Wow, I missed the whole drama. Pretty unbelievable they'd destroy their reputation over 102 btc. According to their stats they have 113067 BTC wagered, which should have made them ~2148.273 BTC (based on a 1.9% house edge, I believe?).

Rather short-sited, especially in the sense most gamblers who win a lot of money tend to be repeat customers  

I find this really hard to believe. You already have the means to check if someone exceeded the max bet (which you use for taking all their money). As a coder, who's worked on a handful of gambling sites -- I don't believe it's going to take more than a handful of lines of code to enforce the condition on the server in real-time, and spit out an ugly error. This is something that should've been from day 1 anyway.

And if it *really* was so hard to enforce a max-bet limit, if you guys had an iota of ethics you would choose between:

a) Giving players a free pass, until you finished the enforcement implementation
b) Revert all bets that exceeded the max-bet be them win or loses, and tell the player about the rule


But instead you've used selective-enforcement to fleece your customers, even for unrelated funds. The scariest part is, I worry that you guys are so damaged as to genuinely believe that it's ok to take all of someones money because they didn't read your terms of service and unknowingly bet too much.

Nice work, Dexon!


The problem with provably fair pvp games, is that they're extremely difficult to actually make provably fair. The way player-vs-house games provably fair works, is the house actually commits to a certain "move" before it could possibly know the players, and then is bound to make that move.


With RPS, the simplest provably fair would be:

Player A makes their move, tells the server the *hash* of their move (obfuscated with a nonce)
Player B makes their move, tells the server the *hash* of their move (obfuscated with a nonce)

Once the server has recorded the hash of both players moves, it then would send it to both players (So they can also check, making it provably fair). Once both players know their opponent hash, they send to the server their own move and nonce (for the server and other player to check).


The flow with this is quite straight forward, except it relies on one thing: If a player can't produce the move (and nonce) that leads the hash, they would need to be forfeited and lose. This might pose a problem with disconnections, and what not. There's a lot of edge cases, and to make it truly provably fair does require a lot of work, and unfortunately a reduced UX [1] due to the whole "lose on disconnection, or failure to produce the result" rule



[1] This could be reduced by having a "trust the server" tick box, which means the client trusts the server and immediately sends the move to the server, that way in the case of disconnect the server would be able to play the move in the persons absence.

Somewhat of a milestone:



Taken from: https://thebitcoinstrip.com/leaderboard.html


Let's see how long we can hold this place!  


_{Edit: Maybe I'm celebrating a little too early. Seems like thebitcoinstrip.com has had some stats collection errors in the past week, and is clearly underestimating PD wagers? (it shows only 224k BTC wagered?)}

On a side note, this strikes me as rather odd:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/rmczv2tqcr196vz/6rnjrhef.png

(Posted in the middle and at the bottom of your post, promoting those casinos. Almost seems like you're getting some sort of incentive to push them?)

I don't understand how you could possibly rank SatoshiDice #1. It has the worst odds of any popular gambling/dice site I'm aware of (but you rank it better than BetKing's or PrimeDice's which is almost 50% less) , and has struggled the last few years with unresponsive support. Other casino listing have moved them to "don't play at".


And on a butt-hurt level, I wonder why you also don't rank bustabit in the top 15, when of all the sites I can see you list it has the best odds, one of the most active communities, and #2 in your own leaderboard by wagered. (Ok, it looks like shit. But I'd assume it would still rank )


Edit: I see you're using a satoshidice affiliate link, which seems to have the most generous affiliate benefits. While sites like bustabit have none. *sigh*

What is it that makes you think you're interviewing hufflepuff? As stunna has made some of his bitcoin addresses publicly known, were you able to get him to sign a message from one of them to know you're communicating with the right person?


Also the interview is effectively a hit-piece against PrimeDice -- which is absolutely fine to publish if hufflepuff really did say those things. However, I would hope you'd be absolutely 100% sure you're talking to the right person before you publish something like that.

I guess as the saying goes, if you have lemons you might as well make lemonade. While I do agree that certainly every successful business will attract haters, I would avoid doing business with any of them that are proud of it. As I know if I had any legitimate grievance, it'd be pretty easily to just dismiss me as a hater.

And for what it's worth, companies that have a track record of being proud of being hated haven't lasted very long. I remember dadice continually boasting that the haters and controversy was great for it's business. It even stole money from some of its fauceting players to fan the flames of controversy. While maybe it temporarily increased their hit count, they didn't last very long..

Huh, our popularity isn't dropping at all. In fact, I believe in the last 30 days we've had more volume than any other bitcoin gambling site (including primedice). You can see our stats:
http://thebitcoinstrip.com/bustabit-stats.html

(Full disclaimer: bustabit is currently doing a lot more volume than normal, as we've lost a lot of money to lucky player who turn that money over )


Anyway, promotions are good, and I'd do them if I have more time and energy. But I do prefer to attract and keep players by offering a low house edge, and good customer support

I think it's pretty understandable for someone to be upset and leave retaliatory feedback for getting negative repped for defending MLM as a concept. (Although personally, I think MLM schemes are cancerous).  But if he's the same xtraelv from other sites like ebay, it's would also kind of invalidate the whole sockpuppet accusation too.

It's kind of amusing how pretty much every reply that was written by someone who didn't bother to read the thread (and realize the canonical answer has been posted multiple times), was made by someone who gets paid to post via signature campaigns. 

Man, that really sucks. I don't think they're getting any traffic any more from the bitcoin community as it seems here and reddit they're widely known as a scam site. If you haven't already, I'd leave your story on askgamblers.com and try file a dispute there. They are miraculously highly rated there, so I suspect that makes the vast bulk of their traffic

I have trouble believing that a rational and impartial person could believe that it's ok for a casino to knowingly accept a bet that is "against the rules" which then they can use down the line to take the entire sum of a players money (even unrelated winnings and balance). The reality is players are never going to read every single dot point of the ToS, and if your UI allows them to make a certain type of bet, they will make that type of bet. None of the players are trying to defraud or do anything wrong, they're just trying to gamble and accidentally break these rules.

And if betting more than X is such a grave violation of the rules that it demands a player be punished by having their entire balance taken -- don't you think that bitstarz should add code to prevent players doing it? All this pain could simply be prevented with just two lines of code and it would never happen again. It doesn't even need to be handled gracefully, the server should just not process it.

But I think the real reason is pretty apparent, bitstarz wants players to break the rules so that down the line if they win money can they confiscate all the players money and cite their ToS.

I think it's a lot more than unprofessional, it's unethical and scammy.

For instance, my site rules say you can't bet more than 1 BTC. I'm not comfortable with the variance of bets bigger than that (since our edge is so low). So what do we do? We don't allow people to make the bet. If you try, the server will reject the bet (regardless if it would've been a win or loss).  If it were Bitstarz they'd allow people to make the bet and then if person happened to win too much over the coarse of playing, check their history for rule violations and use that an excuse to seize the whole account (even if it wasn't material to the win)


As they've done it multiple times, and repeatedly defend that behavior -- I guess they've made a business decision to be a scammy casino.

Heh, yeah. That was a bit of a clusterfuck. The user unknowingly bet more than they were "allowed" to according to the ToS, which the site allowed and then only when they won (from different bets) and wanted to cash out BitStarz decided to confiscate the entire balance, which I think everyone agree is on the dark side of a grey area. Just because you have a gotcha in your ToS doesn't make it ok. It's still a scam imo.

That actually ended up working ok for the user, as betking.io payed them the amount of money BitStarz scammed and then BitStarz just disappeared from here (I guess they get most of their traffic from AskGamblers)

So these are the facts:

You used a card with them, a year ago. They got the funds. They were never charged backed. And now, you have deposited with bitcoin, won bitcoin and they are denying your withdraw until you can give proof about the card you used a year ago?




So they're basically saying if you created a brand new account, they would've treated you better than if you used an account with them with history?

Ouch, that's shady. Based on your side of the story, it sounds a lot like they're going out of their way to find an excuse to avoid paying out a few bitcoin to what is obviously a legitimate and loyal customer. Although based on your post history of spamming ref links, I'll take it with a grain of salt 

Anyway, if what you're saying is true just try make a big of a stink in all public forums that you can, and you might also want to your story to their trust feedback:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=307265

and promise to remove it if they give you back your money. You'll almost certainly get your money, and they can save face by saying it was KYC policy or something and something, and find someone a bit less vocal to rip off.

There's extremely little house edge at 1.01x  (almost zero, in fact). However, just be very careful because unless there's a significant amount of people not cashing out (i.e. aiming at high multipliers) it means you're going to be bleeding a lot due to the bonuses. (And if there's a lot of people not cashing out, 1.01x can be quite profitable)

rofl, nice catch. Fixed

Even if blockchain.info does allow your gambling site, I'd strongly recommend against using it
a) They can change your their mind at any point, leaving you scrambling for a solution
b) They have *horrible* uptime, you can always identify sites that use blockchain.info by how often they're bitcoin system is down
c) You have to trust a third party with one of the more critical parts of your site


And FWIW last time I saw blockchain.info used for a hot wallet it didn't work out anyway, the amount of unspent outputs would always converge to 1 and not allow spending unconfirmed outputs. (This might have changed, that was over a year ago)


Instead I'd recommend setting up your own copy of bitcoin core, and querying it over rpc. I currently have one setup in pruning mode on a small server, and doesn't use an excessive amount of resources and works pretty well.

Pretty cool thread! I hope you keep updating it, it'll be fun to watch over the next months (and hopefully years)