The site owner was bragging on bustabit about it being a scam and fooling people into depositing. However, he's had a change of heart and decided to repay people he scammed in exchange for me removing his trust, so if he does indeed repay people I will change my trust to neutral in exchange.


(And if you lost money to this scam, make sure to send me the txid and amount -- so I can make sure you get paid back before I remove my neg trust)

It's not ideal what I'm doing, but I'd like to see everyone who lost money to him get it back -- and I like to think the OP has learnt his lesson, and won't scam in the future.

If anyone's been scammed by this site (or Alanay) please send me the txid and amount. I've made an offer to change my negative trust to neutral for the OP if he returns all the money.


--

(On a site note, I like how the above two betcoin sig promotors don't both reading the guys trust or comments. Signature campaigns have made the forum such an active place!)

You've done a good job at keeping expenses down, well done. But as potential investor, I wonder how much runway you guys still have left? Do you release cash on hand information, or something?


I would be really careful about this. Looking at majestic.com/ahrefs.com report, it seems like they're just shoveling a lot of low quality spam backlinks at you. You're throwing a lot of money at them for this (average ~$1k/month?), and it has a huge potential to backfire (google isn't as stupid as it used to be) or produce no results. If that happens, you have the mess to clean up and they will still have your money.

FWIW I don't think SEO is that important in this industry -- I mean, my casino done ~42.5k BTC volume in the last 30 days with virtually zero traffic from search engines (except direct matches on "bustabit" or the like). Although, perhaps I'm missing out from the fountains of free money, but if I was in your situation, I'd be focusing a lot more on design and differentiation.  

I think there's an idea is when you "bust" your bonus, it's over. You can never lose. Your worst case is making 0 btc profit, but you can make money from the bonus, ergo the EV needs to be >0

Sure, that's correct. I mispoke about max profit, it's more related to the max bet, but the logic still is sound. Block discarding (throwing away 12.5 (+ fees) btc) is often the economical choice, if the bet is big enough and you're a big enough miner. Especially so in low-payout bets.

Maybe the idea of unbounded risk for 0 EV is appealing? AKA you're a gambler, and this is a cost-effective way to gamble? No idea


PevPot had 0EV gambling (actually positive EV) and was theoretically a sustainable business because it had no house risk (it was totally pvp) and the extra EV was from advertisers buying ads on the site). I guess that *might* work, but gamblers don't seem to care that much, they just want a good gambling experience.


Anyway, investing money in bitcoinbetting.website sounds like a horrible idea, even if you were doing it for gambling purposes. The whole point of investors is that you can offer bigger max wins, but as soon as bitcoinbetting.website max-win is > ~13 BTC, now miners can actually start to cheat on the website, and undetectably rip you off. The only thing that makes the site reasonably secure, is the prizes are small

Maybe my crappy diagram will help make it easier to understand:




The blue curve is controlled by your playing strategy. The higher variance it is, the flatter it is. The lower variance it is, the steeper it is.  So as you can see in this example, the flatter the probability distribution is, the more of the curve contributes to our expected value.


So perhaps the ideal way to maximize our EV is to do a single bet at 100000000000000000000000000x multiplier, and then if we win (slightly less than 1 in that big number) we can easily satisfy our play-through requirements like nothing.


Now would mean, the EV of bonus is always  0.9 btc *regardless* of play through requirements. (Of course no casino lets you bet at an arbitrary payout, though. So the problem needs to be more constrained )

^ Disregard my answer. I believe the question is not solvable with the information you gave. My logic was based upon someone betting with 50-50 odds of winning (e.g. 0.8x multiplier) and always betting MIN(playerBalance, amountRequiredToHitWageringReq), however now that I dig deeper it appears that the EV changes depending how the player bets. (Or that is wrong, which would also make my original answer wrong). So either way, I was wrong



It's very counter-intuitive, but I believe the riskier bets you take, the higher your EV will actually be.

For instance, imagine you have to wager 100 BTC @ 10% house edge. The normal expected value of doing that is -10 BTC, and the less-risky bets you make, the closer your actual result will be to the expected value. But in this case, we only have 1 BTC to wager with, so the less risky bets we do, the closer we are to certain doom (busting our 1 BTC). e.g. If we attempting to hitting the wagering requirement by doing a million tiny bets, the variance would be so small that we would always bust, and we would have 0 EV.


But if we make some extremely risky bets, our variance is huge. And the benefit in this case, is our worst result is making 0 money. e.g. our EV is actually the   so its our goal to increase the variance.




Disclaimer: it's late, wait for someone like blockage or dooglus to answer this, as they're a lot more competent than me.

Very interesting question!


I think it's 0.563 bitcoin.



Yeah, I think you're doing it wrong. But it's late, I've had a few beers and I'm sleepy so I very well might be wrong. I'll try provide some working tomorrow if you're interested.

For what it's worth I get:
1x roll over: 0.90 BTC
10x roll over:  0.563 BTC
100x roll over: 0.315 BTC
1000x roll over: 0.196 BTC


Which seems strangely high.  But I guess the important thing to note, is a player can never lose money, as your worst case is losing the free 1 BTC bonus. So the EV is the average of a bunch of weighted >= 0 numbers.

 In a real casino, it might be a 100% deposit bonus ... which means although you get some "free" money you have to gamble like crazy to the point you risk your actual deposit (and can have a loss), to the point that the "free" bonus money might cause you more harm than good!

First of all, I think what you're doing is incredibly cool from a technology point of view. I think it's awesome you guys are pushing forward on that front.


That's really not remotely comparable. Let's say I make a copy of bitcoin, it has little to no for anyone because it's not bitcoin or interoperable with it and doesn't enjoy the network effect, blah blah blah.

But now let's take a smart contract gambling service, let's say I duplicate it and change your 1.9% house edge to 0.1%. Which I can sanely do, because I don't have any development or operating costs. Now from a users point of view, they are two services which have the exact reputation and trust required (same code) but one means they will lose 19 times less on average. I personally would gamble on the 0.1% edge on, I guess you're counting on people like me being in the minority?

Trustless gambling can be done in bitcoin as well, although it's kind of awkward. I have worked through the logic of how to do a trustless 50% win, 50% lose bet (with arbitrary payouts) on a napkin, and believe it would work


If so, it doesn't sound like a future I'd want to invest in. If it's trustless, there's no need for reputation, and if it's a smart contract it can be trivially duplicated.

I however think the biggest issues are going to be UX ones, it's going to be hard to complete with the sleek experience offered by gambling sites when you are interacting with a smart contract, and waiting on blocks (even if they're every 10 seconds)

Actually, Curacao does have gaming licenses and a control board. If you get one from Curacao there are banks, payment processing companies and advertisers who will actually deal with you. Which they won't if you just have a Costa Rican company. (I've been speaking with a lawyer about getting one, actually).

As a player though, I think it's pretty irrelevant if a casino has a gaming licensing or where it's from. At best, they're just "proof of money spent" which probably means there's less fly-by-night operators from the more expensive jurisdictions. But most of the protections they supposedly offer players (e.g. RNG certification) and just false senses of security

Nice work, that's correct. I've sent it ( e81784831e1ccedcd8c31bcb1cc7711d84c157c59dc4bfbb0a56884d99fecc8b )

Wow, we've finally hit  500k bitcoin wagered!!


As a fun prize, first person who can tell me how many nyan games there has been, since we've been provably fair will get 0.1 btc. (Please don't guess, show exactly how you figured it out)

I suspect the most important factor is trust. People will happily bet thousands of dollars on a pretty much anything as long as they can trust it's fair and if they win they'll get paid.


People have been gambling for thousands of years, I really don't see that changing.

Somewhere that is provably fair (I'm a paranoid guy, I like to verify the results myself) and someone where I know I won't get screwed.

I run my own casino, and have more variance in my life than I would like -- so I haven't gambled in quite a while now. But if I were to gamble right now, I'd probably do so on PrimeDice or BitDice.me. There's nothing particularly special about those sites, but they've been around a while and processed a lot of bets/players/wins and  I've never heard any (legitimate) grumblings. There's a lot of other trustworthy sites out there too, but I haven't really played enough (or at all) to make an informed decision. In the end, I don't care that much about the site as long as they fill the basic requirements.

I don't like on-chain games, and they don't seem to be very popular. I don't see that changing, unless possibly the event of the lightning network. But even that's not technically on-chain. They're expensive (paying 2x transaction fees each round) and offer a horrible UX. I would personally never use an on-chain game, unless I was betting a very large amount of money (to make the fees trivial) and offered very significant advantages (preferably: it being totally trustless, which I've figured out is possible to do in bitcoin's scripting language) or perhaps like luckyb.it where if they robbed me, I would have a public fraud-proof. That's pretty cool too.

Not all casino software is rigged, but there is a lot of rigged stuff out there. The only way you're ever going to know for sure is if you only play on provably fair casinos and verify your bets.

Things RNG certifications are absolute jokes, some of them are done by companies that give actively harmful information. I saw one recommending casinos use mersenne twister for random number generation, which is pretty high in the list of stupidest things a casino could possible do. And no certification is going to protect you from a malicious casino.

Do yourself a favor, and if it's not provably fair -- don't play there. The only exception to this rule I would make, is p2p games have legitimate technical reasons to not be provably fair.

There's no such thing as a "losing seed", as you're able to change if you want to bet high or low and what odds. Anyway, just pick your own client seed after seeing the server seed hash, and you have nothing to fear.

Yup. Although you'd have to also adjust your multiplier to 1.98x or less to make sure there's not a gap in the ranges

Sounds like nonsense. However, if they're generating client-seeds on the server, they should move the generation to the client (and only after the server has sent the client the server-seed-hash). As the name suggests, client seeds are best generated by the client.

But regardless you can avoid all the risks by setting your own client seed, which you should be doing anyway. Or even better, if you really think they've found certain server seed + client seed such that it's distribution is "favorable" for the house, that means it would be exploitable and you could take advantage of them. e.g. If the server wanted seeds that made 2x bets lose, unless they knew which direction you were betting they would have to brute force a combination that had a  higher distribution of outcomes between 49.5 and 50.5. However that would be vulnerable to someone who was betting 1.96x to take advantage of that. Or if they found a seed combination that had a higher distribution of lows, you could instead bet high. etc. There's no way you could use that to cheat players, without subjecting yourself to a similar amount of risk, which no casino is going to want to do.


My guess though, is you're that lame extortionist that wants money to stop saying nonsense? If so, you should realize that no business is ever going to pay you, no matter how much trouble you cause if for no other reason then they would be opening themselves up to more dipshits

Ohhhh touché, you're absolutely right. I am true moron. Mixing up the request and a response is a rather humiliating new low for me.

Anyway, that makes 100x more sense, and explains why they're doing it: so they can have it saved across all sessions (even though it's not ideal).  BTW well done on the monumental effort you put in that whole investigation/write-up.