I don't think that's fair. They're both risks, just of very different sorts. Personally I feel like the investors are getting it pretty good as they don't have to also put their time and energy into it. But if you feel like the app developers are getting a great deal, I'd invite you to be part of it. Or if you feel like investors are getting a shit deal, I'd encourage you to divest or not invest at all.

Anyway, speaking of investor risks, it looks like gamblers have won around ~28 BTC more than expected. This is money that would normally be in investors pockets. This is the very risk that investors are being paid for =).  So if you really want to compare, I think it's more fair to compare 38.4 BTC (expected investor earnings) against the ~93.5 BTC (guaranteed app earnings) and say based on current betting patterns apps are making ~3x as much as investors.


Also, unfortunately, I don't think anyone has really made much money off the platform yet (be it me, investors or apps), and I think it'll be a lot more productive growing our community, getting our volume up and bringing people from fiat gambling, then getting into bitch fights over the scraps.

Bustabit is pretty unique in its low margin, but it's a big reason for why it's so popular. A lot of players have commented that at times it can even be hard to lose money. The market leader (PrimeDice) for instance typically does 3 or 4 times our volume, and has an EV about 3 times ours for the same amount of volume. Some of the other big sites use an investor model where investors take much of the risk (and reward) which allows the site to offer large wagers, without any risk to itself. However this generally means you're holding a huge liability (all the other peoples money) and only take a small cut of the profits (typical is 10 to 20%). (I actually implemented this model on my other site, MoneyPot, but have come to think it was a bad idea).



All our figures are totally open (see thebitcoinstrip for instance), but many gambling places don't have such open figures which makes it hard to compare. I do however believe we're probably the second most wagered at bitcoin casino, but a drop in the bucket compared to some of the fiat beasts.



We control our risk by limiting the max amount you can win per game (after which point, you automatically get cashed out and can enter the next round) and maximum bet per game (we only allow 1 BTC/round, to force whales to play where a house edge starts forming).  

I often get asked about what is the "best" casino investment available. And last time I compared the stats alone, it seemed like bitdice.me was hands down a better investment. But I do kind of feel that people who want to know the best investment are asking the wrong question, the better question is "Is this investment worth it?" and if it is, investing only a small fraction of their total investing bankroll. An investor who diversifies over a bunch of good investments will out-perform (as measured by expected bankroll growth) an investor who goes all-in on great investments (...which funnily enough takes us back the kelly).

I think you're on the mark here, and it's the right way to look at it. Depending on the turnover it can go from being a horrible to great investment.

Yeah, this can definitely happen. A whale can lose money, but if they lose less than the EV it's possible investors will be out of pocket. If the whale does their EV (or worse) investors will make a profit. And if the whale wins (like today, someone won 7 BTC on BetterBets) it can do a bit of damage to the investor profit.

It's really a tricky balance of splitting profit between app developers (who do all the work) and investors (who take all the risk). As it stands right now, app developers have made a 93.136 BTC in profits and 9.02 has gone to investors. I'm not sure the split has been so terrible, I just wish we were doing x10 the volume to ease out some of the variance and bring more money to the table =) For the last month or so, MoneyPot has been running with 0 commissions, so our primary source of income has been cold addresses ( https://blog.moneypot.com/cold-addresses/ ) which isn't included in any of the stats (but more than covering hosting costs, at least). So if anyone has coins they need mixed, give us a try  

Nah, looks great! I didn't publish it very widely, so not sure if you've seen (or using it) but there's an API: https://www.moneypot.com/full-stats.json that gets the combined stats in a single hit and also contains a rather interesting field: app_comissions which is the amount of money I've given to apps as risk-free commissions.

There's some information in the FAQ, but the best resource is really just jumping directly to the fair proof. Because to prove it's fair, it has to show how the bust point is generated. See this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=922898.0 for precise, runnable code.


Probability of precisely 1.02x: 0.951464%
Probability of precisely 99.21x: 0.000100%

(So very different)



It's very much not. If you ignore all conflating factors (house edge, floating point maths, bonuses) the probability of it getting to Nx is 1/N.  So it'll get to 2, 50% of the time. It'll get to 10, 10% of the time.  100, 1% of the time.

The reality is there's a slight house edge, a bonus scheme, and some annoying discrete maths involved so it's not as clean. For the dirty reality, the provably-fair / FAQ is a good place to look =)

As a temporary measure, I've added a 0.5 second delay for all bets < 1 bit and a 0.1 second delay for all bets < 10 bits. Bets of 10 bits of greater will go through without any delay at all.

It's a very unideal way of doing it, as I don't actually want to put a delay on someone manually trying out stuff, I just want to cut down on some of the spam we're seeing =)  This will end up being phased out for a more quota-based approach

Bustabit doesn't allow that, as it enforces maximum bets of 1 BTC. Unlike traditional dice sites, we have a floating house edge (0% to 0.99%). So cashing out at 1.02x has very close to 0 house edge which would start to become untenably risky if we allowed unlimited bet sizes. By the time you're trying to cashout at 2x, the house edge is now ~0.5% which at least justifies taking the risk (from the our perspective)

When a player wins, it takes from the bankroll and when a player loses it adds to the bankroll. But the reason for the big discrepancy between the bankroll and total profit, is because the site started with a bankroll (money I put in), and every so often I've withdrawn money for the bankroll to pay for expenses. And if the site needed, I'd put more money into the bankroll (which almost happened once, when the max profit fell below 1 btc).

In effect the bankroll is a sort of soft number that caps my total liability, and is small enough that I can easily prove I hold that amount of money.

Yeah, that was on hell of a crazy ride. The action also encouraged a few other big betters, and at one point I was clocking a 55 BTC 24h/loss. After they (instant) withdrew those profits I was going to try make some promotional posts around the place about it but actually chickened out as I didn't have the stomach for more whale action. It's really no fun watching yourself lose, nor watching some else lose.

On that note, I might make a withdrawal from the bustabit bankroll of 100 btc. Gone too far to lose it now =)


Yeah, something I've been meaning to fix. The stats page makes a rough approximation of the bankroll, and is a little bit off. The exact bankroll is what you see in game  (Get the max profit and divide by 3%)

Hmm, that sounds really strange? Most wallets randomize the output positions (for privacy) of transactions, so any service that expects (or cares) about the position is probably written pretty wrong. My guess is that it's just a coincidence 

Well, looks like the action has drawn to a close with players taking a combined 50 BTC in net profit over the 1633 BTC that was wagered (!!!). I have a feeling we made a few people pretty happy today =)

Definitely not normal, what were you doing when you got that error?

If anyone wants to watch a show, realhavok has made almost +30 BTC in the last hour, and still betting 1 BTC/round

To help clear up some confusion, here's a bit of an in-depth discussion of our privacy-oriented "cold address" feature:

https://blog.moneypot.com/cold-addresses/


(A real must, if depositing from services that don't allow gambling or you just want an additional layer of privacy)

thanks! Glad you like it

After talking more to the guy, it's pretty clear he's just an annoying troll. He doesn't even have an account that's lost money (or if he does, he's keeping it a secret). Probably best to just not give this guy the attention he wants.

Hey app developers, I would like to cut down on a lot of the spam we're seeing. I don't want to be overbearing, but there's some simple things we can do, so I don't need to start aggressively rate-limiting apps.

I'd appreciate if apps could start enforcing a minimum of a 1 bit (1e-6 btc) minimum bet, that way I can go ahead and deprecate satoshi-level bets  (first by put a huge delay on sub-bit bets) and eventually remove it all together.

Also, I'll ask that people respect the server resources and not overly aggressively spam. (e.g. Don't hit /list-bets in a tight loop, when you can use socketpot to have push notifications on bets). When people are auto-betting small amounts (to put in perspective 1 bit is only $0.00023) try put sane delays in place.  Also bets are inherently sequential (each bet, gives you the next provably fair hash to use) so parallelizing this is guaranteed to give errors, put considerable load on our servers for no purpose and make it harder for you to verify the bets.

On a more positive note, we've given out a total of 87.84 BTC in commissions to app developers! Keep it up!

Thanks!

=)

This whole thing doesn't make much sense. If you felt like you were scammed 13 BTC on 5 accounts, why would you wait until you create another account, win 0.16 and then start screaming scam?

If you don't mind, please contact support: https://ww.bustabit.com/support while logged into one of the "5 accounts"  that's say lost more than 2.6 BTC, and I'll be happy to go over the details with you.


Anyway, please excuse me if I don't reply to this thread as I have the distinct feeling you're trolling and I really don't have the time.