How much was your deposit?

I strongly suspect companies like this (they're far from the only ones) do it because they know that a lot of their customers come with the assumption of anonymity, so if they halt withdrawals until the person does ID verification they can make a substantial amount of money from people who don't wish to provide it.  The insidious part is some of them (like bitstarz) seemingly selectively applies the policy to only catch larger sums of money, while letting smaller players play anonymously.

Considering how shady these operations are, I'd be extremely hesitant about providing them personal information.

The initial version is available here: https://www.bustabit.com/play-old   does that work better for you?

Nope, just some time after there's no more issues left. I'm guessing 2-3 months 

First off, this isn't how you run a casino. I'd be willing to give it a pass if you were very explicit and upfront about this, letting all players know that if they win they won't be able to be paid immediately (or possibly ever). However, you seem to be doing the opposite:

Yup, you can derive the entire thing by using the latest hash you can find. See this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=709185.msg10378591#msg10378591

I'm really sorry your friend was scammed this way. If your friend is still interested in getting into bitcoin gambling, I'd be happy to give him a complete copy of bustabit source for free to get started (something I normally charge 2 BTC for). It wouldn't come with support or anything, but if he or your are familiar with node.js and postgres it's not overly hard to run.

IT-BOX UG is a valid registered Germany company though. I suspect they moved from Croatia to Germany. If you go to their contact page: http://itbox.com.hr/contact.html  they list an address in Munich, but it's different than the company address. (The company address is probably the accurate one, as the one on the webpage is in an prime commercial spot where I doubt they are).

Anyway, I'll stop posting here. I don't want to start a witch hunt.

Yeah it does, it's in the footer...

Pretty much. Although theoretically due to floating point maths there's a limit (I've calculated a few times, but keep forgetting to save it). But it's like billions of trillions or something stupid. But as state, the real limitation is the max profit. Even if you bet 1 bit, the most you could ever really get is ~23M before you're forcibly cashed out. So that kind of is the defacto max achievable multiplier at the moment

From the auction thread, it definitely seems like they've scammed a few people. But, i'm not sure they're anonymous. The company name they listed on their website is a German one. It appears to be a valid company, registered to (what appears) a residential address in Munich. In one of their posts they did say they have an "office" in Munich, so that part checks out.

However, before any cyber-warrior goes on a witch hunt -- be very careful as it's very possible or even likely they just hijacked someone else company name who has no affiliation with these actual scammers.

I'm expecting it'll be around for at least 2 or 3 more months. I'm in no rush to release the new version, and want to make sure everyone is totally happy with it, before I do any sort of switch over. You should be able to get an idea of the blockers by following this: https://github.com/bustabit/bustabit-client/milestone/1   (but keep in mind as time and testing progresses more issues will definitely be added)


You don't need to be playing against oblivious players, just be better than the other players currently playing. If everyone is the same level, they'll probably bleed money slowly (at a dynamic 0-1% house edge, like bustabit currently has).  It's very much like poker when you think about it. If you're a lot better than someone, you can overcome the rake and take advantage of them. But if they're playing nash or you're the same level, you'll just slowly bleed.

Also I agree with Dooglus about the lucky players attracting attention, not the skillful ones. For instance, I know you've put a lot of work in your bot (which seems to be doing a great job!), and it's up 2 BTC. However, that's nothing compared to the 3 players we have (gohard, LosDeXibalbaMC, dudaxmaimons) who are all >200 BTC in net profit from good luck (most of them have had an EV of ~-0.5 to ~-0.8%)!


I agree. I'm thinking the biggest risk is that because bustabit is a game that *allows* skilled players to make a profit (unlike most other sites) it attracts gambles who trick themselves into believing they're playing skillfully, but actually just playing lucky. With a split, it'll be a lot me a lot more apparent.

Anyway, I have no plan of rushing through changes. And and maintaining a branch that puts the odds identical to how they are now (with bonuses).

I like to think I have a very open mind, and a bad intuition about these sort of things. So I'm more than happy to revert back to the original scheme/bonuses if that's what's best for my players

Not really, the change isn't expected to make me any less or more money. The issue is this, I love the idea of pvp gambling and think it's really cool and indeed something that makes bustabit unique. However for players who play purely against the house,  the pvp aspect does them a disservice (they unknowingly get taken advantage of by players who are playing pvp).

Based on my unscientific polling and analysis, leads me to believe that playing bonus oblivious is by far the most common way to play bustabit. So for that reason, I think the most reasonable and fair thing to do, is split it into two games. One specifically for people who want to play against each other. And one for people who want to play against the house

 

I'm currently working with the idea that in the pvp version, the multiplier starts at 0.9x and increases from there. The bonuses would work just like they do currently on bustabit, except that they would be an average of 10% instead of 1%

Wow! thanksfinland turned 25 bits into 10 BTC with an amazing 400,000.00x cashout. Totally shattering the previous record from cowbay of a 50,001x cashout.

All of those transactions seem standard, which means that the cost of spending them can be < 30% of the amount. So if they're not being credited to an account, then it's just free money. If they're being credited to account(s) it's annoying because there's no deposit fee but each of the deposits has a cost associated with it.

Looking at the outputs that  Pseudo-Random posted, they seems to just be faucet payouts from MoonBit.co.in

Capping withdrawal fees doesn't help the problem, it'll just impact your customers withdrawals. The easiest fix is just run `bitcoin-cli lockunspent`on the outputs, so you don't waste money spending them for the time being. Or you can patch your bitcoin with this: https://github.com/RHavar/bitcoin/commit/5ef4bdb3cb1f23bea9ff7bcaa5f7acf5b0344f36

And it'll stop spending those tiny transactions. Then during saturdays there tends to be almost no fee pressure, so you can can create a big transaction at a fee rate of 10sat/byte the cleans it up.

You sure?

Using postgres:

returns:
[8192, 8192]


AKA an int32 and int64 end up using the space, due to alignment.   I would assume the same is true with other databases, assuming you're using a 64 bit machine .. which I can't imagine you're not.  32 bits is for barbarians No, but seriously I almost never use 32 bits numbers.

Yup   But all in all it won't make much difference (you pay dilution fees when you re-invest, but collect them when other people re-invest..)

Yup!

Edit:

Yeah, there's already a half-assed one. It's pretty crappy as it doesn't have a matching engine (you either need to explicitly hit someones trade, or create one of your own). And to keep it simple, all order are "all or none". Improving it is something I eventually want to do, but something simple (along with a #trade channel) is probably good enough for quite a while

It's actually a little lower than 10% (but 10% is the theoretical max), I made an issue for showing it properly.

But anyway, this is a one-time fee and actually doesn't go to me .. but goes to existing investors (based on their stake). The way it works precisely is that if you invest 1 BTC, you get a stake as if you had invested 0.9 BTC and everyone gets diluted as if you had invested 0.9 BTC. Then the bankroll is increased by 1 BTC.

This means the dilution fee is actually 0-10%. Ideally I would have made it a flat 5% or so, however a flat fee would be abusable (you could fragment your investment to get some of your money back).

Ostensibly the high level purpose of the dilution fee is to to compensate previous investors for the fact they are now being diluted. But the hope is that there are some other benefits, like less fickle investors (i.e. investors that divest when they see a whale playing, as that's when I need investors the most) and some marketing benefits.



BTW I'm still trying to figure out what a good dilution fee is, I'm thinking of anywhere from 5% to 25%. Any thoughts?

--

P.S. It's not spelled out, but the only fee that actually goes to me is a 10% profit cut from investors. So I think it's quite reasonable in that side

It will only be on the new game, otherwise there will be an insane silver-glut  (and not to mention, bustabit current supports 0% house edge bets so it's often pretty easy to inflate your wagered amounts if you're careful)


Well derived  My current thinking is that the most straight-forward is just a flat 1% house edge on all bets. That's what's on the dev site right now (although I haven't yet provided methodology, so you can't really prove it). My current plans  are to remove bonuses completely from the main game (and put that in a separate, much more pvp game with ~10% bonuses). I really hate to remove the bonuses and variable-house edge, but with the vast majority of bustabit players playing "bonus oblivious" I can't help but feel I'm doing them a disservice.

With the new system, the effective house edge will be ~0.5% no matter how you play. When players do well and win money, there will be a glut of valor on the market (and no new silver) so I expect the house edge will be rather closer to 1%. And when players lose money, there will be a glut of silver on the market (investors wanting to realize their profits) so the silver be worth more and the house edge will be closer to 0%.

Smart traders I imagine will want to take advantage of this and "time arbitrage" the value of silver and valor to ~0.5 bits.

My hope is it'll be a fun little ecosystem