I don't think he's a competitor or anything. He's previously accused bustabit of being a scam, and then admitted he was wrong:



which you have to respect. So probably just a frustrated player who lost some money (which is never too much fun)

I've been playing a lot with constraint solving (thanks to my work on coinsayer) and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail -- so I was thinking of how it'd look if you applied a constraint solver to a bitcoin node's mempool. The goal would be to simplify a lot of the rules, logic and remove the arbitrary limitations and rules that currently exist (that can be both annoying, and pretty incentive incompatible).


So I was thinking, imagine we allowed our mempool to contain transactions that conflict with each other -- as long as they don't conflict with the transactions in the blockchain.

So to figure out which transactions should be in the next block is actually a pretty straight forward optimization problem.  Basically find the set of transactions that maximizes the fees subject to it not exceed  MAX_SIGOPS / MAX_WEIGHT / have any of the same inputs / and input references to an unconfirmed transaction, must then also include that transaction. You could even throw in a few extras without too much work (e.g. tie break on first seen transactions)

Now lets for a second pretend latency is unimportant (I think it's pretty solvable by running the solver, and caching the and incrementally updating it as an approximation).

So the real tricky part is some anti-DoS stuff. We need to come up with:

A) a rule that would ban a peer for sending us too much crap
b) a rule for knowing which transactions are worthy of forwarding to a peer


And we need to do it such that rule b) never causes our node to be banned by someone following rule a)


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Any ideas?

I don't think he did. He basically had a decent business, and operated it honestly (to the best of my knowledge) and shut down and returned everyones money.


Then later, he saw the wtf ICO craze and decided he wanted in on some of that sweet cash. So he came up with some phoney reasons for needing money, ICO'd and relaunched. Then he was too cheap to use the ICO money for anything so instead of paying for a bustabit license, pirated the software. Instead of putting money in the bankroll, started accepting separate bankroll investors. And  the relaunched site isn't a viable business, beside it's pretty much is dead (1300 btc wagered total, ~2 of those in the last week) and with such a garbage name.

But hey, Dean's sitting pretty (i bet he net a few million from the whole ICO scam) and just needs to leave his zombie site limping along for a couple years, so he can pretend i was just a normal case of a business-gone bad; and in the mean time he can work on his bitsafe or what ever next ICO he wants to scam people with.

Yeah, although in my case it was totally fine. As it's not really required (or expected) that everyone verifies, it's just an option if you want. And had the nice property of being drop-dead simple



Oh, I see. That's pretty clever, never thought of something like that.

It's weird that you consider that acceptable. It's almost like you don't understand how a casino works.  


BTW Can you give a straight answer to why you rolled everything back and didn't pay out the wager prizes? Or simply because it was cheaper than paying out?

You're being rather disingenuous. Just because the tokens were priced in USD, doesn't make the crypto magically disappear. 



You realize that applies to pretty much every single scam out there, right?


You're framing it like people are attacking you for losing money. But the truth is that you structured the ICO to give you exposure to bitcoin price. You were happy reaping the profits when it worked in your favor netting you significant amounts of money, and then renegged as soon as it worked against you.

That's what makes it a scam, and you a scammer.

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BTW I dare you to stop all the nonsense deflection and try give a straight answer to something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4751127.msg51398067#msg51398067

It's worth noting that you can increase the cost of manipulating the blockchain. For instance I used to run a lotto, where I'd use a bitcoin block hash to determine the winner. However, because the prizes were reasonably big compared to the blockreward it would've been (very) profitable for a miner to manipulate. So I stretched the hash with an operation that might take like 20 minutes or something.

That made it pretty impractical to manipulate the lotto (after finding a block, a miner would have to wait 20 minutes to check if it was good or not), unless the miner was prepared/able to 51% attack bitcoin at the same time




How does that work? If you get n blocks in a sequence -- the result is always going to be influenced by the last block in the sequence, who would be able to perform the same sort of attacks as if you just had used that 1 block.

Dean, how about you directly address this?


I think his strategy is to just argue semantics and nonsense to the point people either give up, or assume he might have a point. It's getting pretty hard to interpret his stuff charitably.

There was a post a couple months ago where that BillyBurns guy (some moderator and investor) said that Dean lost all his money altcoin trading. I have no idea if it's true, but say it was and Dean just came out and said: "Hey guys, I'm sorry but I got stupid and lost all the money on altcoin speculation. As such, I am am bankrupt and not in the position to payback investor. However, I really don't want to totally screw investors so I'll be working as hard as I can on the site to make more money to try make investors whole".


If that was the case (not implying it is...) it'd be easy to cut him some slack and say "ok, he fucked up badly but at least he's trying his best to right this situation".

But honestly I suspect he had good intentions at the start. He made a lot of money and was really happy. But when the price moved against him realized that he was going to lose some of that unrealized profit, and wasn't ok with it -- so just changed the terms of BKB with some pretty half-thought-out excuse for screwing investors.

Nice post. It clearly reputes Dean's point a few posts back about the token being a business loan. It's pretty clear the pricing is such that it's structured as a personal loan to Dean, fixed in USD with betking *revenue* offered instead of an interest rate.



lol, nice attempt to weasel out of the deal. The "up to 10%" referred to if a user had X tokens, they could use "<= X/10" for buybacks.

Your memory doesn't agree with my chat logs

You were the one asking for, several times, and each time I told you that I would only do it collateralized. And each time you kept trying to weasel your way out of the collateral requirement (even once agreeing and then last minute pulling out).

And then, no surprise, a couple weeks later you reneg on your agreement and which had you collateralized would have protected me against. So I'll lead it up to the reader to add 1 and 1.



Ok, you're right that I have invested in the bankroll of both bustabit and bustadice (among other sites/services). But if my motives were in attacking "competitors" to increase volume for my invesment (lol..) I would be attacking sites like primedice or stake. But instead I am frequently recommend them (and have zero financial stake in) because they're businesses that have been built upon being fair and honest with players.

Also for perspective, if you summed up the entire volume of wagers from betking since it's ICO I bet it's less than a good day from bustabit. Your "business" is not a real competitor, but even if it was, it would not have any bearing on my opinion.


I like to relive my former glory. Besides, it's also a bit of a civic service to try minimize the amount of people you can scam in the future.

I was a competitor, and even when I was running bustabit I had no problem helping you out with some stuff and maths. I've always had good relations with other casinos. You'll notice I've never said a bad word about the big and serious competitors I had over the years, because they got big and serious by doing a good job and running honest shops.

But nice try at deflection.

And anyway, I've long since got out of the business. The reason I have a problem with you, is that you turned into a scammer and tried pretty hard to scam me for a large sum of money.



Hard to argue too much there. I definitely did get lucky, and not a business person at all. But to be honest, I don't think I've leveled much criticism on how you run your "business". My complaints have more been around your character (or lack of).  But if you consider scamming people a "business" decision, then maybe it's your skills that should be questioned, not mine?

Just to be fair to Dean, while he's a scammer and a liar -- I'm not sure he's a "serial scammer". To the best of my knowledge he's only ever scammed people once with his ICO.

(Granted: I'm sure he'd be happy to scam people again given the chance, now that he's name is in the trash. But we should probably wait until then before calling him a serial scammer)

 

Ok. It's not easy to have a discussion with a scammer who can't even stick to basic facts. I was willing to cut some slack if you were forced into a corner by financial circumstances, but if you're just going to keep blatantly lying it's a bit difficult to try be charitable.

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For anyone reading, the original BKB was a personal loan to Dean. He and I discussed that aspect extensively, when he wanted me to buy some BKB tokens to help him increase his BTC exposure (as he'd supposedly have to sell some BTC to pay some poker debts).

 
The original pricing formula used for BKB didn't take into consideration any expenses for the business, which were supposed paid for by Dean. And as such, investors never got any equity in the business. The original deal was structured as a personal loan to Dean, which was denominated in USD but instead of interest people would get paid some of the *revenue* (to not expose them to business risks) from betking until the loan was paid according to a fixed schedule.

Dean was ecstatic about the structure of his ICO and how much money it made him personally when the price of bitcoin was up (but he never sold the bitcoin he raised, and his debt was denominated in USD). But the second it came to him losing money, he had no hesitation in renegging.

--

But if Dean's not going to be honest about how things were, and what went wrong -- there's no point really wasting more energy on this discussion. It's already pretty well established that Dean's a liar and a scammer. But I do wonder why he's suddenly after months now trying to defend his little scam?  Dean, you wouldn't happen to be trying to float another ICO in the near future? :rofl:

You mean, because you couldn't afford it? Or because you didn't want to lose money?

Not that it makes a difference, but I'm extremely skeptical that you've personally lost any money, as AFAIK all the buy-backs were done far below the sale price, which should've yielded you a huge amount.


Regardless if you could afford it or not, it still makes you highly untrustworthy. You shouldn't have entered into a deal in which you couldn't have upheld your side if the price moved against you. Literally a week or two before you renegged, you had even assured me that you had "systems in place" to guarantee you'd have funds to repay investors even in a price crash via auto-selling bitcoin.

Of course, that was just more bullshit.

And how much would've you lost if you honored the original agreement till completion?

I have a simple question:

With the original scheme (before you unilaterally changed it) how much profit/loss (in crypto) did you make/lose from the buy-back scheme? i.e. If you look at how much you made when you sold the BKB (in crypto) and subtract how much you paid for the buy-back (in crypto). What was your net profit/loss?

I don't refuse to acknowledge it, it's just not a particularly interesting point. You honored the terms of the agreement when it favored you personally (crypto prices were higher), and then renegged when it turned against you.
 
Even if you only scammed 0.01% of investors, it's still scamming and you don't get a cookie for not scamming the other 99.99%.

But besides, you keep bringing this up -- and never given a real answer. If you renegging on the agreement affected so little people for so little money, then why did you even do it? Why not just honor the agreement?

No one's upset because the investment did bad. They're upset because it did bad because you scammed them by unilaterally changed the rules of the buyback to personally benefit you at the expense of investors. I think this is pretty clear to everyone, hence why so many independent people have given you negative trust.

I can pretty much guarantee you that it will have zero effect in confusing more advanced tools. I've tested way more complex and advanced things to try trick up analysis, and it's not easy. Sometimes even I'll momentarily fool it, but later it'll "back propagate" (correct term??) information from how the outputs are spent (and associated clustering), to get a better understanding of the transaction. Like I've seen them reliably determine which outputs are change, in settings that should be impossible.

Taking bustabit as an example, it does smart partial batching so it frequently sends transactions with: (1 payment, 1 change) and (2 payments, 0 change).  Naively they are indistinguishable, but in reality analysis software has proven to have almost no problems distinguishing once it's been able to collect enough information after they're spent.

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If you want to trick analysis software, pretty much a prerequisite is reasonably uniform wallet behavior (now is a joke...) and good practices (e.g. avoiding address reuse as much as possible). This will create an environment where there's a lot less "redundancy" (??) in the analysis, such that it has to lean on increasingly fragile assumptions.  And then (and only then really) you can be cute and do something like a bustapay/p2ep  or import/export a reused address output from/to a friend or something.

Now they'll probably realize you broke their models, but it'll be too hard to figure out (short of having law enforcement contact you for help declustering ).


But yeah, if you just got two very strongly clustered wallets with different behavior and created a single coinjoin between them (even if it was undetectably a coinjoin...) it's not really going to get you anywhere against advanced analysis (although it'll confuse something like walletexplorer, which maybe is something you want to do).

Yup. That's what "vout" means. I knew it was the 0th because in the example I gave it said 0. But as you've realized, it's often different.