The dealer does indeed peek, which means you only lose your original bet against a dealer blackjack, because you are never given the opportunity to double or split.

Thanks for pointing out that our states rules did not include this! We have added this rule to the list, so it is now clear what our rule-set is.

Thanks for the help! We've followed your instructions, and now we're now awaiting a core dump. It usually happens about once a day, so hopefully we don't have to wait too long.

Recently we have run into a problem with bitcoind crashing on us. After looking into the problem, we have found that the crashes always occur directly after our system issues a `sendmany` JSON-RPC command.

When sending out bitcoins, our system issues the following JSON-RPC commands:


After the sendmany command, we occasionally see an error code: "-4", with the message: "Transaction creation failed". However, we also occasionally see a complete crash of bitcoind.

The crashes typically occur when our system is under higher load, and processing a higher volume of deposits and withdrawals. However, we can't really find any strong causation - other than the fact that it always occurs after a sendmany call.

These crashes seemed to occur after upgrading to 0.8. We are currently running 0.8.1, and are still experiencing the problem. However, it is difficult to tell if 0.8 is the culprit, or we just happened to scale to a sufficient size at around the same time we upgraded to 0.8.

We would like to help debug this issue, however, to be honest, we don't really know where to start. So, my questions are:

- Is this a known issue, or has anyone else experienced it? If so, are there any known work-arounds?

- How can we help to get to the bottom of this issue? Ideally, we'd either find what we're doing wrong to cause bitcoind to crash, or we'd help find the bug in bitcoind so it can be patched, and more resilient to whatever is causing this issue.

Thanks!

Thanks Dooglus for helping to explain the statistics.

hiltonizer - We'd be happy to provide you a full hand history of all your Roulette gameplay (in total, it looks like you've played 7110 spins of Roulette.). Just reach out to our support team (https://bitzino.com/support), and we'll be happy to email you a CSV.

Sorry to derail this thread. Ultimately, I just want to correct the facts regarding provably fair games. Mainly: it is possible to create provably fair slots, and it does provide a real benefit to players.


That's a good point: If you want to create provably fair slots, you cannot "weight" the reels. But, since you won't be adjusting the RTP on-the-fly for online games, then this really shouldn't be an issue anyway.


Provably fair systems allow players to independently verify every single wager they make - usually immediately after the wager is complete. Effectively, this is a zero-trust system: players don't have to trust third-party licensing providers to be confident they're getting a fair game. In many ways, this is a parallel to bitcoin itself being a zero-trust system that doesn't force you to trust bankers in order to store and transfer value. I think that is one reason why bitcoin users are drawn to provably fair games.


If the provably fair system is implemented correctly, then this is not true. A player would be able to detect that the house has discarded the hash, and would immediately know they are being cheated.


If the house is lying about their pay table, then the player would know something was wrong as soon as they won something and didn't get paid the correct amount. This deception wouldn't last long.

Congrats on the launch! Your product looks amazing, and I wish you much success! I'm really glad to see bigger players entering the bitcoin gambling market.

I do want to address one issue you brought up:


I want to address this, because we do provide provably fair slots, and we specifically indicate that our game offers a 99% return-to-player. We spent a lot of time ensuring that our slots game is indeed provably fair, and even developed a novel technique for computing a slots outcome from any shuffled deck, so that our existing provably fair methodology could be applied to our slots game as well.

As long as the house provides the reel-configuration and the pay-table (which are both easy for players to verify without doing in-depth statistical analysis), it is possible for a player to calculate the return-to-player percentage of any slot machine. For an example, take a look at the wizardofodds.com game design for their slots game: http://wizardofodds.com/play/slots/australian-reels/5-line/math/. Given only the reel-configuration, and the pay-table, they calculate the exact payout.

As another example, our provably fair slots game has the following count of symbols per reel:


Combining the above with the pay table, you can calculate the following table:


If you add up all the Returns, you get the following total return-to-player: 0.9903564453125.

So, as long as the house provides the accurate pay-table and reel-configuration, it is possible to independently calculate the return-to-player for a given slots game. Thus, it would not be possible for the house to deceive the player about the actual return-to-player for their slots games - as long as they provide the reel-configuration and pay-table.

I really do encourage you to look into making your games provably fair. It's good for you (because your players will trust you more), good for your players (because they'll know they weren't cheated), and good for bitcoin (because bitcoin casinos are leading the charge in revolutionizing the online gambling industry).

If you're serious about the 5 BTC, please donate it to the Bitcoin Foundation

You can hook up a mouse to Android devices. They even make custom hardware specifically for Android, eg: http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Tablet-Mouse-Android-910-002626/dp/B0058SRNZ4. I believe that any bluetooth mouse will work.

Ideally though, external hardware should not be necessary to play our games! We've tested our site on a handful of tablets and phones, and it does seems to work well - but we haven't tested every device. I wonder what device you are using, and do you see the same problem of "clicks registering as scrolls" on other websites as well?

We've pushed an update which should fix the issues you mentioned Dooglus: We added a 30 second timeout to the cash out action, so you'll at least get some indication that your network is having issues. We also made all text on tables unselectable except for your deposit address and your bet amounts.

I also want to give a shoutout to coinad.com. Carlos from coinad emailed us to let us know about a lot of minor spelling and grammar errors that were live on our site, which we are very thankful for!

Good catch! You're always helping catch the issues that arise due to network timeout corner cases, thanks! We'll work on making this time-out correctly in the same way as our other buttons.


Thanks for the kind words!


I do not know of any casinos specifically that are rigged.


Thanks, we got the message and responded, hopefully to your satisfaction


We do disable some text selection, but it probably makes sense to disable almost everything except for the text that should be selectable. We experimented in the past with making it all un-selectable, but found that bad for some of the text. We'll work to make this better so that your situation doesn't happen again.

Thanks for the bug reports Dooglus! I've added another quarter BTC to your account to thank you for helping out.

Thanks for noticing this! I guess I mostly used the up and down arrows to change my bets while testing it, so I never noticed this bad behavior. We've fixed it now, and I've added another quarter BTC bonus to your account. Keep the bug reports coming!


Thanks for the tip! We actually did have our update function bound to keyup, but it looks like getting the value of a textbox from a function bound to keyup sometimes will return the old value of the textbox, rather than the new value. We solved this by wrapping our callback function inside a window.setTimeout, which consistently allows the new textbox values to be accessed.


Thanks for spreading the word! I've been thinking of doing an AMA about us on /r/bitcoin at some point.

Yup, this was an oversight on our part. We've fixed it now. Thanks for the keen attention to detail!

Nice 5-way win too


Another oversight, thanks for catching it! We've added the appropriate link now.

I've comped your account with another quarter-BTC to thank you for helping us make bitZino better!

By the way, this has been one of the most successful game launches we've seen yet. It's been less than 24 hours since launch and we've already seen more than 12,000 real-BTC slots wagers placed!

We've updated our Slots game to properly handle the fastest animation speed without spinning forever.  Thanks Dooglus and Stephen!

We also updated the style of the 'on' indicator graphic so that it has a border around it, which should make it more prominently different than the 'off' indicator - thanks Dooglus!

I really appreciate the feedback! As always, keep it coming!

Ok, I was finally able to replicate the problem! It looks like the issue is occurring because both of you have your animation time set to "Fastest / Off", which is causing a bug in the javascript. Our Roulette doesn't account for animation time in the same way, which is why the bug doesn't show up there. I should have thought of this earlier!

We're working on a fix right now, and I've also comped both of you 0.25 BTC to thank you for helping us identify this bug.

Cool report! Those times all look pretty good to me - except Hong Kong, but I'm not sure if there's much we can do about that.


I'm sorry to hear about these issues. We use the same technique for spinning the slots reels as we do our Roulette wheel, so I'm sad to hear that you're running into problems. Even if you're having internet connectivity issues, you should still see a warning popup after 30 seconds, rather than just having the reels spin indefinitely. Have you run into similar issues with Roulette as well? It's possible that the same bug is present on both of these games.

Oh no, that doesn't sound good at all. Our servers seem to be operating smoothly - our response times are withing the 100-200ms range, which is the standard. However, even with a slow response time, you shouldn't be seeing the jittery graphics in that manner. However, we have noticed that in firefox, the framerate does drop when it's making a request, so maybe this has something to do with it. What browser were you doing the testing on?

I'll look into making the on and off indicators have a bigger visual difference.

Thanks for your feedback!

We're happy to announce the official launch of Slots!





We are launching a classic 3-reel, 5-line game of Slots that we call "B's and Z's". This game offers 99.036% return-to-player, and allows you to win up 500x your wager! You can wager up to 2 BTC per line, for a total wager of up to 10 BTC per spin. I'm really pleased with the way the HTML5 graphics turned out - it looks great, and plays silky-smooth.

Of course, like all our games, Slots is provably fair. We have utilized a novel technique, utilizing a mathematical system called factoradics in order ensure our Slots games are provably fair.

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Cheating by simply refusing to pay out really only works once though. As soon as there's a public outcry, you'd have to close up shop.

Whereas, cheating by manipulating the odds in the house's favor could go undetected for a very long time, and there is already existing software that allows the cheaters to do this.

Even third-party certification agencies can only provide so much protection against this type of cheating, because they can't be monitoring the software 24/7. Only cryptographic systems allows for true zero-trust game-play. It may take a while to break outside of the bitcoin community, but eventually all players will demand their online casinos be provably fair. It's just easier for the bitcoin community, because most people that understand bitcoin already understand the basic premise of how provably fair systems work (mainly the importance of a one-way hash function).

I'm just glad to see all this bitcoin entrepreneurship, although I do wish they'd choose unique names for themselves. I'm also glad to see that provably fair gaming is the standard around here. The rest of the industry will will catch up on these fronts eventually, and we'll all be the ones that innovated and drove them to change their practices!

Dooglus put it well. I take this as a sign that we've made it I also see it as a general success indicator of bitcoin.


This must just be a coincidence. We have absolutely no interest in selling our user's personal information. Additionally, we have no interest in email marketing. The only reason you'll ever get an email from us is if it's from a human being due to a direct support-related issue regarding your account.

We haven't had any major outward-facing updates recently, but we have made substantial improvements to our underlying systems, which you may notice through faster response times. We've seen substantial growth, and we had to re-architect certain parts of our systems in order to account for the growth.

We're also really close to launching Slots! We were hoping to launch it sooner, but the recent spurt of growth has forced us to focus on scaling. Hopefully Slots will launch within the next week.