You neglect to mention in your FAQ that the *real* reason 7 was jealous of 6 was that 6 was perfect....

yes paid after losing 5/6 of my investment - Godamn the soul of those responsible to Hell forever.

This. Dooglus became an instant BTC Saintly Legend just by not being a crook.

I just visited your site for the first time, and I must say it is stone gorgeous.

Probably someone taking profit - we want this actually - the smaller the max profit the more smaller bets - we want as many small bets as possible - each gives the edge a chance to take it's tiny little nip out of the money...

Plus - the fewer investors the more pro rata we remaining ones get! :-)

Zerocoin offers real anonymity - which we all of a sudden really need.

Anyone have any idea if the devs will add it any time soon (or ever?)

Like Panama for example?

You know, just in case someone theoretically wanted to start one and was located in Canada .....

because it blows out all the johnny-come-lately trendoid bandwagon-jumpers.

They can go back to saving the moose or something.

Please don't do this. Variance will burn us investors big time. The edge is already very low. The more small bets there are,  the closer it gets to the ideal of 'you give us your money, we give you 99% back, you give it to us again we give 99% of THAT back, and every 72 turns we have half your money'.

Larger bets means someone can make a score at our expense with a few large bets and some discipline.

If you want to remove a banner just get adblock plus and just use it to remove the element.

I DID make an error in my posting - it is a binomial distribution and a Bernoulli variable, not a Bernoulli distribution.

Nevertheless, the stats is exactly correct.

I also wrote a small program to simulate what happens when a bettor makes 1,000 bets at a 1 percent disadvantage.

After one million rounds of 1,000 bets each, that is, one billion bets, the results are

Player profits 250,803 times 25.333636363636362 %
Player loses   718,707 times 72.59666666666666 %

Just about exactly as predicted.

Ok I got it but I had to do the rescan again. BTC really isn't ready for prime time when stuff like this happens.

I want to thank you for pywallet, but I wish the GUI was more informative...

Hi - what I am doing is starting the latest pywallet with --web

Bitcoin is not running

I then go to change passphrase and enter the passphase. I get no feedback as to whether it worked or not.

I goto the import key and import a priv8 key. The lines in the terminal says

2013-09-27 21:57:26-0400 [HTTPChannel,0,127.0.0.1] The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct

The gui gives me the key and public key but it does that all the time, even when the password is wrong.

I quit pywallet

I run bitocin-qt

The key isn't there.

PLEASE tell me what I'm doing wrong.

He'll change or go broke. I'm outta here.

I've done the math.

What we have here is a Bernoulli distribution - only ones and zeros but it still has a mean and a variance.

The variance in such a distribution is the probability of an event happening times one minus the probability of that event happening divided by the number of times it has an opportunity to happen.

The probability of us, the investors, winning any one bet is 51 % so the variance is 0.51 * 0.49 or 0.2499 divided by the number of bets.

A Bernoulli distribution always describes a bell curve. The greater the variance the fatter the bell curve, but this one always peaks at 0.51.

Our profit is all the curve that is on the right side of 0.5 (the mean of a fair coin toss) and our loss is all the curve on the left side of 0.5.

What we WANT is a curve with no variance at all. A straight line. We take the bet, shave off 1 percent and give the 99 % back. They give it back to us and we shave 1 percent again and give it back etc etc. Every 72 times this happens, we are keeping half the original stake.

But in real life there is variance. We don't get a straight line, we get a bell curve.

You will notice that with 51 % probability of winning we are intrinsically slightly advantaged. That's the whole point.

When the whale makes one huge bet of amount N the variance on the one bet is 0.2499 and the standard deviation of that is the square root of the variance which is 0.4999. That is a big fat curve of mean 0.51 and standard deviation of 0.4999. The amount of the curve to the left of 0.5 (the one where we the investors lose the bet) is 49.2 % - the part were we win is 50.8 %.

That is NUTS. We're betting a huge amount on a coin toss. The chance we make a profit (the portion of the curve to the right of 0.5) is only about 51%.

Oh, but that's an advantage you say! Look - if we take that bet we are gamblers and the whole point of investing is to not be a gambler. I'm not betting a wad of Bitcoins on a coin toss.

Besides - watch this! I'll show you what a REAL advantage looks like!

Let's get the same N bet in 1,000 small bets of N / 1,000.

Suddenly the variance is 0.2499 / 1,000 -> 0.0002499 - and the standard deviation is 0.0158

The curve this time is still peaking at 0.51 but it is much narrower. It is much closer to that ideal line we want. The area to the left of 0.5 - the losing bets - is about 24 % of the curve. To the right - 76 %.

We profit 76 % of the time over 1,000 bets - not 50.8 % of the time like with 1 bet.

THAT'S being an investor, not a gambler.

Also - has anyone noticed that despite the 1 percent edge JD has never made a 1 % profit? It was about half that - before the current fiasco - now we know why.

Variance. Lets lower it by refusing big bets.

No, the opposite. The lower the variance the more the house edge counts. More profit.

He had better or sharps will continue to butt rape JD and it will continue to lose money and investors will start to flee like rats from a sinking ship.

It's about the variance, Doog!

There's no need to make it harder for the 0.0003 BTC type bettor - it's the 75 BTC bettor like Chode I just saw...

We should just enforce a max profit and a max bet.

The variance on a Bernoulli distribution with a win prob of 0.5 (close enough) is 0.25 / the number of bets.

We want the variance to be small, therefore a lot of 0.0004 type bets. We take little nip out of each one.

It's not the edge it’s the variance and with a lower edge you must have a low variance and that means lots of little bets and not a few big ones.

I really hope Doog reads this. It's math, there's no room for argument. We need a max bet and a max profit  - I recommend 1 / 1,000 capital - that still allows a 36 BTC bet right now - that’s 4 grand.