I hope you can appreciate that when most people see a mundane contract or a "terms of service" they don't expect there's a need to get lawyers involved and just assume they're reasonable. I've logged stats of how many people click "Show Terms" before agreeing, and it's <1% of people even glance at it, let alone study it. This should be used as a chance to do right by your customers, not as an opportunity to selectively screw them.


Actually, this reminds me of Bank of America. They had in their terms:
a) If you use your account when you have no funds, you have to pay an overdraft fee ($35?)
b) They are allowed to re-order transactions that occur in the same day


So what they did was re-order transactions in such a way to maximize the amount of overdraft fees a customer needs to pay. They would put the larger transactions first so the account would be overdrafted, and then charge the overdraft fees over and over for all the small transactions, even though you really had funds in the account at the time.

It was totally allowed by agreements customers signed, and I'm sure you'd defend it, but it's total predatory bullshit. And the law seems to agree with me, they ended up paying a $410 million dollar settlement over it.


The same applies to bitstarz, I'm sure they think they're really clever with their little "gotchas" they left in the ToS, and I'm sure there was a lot of excitement when they realized they could take ~$8k USD from btcgambling's account because he accidentally broke a rule (that their software accepted), but excuse me for not taking the same interpretation.

Well, I think that constraint needs to be relaxed for fixed-interest investing to make sense.


Let's say I borrowed 1000 BTC from you at 3% interest over a year. I throw that 1000 BTC in my bankroll, knowing that I can attract more action on my site. Even if a whale wins a lot of that money in the short term, he (or someone else) will probably maybe lose it back to the site. If everything goes well after a year, I give you back 1030 BTC and profited from the increased action on my site. If things go badly, I need to refinance the loan or declare bankruptcy.  


It doesn't sound particularly appealing for investors (and even stressing on MP's behalf, as it would effectively imply fractional reserving and needing to worry about bank runs and blah blah), but in the real world there are billions of dollars of loans/investments built on pretty similar principles

I understand that people have different views, but I really have trouble understanding your position. The vast majority of users will never read a sites Terms of Services, and rely on it to be reasonable. Even if they did read it, it's simply not fair or just that someone making a small mistake (that the site accepts!) leads to confiscation of (unrelated) funds.

It seems to be to be very basic empathy. If you, or someone you cared was acting in good faith and was screwed out of thousands of dollars by a technicality, I have trouble believing your reaction would be: "haha, yeah! Should've studied those terms of service and had it reviewed by my lawyers first! They got me good on the fine print"
 

And besides, the whole "Terms of Service" thing is complete misdirection and wouldn't stand up in any court system that I'm aware of. There is a well established legal concept known as unconscionability which would invalidate such a one-sided predatory condition like this.

I believe that my summary is quite accurate:

which is confirmed by vdice where he explains the reasoning behind the limitations, and says that some will hopefully be improved -- and some of the tooling will be improved as well.


The real "problem" right now in current provably fair gambling is that:
a) You need to trust an operator with your money (until you withdraw)
b) If they do cheat you, and you detect it, it'll be your word against theirs

So there's absolutely a lot of potential to improve the current status-quo. But unfortunately vdice is (currently) a step backwards, because it's not even provably fair at the moment.

And even though I strongly dislike ethereum, it's actually probably a good platform for making trustless gambling practical. (It's possible in bitcoin too, but the UX would be horrible because you'd need a very complex custom wallet)

That's not quite correct, there are strategies that revolved around the site bonuses. See:

bustabit.com/guide
and
bustabit.com/faq#last

Ha. Funny. This seems to be the go-to response of every single shady gambling site I criticise. But amusingly enough, less than an hour or so before you posted this someone was asking on my site:


...and then later recommended him to checkout MoneyPot, as he was US based. I think you'll find I'm pretty much the least competitive person out there. I really don't give a crap. The only reason for my skepticism is that I care about the crypto gambling community, and don't want to see people get ripped off.


Anyway, the fact you have never directly refuted my assertions, seems to be a tacit acceptance of them. I'll take that  

So the tldr is:

The site has an extremely weak trust model, significantly weaker than existing bitcoin gambling sites:

* random.org  can undetectably cheat (by picking any number they want)
* cloudflare can cheat, but if they do random.org will be able to detect it (and it'll be CFs word against random.org)
* oraclize can cheat, but it's semi-detectable (there's no tooling offered to detect it, but it's checkable, and oraclize has plausible deniability)


It is centralized by every meaningful definition. It uses a decentralized contract, to communicate with a centralized oraclize server, which sends a message through a centralized CDN (cloudflare) to communicate with a centralized random number generator (api.random.org).


AFAICT this isn't even a serious project, some low-hanging fruit like checking api.random.org's signature is not checked (which would remove the possibility of cloudflare being able to cheat). They also are buying reddit upvotes for 0.006 BTC each, and a bunch of "press releases" to promote the ICO.

Good luck, I guess.

There is none, gamblingbad is just trolling. He has full access to his funds. His ip address was banned for being obnoxious (see: my previous posts), so then he thought it would be funny to login with a VPN (which is fine) and deposit ~0.1 bitcoin (*after* he was banned). And is now complaining he can't access his funds. But the truth is he has been on his account, his account is not locked, and he's free to withdraw when ever he wants. He hasn't even followed the procedure to get his primary ip unbanned.

Since I have better things to do with my time than deal with him, if he continues to spread lies I will leave his bitcointalk account negative trust 

They are also buying reddit up votes to make it look like they have more community backing than they really do:

See:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1668439.msg16751764#msg16751764
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdk8I_C6iu8kk8DMZfIp6N0QLhbg3yb-tFPdfkZvkuVyoMuCw/viewform?c=0&w=1



What could possibly go wrong?

This isn't true. You were warned several times, given several short warning-mutes (of a minute or two), then when finally when given a longer mute immediately a new troll account "gamblingbad2" (?) which, suprise, suprise uses the same same ip address as you. And then when that was muted, more appeared. After which finally the whole ip address was just blocked.

Looking back, perhaps that was a mistake. As at least when you troll on bustabit directly, instead of here -- you're not getting paid by a sign campaign to do so ;d



You won a small amount of money almost two weeks ago. You had no difficulty withdrawing it. I didn't even bother looking at your game history, as it's it's completely irrelevant. But if anything, I prefer people who are up -- as I know they have money that they might be tempted to return to the site.



For anyone reading, I'm going to try my best to avoid replying to gamblingbad's future post, even if it requires I leave some unfounded accusations unchallenged. He hasn't even requested his ip to be unbanned and is just doing a pretty good job of trolling me, and I'd like to do better things than wasting more time with him  

No, I don't lock people out of their money ever.

 When people are being overly abusive (ips associated with dos' on the server, or using multiple accounts to spam/troll/circumvent chat mutes) they get added to a ban list (which you can get off). Accounts themselves are never banned, but they do get muted.

rofl, nicely played. Yes you're up. But you weren't banned for winning, you were banned for trolling. And it's extremely rare I even need to do that, it's only when people abuse the system by creating multiple accounts to circumvent their chat mutes. Unfortunately having a >0 net profit isn't a free pass

And you are no way restricted from having access to any of your money  

I got to hand it to you, you're doing a reasonably effective job at trolling.   I'd normally like to ignore it, but I feel obliged to point out that no one has ever or will ever be banned for winning. That wouldn't make much sense.

Probably some time after you follow the instructions on the ip banned page to get unbanned.


FWIW I didn't even realize it was you trolling on alt accounts, I had actually assumed it was someone impersonating you to make you look bad. I guess I should've known better

I have =)



Sure, I'm merely asking some questions which you aren't giving a straight answer to =)


This I have no doubt


Because you have been ignoring my questions for days, which make me believe you are hiding something I would think "blockchain nerds" like yourselves, would be happy to discuss things on a technical level



Sure, I'd be happy to keep it here if you reply to me here.


However, AFAICT your contract never actually checks the "requestsLeft" field or the ids. Am I wrong? You also provide no tooling to check if any are skipped. Furthermore, this does not provide protection against oraclize making 2 or more requests at the same time, and re-arranging them. I would assume a properly designed contract would have an explicit checks for the id that it expects, and only accept a result that matches the one it expects?

Furthermore, using a service like random.org seems backwards, because there is absolutely no guarantee they're giving you a fair result. Contrast this provably fair bitcoin gambling services, where a cryptographic proof exists that the number was fair.


Why do you verify the TLS, when api.random.org actually provides its *own* signature. Checking the api.random.org signature seems to be the correct thing to do, not the TLS one. By verifying the TLS signature instead of the api.random.org one, it just introduces more opportunities for a party to cheat (notably: cloudflare, which the requests are going though).


Well, then it's not really provably fair as a player/investor has no way to distinguish being cheated with "http request failure"


Again this is nonsense. You have 1 decentralized part (ethereum contract) and 3 centralized single-points-of-failure (orclize, cloudflare, random.org). Players have significant less protections than playing at a current bitcoin gambling site, with a better user experience. I fail to see a single*advantage that your site offers a player, other than affording you the possibility of getting rich with an ICO

Assuming that this bid is for the vdice.io ICO, I would suggest that the bid gets blocked. From what I gather, they are seeking a ~10M USD worth ICO, based on having a fully decentralized and trustless ethereum gambling game. From what I can gather reading the contract code, it is neither: trustless, decentralized or even provably fair.  I have been asking for the last couple days on reddit and here to discuss my concerns, and the serious response I've been able to get is:



and



I do not wish to jump to conclusions and accuse them of being scammers. But if they are unwilling to engage in a reasonable discussion, while asking for so much money -- I do not think they should be allowed to advertise 

Huh? You're the one citing figures:

 Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But I can tell you, as someone who's been in the bitcoin gambling industry a while now, and currently running one of the most popular sites -- that this is nonsense.



Ok, it very well might be. Can you explain why?

There's already a thread for it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1646783.0  in which you guys have been avoiding answering my technical concerns (see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1646783.msg16764426#msg16764426 )


Also who wrote your "business plan"?  The executive summary looks like it was hacked together in a few minutes:


And is hilariously wrong. Not even close to 50% of all bitcoin transactions are gambling (I would probably know, I suspect in the last month my gambling site did the most volume of any bitcoin gambling site), and vDice relies on 3 different centralized services, all being single points of failures. Not particularly decentralized?


Anyway, good luck on your 10M USD () crowdsale!

The reason I don't play at BaB is not because I can look up the outcomes, it's because I'm 100% of the bankroll. That means no matter how much I lose or win, I will lose or win exactly 0. This would serve no purpose other than to inflate stats (and mess with the bonus pool), so I consider it improper.


However, in MP's position I don't see anything wrong with them gambling on the site, as the wins and loses would be real and serve more than stats-inflation purposes.  The truth is, if they were going to cheat they would just cheat (and use different accounts).

I actually remember once on JD dooglus gambling, but (my memory might be wrong on this) to reassure investors he told everyone exactly how he's going to gamble (a bet low, martingale sequence until he got to X or busted Y?) and got users to call out the digits in chat he would use as his client seed. (or something like that). It's not the most robust way to do it, but I don't recall anyone had any issues with it.

I left betcoin.ag trust with a link to this thread so they find it. Could you please confirm if the information here is indeed accurate?