Sorry, just a stupid stupid DoS. They found a way to tickle the system into using too much memory and cause the machine to start swapping and slow down to the point of not being able to serve requests. Got it rebooted, and will have a fix out in a few minutes.

We use bitcoin's dynamic fee estimation logic to decide how much transaction fees to actually use. This means it greatly varies depending on a) How many inputs it sources  and b) How much block contention there is.   I've seen it use fees from anywhere between 20 bits  and 1600 bits (when we were getting spammed with dust). To make it simple for users, I just charge a static, predictable 100 bit withdrawal fee, regardless of what the mining fees actually are.

I don't think it's fair for app developers if I just leave it running idle if I am able to find a new owner who had more time for it. Also, it's a huge liability to just leave unattended (e.g. Just today, I had to do a security update for libpng buffer overflow, which could potentially haven exploited by a hacker with the thumbnail uploading).

All software and projects are included (including socketpot).

It does not however include the Costa Rican company (I like the protection it provides, and would prefer to keep it to run bustabit and pevpot under that entity), but if someone was willing to pay an extra ~$2k USD (the cost of me setting up a new company) + the legal fees of transferring it, I would be happy with transferring it. Or could come to some arrangement where bustabit/pevpot continue to run under that entity.




My hard-costs are about ~450 USD a month in hosting. If I tried, I could probably knock that down considerably, but as it stands most of that goes to high quality database hosting I run it with a beefy and replicated setup (even losing a few minutes worth of data, could be horrific)


MoneyPot has only directly made about 35 BTC from commissions. (Although I personally made another 56 BTC on the original 100 BTC I seeded the bankroll with). Throughout most of MoneyPot's existence I've been waiving commissions (including right this moment) to either help developers or investors. Honestly, commissions have made relation between developers and investors very tricky. On one hand there's sites like JustDice which offers (amortized) 90% of the house edge to investors. And there's other sites like PrimeDice which offers (amortized) 100% of the house edge to the owners. So I'm in a tricky situation where often app developers look at a site like PrimeDice and complain about not making a higher cut, whilst at the same time investors look at a site like JustDice and complain about making too low of a cut.

My general solution for this has typically been to waive commissions, especially after big events (e.g. BetterBets got hacked, so I waived app commissions for a while). I've been fortunate to have a pretty decent source of income from bustabit (~50 btc/month) and always held a >= 20% stake in MoneyPot's bankroll, so I've had the luxury of delaying the question of the best way to monetize it.

Probably the nicest thing about owning the site, is that you have no counter-party risk (which is probably the biggest reason to not invest in bankrolls). So you're able to own a large percent of the bankroll without too much worry. With a 10% fee on investor profits, you can use that to own more-and-more of it.



Sorry, I'm really just looking to free up time.

I've decided to put MoneyPot.com up for auction, full details are here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1249919.0

Note to players/casinos: Any change of ownership, or event that would have any impact or risks will be clearly announced significantly in advance.

Users balances, logs, ip addresses, deposit and withdrawal history will **NOT** be included in this sale

Just decided to cross-post it here, as for anyone looking for a much larger purchase:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1249919.new#new

Note to players/casinos: Any change of ownership, or event that would have any impact or risks will be clearly announced significantly in advance.

Users balances, logs, ip addresses, deposit and withdrawal history will **NOT** be included in this sale



--
For those not familiar with the bitcoin gambling scene, MoneyPot.com is quite a popular bitcoin gambling wallet and service. It provides an API for casinos to run their own service, allows players to transfer money between casinos and provides a unified bankroll for investors. I started first working on it over a year ago, launching it in March this year.


The amount of workload I've had recently has become a bit unmanagable ( both in bitcoin gambling, and out of it), and I'm looking to lighten my workload up as much as possible by selling moneypot.com (And am not working on or for a competitor/successor of MoneyPot).


Furthermore, as MoneyPot accepts 3rd party bankroll investments, it is currently has attraced over 630 BTC of other peoples money, which could make this property very attractive to a scammer. As such, I am not willing to sell to a completely anonymous person.

All source code (node.js/postgres) and intellectual property rights are included. The domain moneypot.com has been in continuous use for bitcoin gambling, since July 2014 so it's well ranked and in itself has fielded offers of $10k USD

I am also willing to assist in migration of the site to the new owner to help make it a seemless transition.

As everyone loves charts:

Wagering statistics:

(Note: MoneyPot itself has made a bit over 35 BTC through comissions and cold deposit fees. I've also held >= 20% of the bankroll)


User growth (proper registration, not instant-account creation):



Auction Format

This will be a silent auction, terminating at midnight of 31st of November GMT. All offers need to be either PMd to me here, or emailed to ryan@moneypot.com  accompanied with a signed message showing you have enough money to make a serious bid.  Minimium bid is 50 BTC. I reserve the right to reject any and all bids. More than just the bid amount, I am especially interested in some of the soft qualities (who you are, what skills you have, what your plans are), and very-well might pick the bidder who didn't actually bid the most. =)

Payment method is bitcoin only (preferably an escrowed 2-3 multisig transfer).


Good luck! I look forward to hearing from you

A bit of an update:



So you'll see we've taken ~43k BTC in wager, given app developers ~216 BTC in commissions and investors almost ~200 BTC!

Updated wager/profit chart:



Apparently 700 is a lucky number for players!

DiceBitco.in


But the management and casino style were completely different, I highly doubt they're related. DiceBitco.in was run in quite similar style as JD catering for investors and big whales. DaDice seems to have taken a more social approach, and seem to primarily target fauceters and the masses.

No, it's for your record keeping purposes only =)

(We have saved it in our database, and will look it up if you win)

Thanks Dooglus, I've sent 0.1 BTC to your sponsor ad in appreciate for the help.




I think that's going to be out of scope for the provably fair (or maybe I'll add to the FAQ) but if you want to verify you can add this:


to a bip32 wallet, and the sponsor contribution will be 90% of the amount received during the previous round.

Our first video review:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dvbRH2P5j0&t=6m10s !

Whole bunch of improvements and fixes pushed out, including the finalized new provably fair which should now be robust against miners who withhold blocks or withhold transactions =)

https://www.pevpot.com/provably-fair



Criticism encouraged, and before the actual draw I'll be releasing an independently runnable tool that gives you the draw and winner results =)

https://www.pevpot.com/registrations/7182f4d2-f26f-4400-976c-7b546977763a

If the 0.1 wins (tx aa02a98b2dada8c3e3f5cf1ccc7a2f0ea1cc2cfaecc4e3be4f8df51a92505cb8) you'll get your prize automatically sent to you without further action required. Good luck!

!! Wow, I never noticed. Major brainfart on my part.



I had hard-coded a mock value in early development, and forgot forgot to replace it with the proper value. With next push, that will be fixed.  

As thanks for pointing that out, I'll give you 0.1 BTC in tickets. What address would you like it to go to, if you win it?  


 

Bitcoin block number 1233000



(BTW, I really appreciate all these questions as they help me understand what's not clear about the site to improve it. I got a lot of work cut out for me )

Thanks everyone for their input on how to best mitigate the big-miner-withholding attacks, and think I've come to a pretty good solution:


The draws ends on xxxx000 blocks, but we wait until the subsequent xxxxx006 block to use the hash for the draw. With the xxxxx006 block hash, we apply the following time-wasting function:


PBKDF2 set with:
  hash-function:  sha256
  password: the xxxx006 hex-encoded block hash
  salt:  'pevpot'
  iterations: 5,000,000,000
  output:  256 bits

(Code will be provided for this, included some that you can run in the browser in javascript).

The output of this function will then be modulod by the amount of non-dust satoshis sent to the address during the draw. Transactions sorted by their txid, and then the Nth satoshi pick.


I'm updating the provably fair and the code now =)

Awesome, thanks for playing! Yeah, actually the register thing is already working, just the page is just so ugly that I didn't publish it. I'll release it with the next update =)

So I think I have the parameters for the draw.

So I'm looking at using PBKDF2. It seems well studied, nice and simple with some already some highly optimized implementations out there and available in pretty much every environment.

PBKDF2 is defined as PBKDF2(PRF, Password, Salt, iterations, dkLen) which I'll use as PBKDF2('sha256', BLOCK_HASH, 'pevpot', 10000000000, 32)

The fastest implementation I could find was openssl, which when compiled with -O3 took about 2h47m to run. With the fastest virtual machine I could get my hands on (c4.8xlarge), I got it running in about 2h1m.


So this should also solve the problem of a miner creating a giant private transaction (and only releasing it if they mine the correct block), as it would mean that *if* a miner does solve for a block that includes their "private transaction" it would incur an **additional** two hours of validation time. A miner could optimistically assume the block wins the lottery and (privately) mine on top of it, but it'd be taking a huge bet that in two hours the network hasn't caught up or surpassed it.