It's a nice idea, but I'm not really sure why a crypto player would do it. You're selling 900,000 EUR worth of tickets for a chance to win 650,000 EUR prize. While by itself, I'd say despite the huge house edge -- it's probably not terrible -- as you're just buying a bit of fun. However, the part that makes it really unappealing to me is there doesn't appear to be any effort to have a provably fair drawing. Which to me, seems like kind of an easy process: you publish a list of all the tickets, and then take a future bitcoin block hash % ticketNumber to determine the winner.

I'm an idiot. I didn't do any testing, and my script sent money it to itself (whoops, wrong variable...  )  Well, at least the transaction demonstrates that it was easy to create a transaction such that it's hash was a winner.

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/70b9053f46c42ac64db578364850c279fedebda332a498687f0d0cf12acca2b0/

I sent it with crazy low fees, so it didn't propagate very well. Was just a demo =)

I just created a dust transaction to you to prove it works, but seems like you realize that. Please don't return the money, it was just to show you it's easy to abuse =)

You're aware that this doesn't make any sense? You need to use the block hash (that the transaction gets included in), not the "transaction hash" .. as the user can trivially grind transactions until they find a winner and propagate it. That's not nearly as easy to do with block hashes, as it involves throwing away a valid block (which is worth 12.5+ bitcoin).

It's a good idea, but I wouldn't put too much hopes on it. The issue has been brought up repeatedly with AskGamblers and they have consistently sided with casinos, even when it's very obviously extremely predatory. It gives me the impression they don't actually care about players or fairness, and just their affiliate earnings. But definitely doesn't hurt to try.

But the real uphill battle that the OP is going to have is that bitcoincasino.us is not a well known or reputable casino, so they have no real reputation to protect.     But I really hope the OP is successful, casinos that prey on their customers really should just not exist.

Yeah, this is the same trick that bitstarz used to do. It's highly abusive, and something I think most people would agree is pretty much is a scam. (After all, there are trivial software fixes to not allow people to accidentally bet higher than the max-bet).

Unfortunately they don't seem to have a bitcointalk presence, so there's no way I can leave them negative trust or what not. I hate to say it, but your avenues of recourse are going to be very limited. Probably your best bet is to contact every site that links to them (although most of them won't care, as they are happy linking to scam sites/services as long as they get their affiliate money).

You also have the potential for legal remedy, but it's not clear where they are operating from -- your best bet would be talking to a lawyer who specializes in this stuff. You can really go after their domain and hosting, which will force them to defend the case. (Which is pretty much indefensible, as the contract is clearly abusive).  P.S. ignore the vultures like game-protect who go around scamming victims.

I know it's a bit late, but if you gamble in the future -- I'd strongly encourage you to go to well known and reputable casinos. The https://cryptogambling.org/ has a bunch of "Verified operators" who would never pull bullshit like that.

Yup, although a pretty good reminder for everyone to be careful. That program will steal everyones saved passwords in their browser.

Virus Total Reference: https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/0d09c9f73dd9e3847b401b9ab99871fab974e3b4565c698f25c5614183a5a459/detection

You really should close this thread, it's nonsense and detracts from any point you may have. Dean had a winnable jackpot, no one won it and he removed it.  That's not scammy, that's business as usual.

That said, betking.io is probably on it's last legs. The homepage now defaults to an exchange where there are unfilled sell orders for betking's token at 50% of their face-value. If that's not a red-flag that spells trouble, I don't know what is.

I think your maths is slightly off  (should be 0.505^N  not 0.5^N), but retrospective probabilities like that aren't super useful.  i.e. I just  won, lost, lost, won, won, lost, lost, won, won, won, lost -- which is pretty normal -- but if you look at the probability of that specific sequence happening it might be a 1 in a million. But really, you're never going to be able to tell the difference between being unlucky and being cheated by outcomes alone. I highly, highly recommend you invest the time in learning how to verify your games. It's a bit annoying and a bit confusing -- but once you can, you'll find it liberating to know without a shred of doubt you lost (or won) legitimately.

Yeah, I'm the guy who bought bustabit in the early days. Back then it was called "MoneyPot". After adding provably fair, it really started to take off and at the same time I was building a new gambling product (bankroll-as-a-service) called "vault". Since I couldn't come up with a good domain for "vault", I rebranded  "moneypot" as "bustabit"  and then I launched "vault" as moneypot.

Then I found myself a bit burnt out with too much work, and sold moneypot.com  and then once I more or less finished the "bustabit v2" rewrite, I sold the entire project to Daniel (devans) who was the one who launched bustabit v2 (at the start of this year) and has been doing a great job running it ever since.

And now find myself having gone from way over worked, to way underworked.  

It's based on an old version of bustabit v1, but it's just some random person who made his code opensource to comply with the AGPLv3. The version by kungfuant is also not "official" but it's a pretty close to the last public fork of bustabit v1. kungfuant is the guy who originally made shiba, so he's pretty trustworthy.


Originally there was an official open source bustabit (v1), but I was the one who stopped publishing publicly. At the time the site was getting spammed / DDoSd pretty heavily (funnily enough by some scam site on bitcointalk I called out, and they wanted retribution) and I was putting in lots of little-hacks to prevent the abuse (e.g. specific to the attacks they were doing). However because the repository was fully open, they were actually seeing my mitigations in real-time and working around them.  I had planned on re-opening the repository once I converted the hacks into reliable code -- but I never did so.

The reason bustabit was allowed to go "closed source" but no one else is, is because bustabit fully owns all copyright to the source and just published a AGPv3 version. All contributions that bustabit integrated were required to assign copyright to bustabit. (This is known as "dual licensing"). And it's the same reason that bustabit is allowed to sell people non-AGPLv3   encumbered versions of the code.


Also FWIW, the current version of bustabit (v2) is actually a ground-up rewrite that has zero shared history (it's not even written in the same language). It was a kind of a "let's take all the lessons learnt from running a successful casino and build a kick ass product with that in mind" with huge emphasis on things like security while bustabit v1 was very much hacked-together with the primary goal of getting to market and seeing how people like it. For reference, I think bustabit v1 took ~3 months from idea phase till it was hitting production. While I think bustabit v2 took >1.5 years from the first line of code until it was ready.   But Daniel is now the exclusive owner of all that stuff, so only he can decide if he wants to release it / license it or what not.

Seems kind of retarded to me. You want your money back because ... you broke their ToS? (which explicitly state you shouldn't play if you're a resident of the UK).

If they tried to seize your winnings just because you were in a not-allowed jurisdiction, I'd consider that extremely scammy. So I'm not one for double-standards =)

But fortunately for you, the law isn't always just. So if you do want to pursue a case, you'll need to find an actual lawyer in curaçao (where they are registered, and have a gaming license). Also you really need an actual lawyer. Anything you find on these forums has a 50% chance of being wrong and a 50% chance of being a scam...

This is absolutely ridiculous of you to drag me into this.  I neither said nor implied any such thing. I would normally be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest maybe you misunderstood me, but we only spoke about it after you launched with pirated software.

But I do encourage you to share anything I said that might have given you a different impression. Just make sure you include enough context, like how you first started off with "we didn't just copy it but used reference" before then later admitting you were using a minified verbatim copy of bustabit (even including some pointless bustabit debug lines) both on the client and server, and asked about known problems or exploits in the specific version you're running. So there goes the "accidental infringement" defence. Ooops.

But reviewing our conversation, my advice was to follow the terms of the AGPLv3 version (releasing modified source code) and save you paying the small licensing fee. So please don't act like you were led astray (and not to mention: I'm not a lawyer or have any rights to the source code you're using) so my opinion is rather irrelevant anyway.


That's obviously nonsense. Let's not pretend you reimplemented the entire thing in a couple days. It's exactly the same and has literally exactly the same rendering quirks and bugs that it did before. I can see you made a few obvious changes (stripped the debug lines, changed <canvas> to <svg> changed the fonts, stripped the noise function, renamed "GAME_TICK" to "CRASH_GAME_TICK" but as the original author to most of the code you're running, it's rather obvious you just spent a couple days obfuscating your previous blatant copyright infringement.

It's like you got a copy of a Harry Potter book, and find-and-replaced most of the characters and places names. Pretending it's your work is insulting.

And I'm going to be honest, I personally don't really care about copyright infringement (I pretty much pirate every movie I watch), but I do very much value honesty -- and find this whole situation extremely concerning.

And on that note, I'm not sure what's a bigger red-flag: That you raised millions of dollars with an ICO to supposedly help pay development, and then would rip Dan off for a rather insignificant once-off 2 bitcoin licensing fee. Or that you'd rather tarnish your brand and reputation over said fee.

I know Daniel said he's too busy to care, but I don't think what you're doing is fair. I intend on leaving negative trust, and petitioning the Crypto Gambling Foundation to revoke your membership, unless you can do the right thing and pay what is owed (and ideally provide a proof-of-solvency to show you are in the position to complete the terms of the buy-back program that your ICO tokens require).

Maybe I have comprehension issues, but rule 14.4 reads:
"""
14.4. Getting an edge against the casino without any risks is FORBIDDEN. (e.g playing with faucet, winning from faucet then depositing to withdraw all the balance etc.)
"""

but it really sounds like any use of the faucet could be considered forbidden? That ambiguity is precisely what I am complaining about.

I think a saner/fairer/clearer rule would be along the lines: "As long as you do not use bots or multiple accounts to claim the faucet more than the site would otherwise allow you, then what you do is totally fine"  and if you are unhappy with how they use the faucet, then just disable (or nerf) it for that user.

 


I know, I wasn't trying to imply it was. In fact, I'm sure the only reason bitsler attracts the magnitude of abuse it does, is because how generous it is. I just think there's some room for improvement to clarify exactly what constitutes abuse, and clarify that someone who doesn't use bots or multi-faucet-claiming-accounts never has to worry.    

The reason I used quotes is because "abuse" can be pretty subjective. I'm not exactly familiar with bitsler's internal policy, but quite a few sites consider a single-person on a single-account repeatedly trying to get a withdraw-able amount of money "abuse". While I'd say that's how I'd expect a lot of people to behave if you give them free money.

Other sites consider it abuse and will seize any funds if the player has multiple accounts (even when it wasn't done to give the person any advantage, for faucet or bonuses).

Some other sites (although no longer, after I made a big deal of it...) had bet limits hidden in their FAQ, and considered it abuse to exceed that and took their money. (Even though their UI would happily accept the bets).

And then on the other end of the spectrum you have people with sophisticated bots/vpns setups and stuff, which are obviously trying to circumvent restrictions and unambiguously abuse.


I would have less problem with the rules if they were a) unambiguous  and b) reasonable and c) not overly punitive.



Laugh, but I speak from experience. When I owned bustabit I did not a single time unilaterally took money out of someone's account, or otherwise prevent anyone from withdrawing. And in my time, I dealt with a huge amount of abuse (including faucet). I even had people give me death threats, or try extort the site with considerable balance on the site that I never touched. Hell, I once even accidentally sent someone an extra 40 BTC (ugggh, manually withdraw! I'm not the brightest) and the furtherest I went is tell them if they didn't voluntarily return it, I wouldn't let them keep playing.

Now you can laugh, and think I'm naive -- but I'll point out I was doing way more volume than any other bitcoin site. And I think a huge reason is because people realized that I treated their account balances as sacred and never fucked with it, and trusted I wouldn't come up with arbitrary bullshit to take their money. And I think bitcoin gambling in general would be a lot more popular if similar code of ethics were applied.
 


Disabling (or nerfing) someone's faucet in this case (or any really) is totally reasonable, and what pretty much what anyone should do. I would only think it's unfair if they were retroactively deemed "faucet abuse" and then their withdrawals not honored.



To be honest, I think very highly of bitsler and in fact most of the sites that are here on bitcointalk (even when I have my disagreements). I actually believe all the main sites at the moment do have players interests at heart and are trying to offer a good experience instead of just milk them. The site I've seen with the most ridiculous policies (and justification for it) would be bitstarz which I would consider a veiled scam (even though they've improved their practices, it's obviously run by a sociopath with no regard for his customers or fairness)

I agree with adaseb. I find the practice of disallowing withdrawals for "faucet abuse" to extremely distasteful and bordering on unethical. Of course the site has no obligation to give a user free money, and disabling new faucet claims should clearly be done for "abusers" -- but once the site has given them money, it should be the users.

I realize that not all cases are clear-cut, like if someone egregious abuses the site (e.g. lots of ips/accounts/bots) then it seems reason to take back the money (although personally when I ran a site, I would not have done that). But there's obviously a lot of cases of people getting caught in the crossfire who are just people who spend a lot of time with the faucet. The responsible and ethical thing for a casino to would be identify these people and disable future faucet claims. Instead of hoping they turn into paying customers, and if they don't just not let them withdraw.

Same shit about thing like site that's that don't allow you to bet at 9900x with faucet funds. If that isn't allowed, then the site shouldn't allow you to do it. Or disable your faucet if you do. It seems unfair to wait until someone's withdrawing to find a reason to not honor it.


(To be clear, I don't mean to single out bitsler here -- they're definitely not one of the worst -- but if casino operators want to build trust, these sort of practices need to stop)

That looks correct, although it's a bit weird to have a x/y/z type fraction. It's a bit nicer to simplify it instead as:  (0.99 / M) - (0.99 / (M+0.01))


Which is actually kind of neat, because we can see the structure of it. Before we said 0.99/M is the probability of winning.

So if you look at that formula, it is easy to see that it's "The probability of winning at M  subtract  the probability of winning at M+0.01"

Out of curiosity, how much do you make a month? I assume writing so much nonsense is a pretty tiring job. BTW what ever happened with your imminent police raid on bitcasino lol.


And trying to look at this jackpot issue as objectively as possible, I don't get the problem. Unless someone won the jackpot, but Dean refused to pay them -- which I see no indication of -- this entire thread seems totally retarded.

There's also a sort of irony in the same posters attacking the jackpot for being shitty while attacking Dean for removing the jackpot.

I'm sorry for what ever set of events triggered all this, but you guys deserve major respect for the way you're handling it and not just simply going dark. I like to think that in the future crypto-casinos will lose the "wild west" sort of image they have, and instead be appreciated for the significant advantages they offer. And I really think the way you ran (and shut down) the casino really go a long way to achieving that.

If there's any assistance I can offer, I'd be happy to lend a hand =)