Dexon's not an owner of bustabit, but a moderator. And both he and I have asked you to stop spamming there, which I don't think is either unreasonable or childish.

BTW it's got absolutely nothing to do with you being a competitor, it's got to do with you being disruptive and annoying. I've never had a problem with people talking about competitors (including direct clones!), but creating multiple shill accounts and spamming ads is something that I don't think any site allows or will put up with.

The new feature is opt-in, which means on a transaction by transaction basis you explicitly say "I might double-spend this".  So for a bitcoin casino that currently accepts 0-conf transactions, you just need to not opt-in to the ability to double spend, and they will process your transaction exactly as they do now.

My thoughts:

* Provably fair is huge. Why would anyone want to go back to having to trust (and not be sure)? But verifying provably fair is a huge PITA, and almost no one does it. So I think we'll see more automated provably fair checking (e.g. with a browser plugin)

* House edges are going to go down. One of the biggest reasons bustabit gets such huge volumes (i think 2nd, after PD) is just because the house edge is very low. Even if you can't notice it (you really can't) it means you get a shit load more variance, and the same amount of money lasts a lot longer. I have a theory, that if a casino is not bankroll constraint (e.g. can offer the same limits) they'd might make more money with a 0.1% house edge, than a 1% (i.e. they might > x10 their volume). Just a nascent thought though.

* Pure skill games (e.g. chess) will unfortunately never become big in gambling. Even if you can solve the bot problems (which is dubious), just the difference between pro-level and punters will always be too big. And the pro-level people like to make money, not gamble. Skill games with a lot of noise (e.g. poker, or bustabit) will do well though

* We'll see more betting-exchange type stuff

* We'll see some 0-house-edge sites. No sane operator can or will back the other side of bets, but it could be done with efficient match-making, somehow. I guess the site could make money with a commission (e.g. 10% of profits you made) ?


Disclaimer: Don't trust me, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've completely fucked up and misjudged the market twice with dustdice and pevpot

Thanks!


At it's core a block hash is for all intents and purposes a (very big) random number between 0 and <block target>. So all pevpot does is use that to decide who won the lottery. There's some fancy stuff like stretching the block to prevent miners from being able to cheat, but at it's core it's quite nice. The whole point of the blockchain is so we can come to consensus, so with a well-defined lottery procedure, we can unambiguously pick winner.

I think it's pretty cool how pevpot can offer a RTP of >100%  (compared to state lotteries that do 50% or something) but it doesn't offer the instant-feedback that most gamblers want, I think

Sorry about that, I've updated it now. Added some stuff so draw #6 should be much more automated

This would be a question for Dexon, he's the one who wrote and runs the lotto so I'm not entirely sure. If you want, just PM me your username and I'll give you the prize =)

Hey everyone, yeah, sorry bustabit is getting hit by quite an intense DDoS =o (someone wanting 3 BTC lol).

Obviously we aren't going to pay, but might have intermittent downtime while it happens. Now that I'm awake, i'll be able to deal with it a lot better 

I think he's referring to apps who's business model rely on being "featured" to generate traffic.

As for MoneyPot "playing favorites", that's basically the whole point of featured apps. I've looked at apps that seemed new/interesting/cool with app owners that I think users would like to visit. It's probably quite biased, and might be better replaced (or supplemented) with "top X most active MP casinos in the last week" but the energy would be better spent marketing/improving than complaining about someone not giving you free traffic

Some of my thoughts:

* Your use of Math.ceil means if 20 tickets were bought, there's 21 possible outcomes? If the winning ticket is 0 (a 1 in a million), does that mean the house wins the lottery prize?

* You use "timestamp of the receipt" to order tickets, but there's no way (afaict) for you to prove to use this order. Perhaps you're better switch to "blockchain order" or doing what pevpot does, and sort by txid

* What does "first block of 2016" mean? Does it mean the first block in which a miner **says** it was in 2016 (using the timestamp field in the block) or does it mean the first block that you receive in 2016?  The first is vulnerable to a miner lying (only at the cost of block discarding) and the latter is hard for you to prove. Unless you want to go by blockchain.info's "recieve time" or something

* It has a 1% house edge, when pevpot for instance has a negative house edge (and supports forwarding from exchanges/other wallets) too 

Yup, thanks for running this. I got the same result. I'll make payment in the next ~12 hours, assuming no one disputes the result

Just around 10 hours to go to buy tickets (or sponsor next round) 

Hasn't been such a bad time to leave coins idling:

Probably not. Imagine for instance I'm a gambler with a 100 BTC and every day I bet 100 BTC in dice @ 98% chance of winning. I keep doing this until one day I bust the 100. Each day, there's only 98% chance that investors will lose money to me; yet it makes sense for them to accept my bet (it's +EV and kelly compliant). Eventually I'm going to bust my 100 btc, but there's a reasonable (~13.5%) that even after I bust I'll still be at a profit. And it very well could be 6-months before I bust. Or perhaps after 6 months I get get bored of this particular casino, and end up losing it on another. (Or decide to quit gambling all-together)

On bustabit for instance i actually have a player who behaves similar to this: https://www.bustabit.com/user/kapi18wro   (he wins a bitcoin or so each day, and aggressively loss-chases if he's down). So far he's up 41 bitcoin yet each bet he made, made sense for me to back.


I guess the common sense approach works best here: If it was risk-free, why would casinos even want your money?

Just to add to that, here's the profit chart of my other site (bustabit, but doesn't take investors):



which is probably the 2nd most wagered at bitcoin casino (after PD), despite the incredible volume, and obvious trend (from the house edge) the site hasn't made me money in 2 months. If you expect a consistent daily profit, you're going to be very disappointed =)

Yeah, casino investing is frustratingly slow and volatile. I personally wouldn't check profits/loss more often than weekly. Also the biggest mistake you can make is find the "best" place to invest, and put all your money there. Diversification is key.

It's not a national lottery, but pevpot.com is very legit, and all draws are easily verifyable (thanks to it being completely on-chain)

bitcointalk thread

The absolute best strategy possible would be able to turn your expected loss of 1% into around a loss of ~0.7% (but only by reducing the amount you actually wager, for the same sort of sort of style bet you wanted). With a large enough bankroll, you can easily have a high probability of making your desired 1 BTC a day (but it comes with a small probability of losing a much larger amount), making the whole thing -EV, and a good way to lose money.

If you're actually trying to make money, you first need to find things that have the possibility of being +EV. Types of bets I know that have that possibility:

  * Poker
  * PevPot  (mine)
  * Bustabit  (mine)
  * Taking advantage of promotions (esp. by sites that can't do maths, e.g. speeddice affiliate program is ridiculously +EV (until they realize it, and shut it down, possibly with your money))
  * Card games when they don't reshuffle enough (esp. blackjack)
  * Some physical video poker machines with perfect play
  * Sports Betting (Superhitech's suggestion) if you're more accurate than the book maker / market


..and then once you find something +EV, you need to manage your bankroll well enough that you don't get wiped out by bad luck. (Rule of thumb for most style of bets: If you find something +EV 0.1%, never bet more than 0.1% of your bankroll)

There's lot of things that aren't consensus issues, but would be great to have votes on anyway. e.g. Take my earlier idea that in a block-race stakers would randomly select a block (rather than use the first-seen) to minimize the orphan-risk for honest miners who produce big-blocks.  I don't think that's a consensus issue, but seems like it'd be crazy to adopt something without knowing what everyone thought?

(Or another good example is mempool policy in bitcoin (Current vs FSS-BRB, Opt-in RBF, Full RBF) which seems wildly controversial, but with the shilling and censorship around it, it seems impossible to get a feel for support of each)

I don't discount the fact I'm likely missing something. But

As a staker: are you sure I should even bother adding transactions to my block? I mean, the additional money I make for staking a transaction is .. 1% of it's txfees? Hardly seems worth the additional orphan risk? (I guess this can be mitigated by in a block race, by policy you randomly select a block, regardless if it was first seen or not?)


As a sender: If a user is willing to pay a fixed amount for a transaction to be included in a block, it means that if as staker can make 100x as much by accepting a direct payment? So if it ever becomes worth the trouble, the entire fee market is going to move off-chain; probably to centralized services? Already in bitcoin we see some very large mining pools offering prioritization services (which small mining pools can't meaningfuly offer), this seems to have the potential to be 100x worse.

e.g. I can envision a service where you have an account and post a transaction (without tx fees) to it. If they stake the transaction for you, they charge you 50% as much as it would've had to pay on the open network. It would make the staker with the service more money, and would save the sender money, all at the cost of on-network stakers.

For some people who were having trouble connecting, I've issued a new ssl certificate that should hopefully fix that. Also thanks to a patch by kungfuant, the game client is significantly faster.

And in other news, we set a record of having 173 people online at once! (Although the vast majority are idlers)