and are, I believe, the longest running Bitcoin based business in the world.

Native clients for Windows, Linux and OSX are available on http://www.dragons.tl

I'm planning to do a Q&A session in IRC about the motivations behind PS Coin, a new market that I have recently launched (currently in alpha at http://www.pscoin.com)

As some of you know, I am the designer of Dragon's Tale, which is (I believe) the longest-running Bitcoin based business in the world, in continuous operation since October 2010.

This market puts a new twist on commissions, that should eliminate high-frequency trading, and create a truly deep and stable market.

Time: Friday, 2/27/2015 at 11:00 AM EST
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #bitcoin-otc

Teppy

I believe we're currently the longest running Bitcoin business in the world. Anyone know of one that has been in continuous operation for longer?

Teppy

Some of you know me as the designer of the gambling MMO Dragon's Tale, which I believe to be the longest-running Bitcoin based business in the world. I'm posting to announce a new venture that I have started.

--------------------------------------------

Pittsburgh, PA - PS Coin today is pleased to launch the first correctly incentivized market on www.pscoin.com. The unique PS Coin market algorithm encourages "healthy" behavior among traders in a market by awarding limit orders with royalties relative to their participation in helping produce a deep, dense, and stable market. Traders are automatically compensated for placing orders for as many units of currency as they can, as close to the bid-ask-spread as they dare, for having those orders sit there for a long time accumulating royalties, and then eventually having their orders trade. As a result of our incentive algorithm, all of the bids and asks you will see on the PS Coin markets are very likely to remain there. It's not an illusion of stability, as traders have come to experience many times in traditional markets. It's actual stability.

You are encouraged to watch our video for a detailed explanation of how the PS Coin algorithm works, by the conceiver of the algorithm himself and co-founder of PS Coin, Andrew Tepper: https://youtu.be/dLqhMIksOjU

PS Coin's engineering team has spent over a year in development, with the goal of building the most secure and most powerful exchange possible.

Security:

The majority of all funds which will be deposited to the PS Coin exchange are stored offline in bank vaults. For the rest, we have sought the expertise of cryptographers and decorated cybersecurity experts to design and engineer software security systems that far exceed industry standards for excellence. Because we can't accurately condense all of the information into this press release, you are encouraged to read more about how we will protect your funds on our security page: https://pscoin.com/Security/

Performance:

The PS Coin incentivized trading engine has to do a bit more work than standard exchanges, because it must process accumulation and capture of royalties for every order. Yet our C++ based engine can handle about 500,000 new orders per-second on a single commodity server.

Experience:

PS Coin engineers have extensive experience in the crypto-currency space. Co-founder Andrew Tepper is also the founder of eGenesis, the 14th company ever to accept Bitcoin as a currency, and creator of Dragon's Tale, which is likely the longest running Bitcoin based business in the world (in continuous operation since October 2010.)

Availability:

The PS Coin initial alpha launch will commence worldwide this morning at 9am EST and allow traders to participate in the following initial crypto currency markets:

* Bitcoin / Nxt
* Bitcoin / Darkcoin
* Bitcoin / Litecoin
* Bitcoin / Paycoin
* Bitcoin / Peercoin
* Nxt / Darkcoin
* Nxt / Litecoin

Our initial alpha testers can only sign up after receiving an invite. Press and media personnel are encouraged to request an invite from us directly via e-mailing our co-founder, Daniel Pusateri: daniel@pscoin.com - Upon request, a very small amount of funds may be provided to press and media personnel for the purpose of testing the PS Coin exchange.

Revelvant links:

Website: https://pscoin.com/
Interview: https://youtu.be/dLqhMIksOjU
Press materials: https://d1s3cnxrjam8j.cloudfront.net/dl/PSCoin_Press_Materials.zip

I believe we're actually the longest running Bitcoin based game in the world - continuous operation since October of 2010. We'd routinely tell each other "you know, we're probably with future $100 bills right now. "

(Bitcoins were about a nickel at the time. )

Teppy

Our daily peak-concurrent-players has been about 50 over the last 2 months. I don't have a 24-hour average, but I would guess between 35 and 40.

Teppy

Well, that was one tricky bug to find. We were linking against the wrong version of SSL - one which had a bug in it that was triggered by only one site that the server would communicate with to do geolocation. This caused SSL to clobber memory, crashing the server.

Anyway, Dragon's Tale is back - see everyone in game!

Teppy