Man, if he does that, buys up a bunch, then crashes it, it sure would suck to sell to him for a high price and then buy back when low.  He'll sure show us!

Yeah, I think we are close enough here, just nitpicking.  Either way, mining investors should be smart enough to see that a "fair" ratio will get back fairly quickly (they aren't, though).  They are far too optimistic about difficulty rises and make less profitable (or even unprofitable) investments.  The assumption that if difficulty gets too hard, price will go up to match it, is a bit flawed.

One thing I haven't calculated is based on a fixed amount of investing, and people going optimally, if the ratio changes as the price goes up.  It's MUCH harder to make the price go from 8 to 9 than it was from 7 to 8.  Every increase, it gets harder.  Going from 400,000 in difficulty to 500,000 in difficulty is just as hard as going from 500,000 to 600,000.  So this is something I need to investigate to see if it makes sense.

Say it costs $1M of investment to make the difficulty go up by 100k.  If you divert half of it to buying coins, how much does that move the market instead?  How does that affect that ratio?  My gut tells me that price will move slower as price goes up compared to difficulty.  So it will cut the profitability of mining even if the ratio skews less toward mining.  Just thinking out loud, need to think about it more, but maybe you have some thoughts.  I like the way you think, so maybe it will give you ideas.

How does him buying all the Bitcoins harm anyone?

Oh noes, we have something we voluntarily traded and valued more than Bitcoins.

Deflation only occurs when the economy expands.  The economy only expands when people become more productive (or there are more people).  Oh noes, people's feelings might be hurt by being able to buy more stuff.

By slowing the economy, you mean it will make it harder for people to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit, yes.  Instead, resources will be used for investment and we become richer over time.  Oh no, how horrible.

If your house burns down and you lose your bitcoins, then everyone else becomes richer.  Oh noes, how horrible (except for you, where you would be hurt).  Everyone else benefits.

The roulette table must provide a list of what all the payouts are for each type of bet, and you can easily figure them out for yourself (if you wish).

I think your position is mostly correct, although your reasoning just was confusing high difficulty with high difficulty to price ratio.  Two different concepts.

Growing interest drives the price up.  Growing interest drives the difficulty up too.  The ratio of price to difficulty determines what mix goes where.

How could Soros "wreck the whole thing", and how would that benefit him?

The deflation thing has been mentioned.  What's the problem?  No, the current implementation does not allow for more than 21 million and this is intentional.

What problem do you expect to happen by not having inflation?

This would be true if people were trying to get a certain amount of bitcoins.  If I wanted to get 50 bitcoins, I could mine or buy them.  But I'm not aware of anyone who actually thinks this way.  Anything that is priced in Bitcoins tends to fluctuate in BTC price based on the trade rate.

I cannot speak for those who don't do their homework.  There are a lot of miners who don't like risking money, but have the equipment, so they will go after free money.  There are a few people who calculate between buying mining equipment and buying coins.  

What matters more is the difficulty/price ratio.  If the price is very high compared to the difficulty, people will mine rather than buy.  If the ratio is the other way, less will mine and more might invest.

What happens when the difficulty rises?  It does what you describe and makes mining less profitable and might make someone invest in coins.  Anyone investing in coins for this reason is making a pure speculation play, since they anticipate the price of coins to rise.


It's a decent theory, although we need to look at the ratio of price to difficulty.  When I did the calculation, difficulty was at 60k and price was $3.50.  At that point, the difficulty was considerably less than the expected price.  I wish I still had my spreadsheet, but it was quite a bit off (I think the expected price would have been $1.80).

I think you are right in another regard- difficulty increases tend to correspond greatly with increased interest in BTC.  So while not cause and affect, but if there is more interest, either that interest is going to increase the difficulty or increase the price, or both.  If a lot goes toward increasing difficulty, the next wave may decide going for the coins themselves is a better approach.  So we see that increased interest and investment leads to one of the two or some combination of both increasing.  If one goes up too fast, you see a swing to the other one in the next batch of investment.

The supply affects demand, but the total daily new supply tries to remain constant (it doesn't in reality- in a growing hashing power, the beginning of difficulty periods are slower than the end by a lot).

Since less coins will be mined, it might adjust a little bit.  But everyone knows it's coming, so it should already be priced in.

That still requires a paper check unless it's the same bank.

Carrots.

If you don't think that the shutdown wasn't orchestrated and funded by companies that make their home bases in the USA, you are deluded.  The entire point was to destroy the industry so that the politically favored companies (Harrahs, etc...) can open up their own online casinos with a huge advantage. 

I have looked at the results of my code, everything looks on the up and up right now for the shuffling.  Perhaps I am just super unlucky!

With the level of cooperation I have gotten from BCE, it is very unlikely he is scamming me, and just protecting himself up from exploiters.

I've run out of ideas about what possibly could be wrong, so unless he is super devious and running different code than what he's publishing, I was either unlucky or it's some super obscure problem that I cannot figure out.

Thanks for putting up with me BCE and investigating this.  Not much else I think I can think of or notice what is wrong.

Of course I know what shuffling is.  Of course you don't see it, you don't know how to look for it.  You refuse to run my code on the production server to try to detect the problem.  And even if you did, and 2's were twice as likely as Ks to come up for the user over a million trials, you'd just blame it on bad luck.

I'm not going to waste any more time until you give me something that could be sufficiently done to convince you.  You intend to keep my money because someone else took advantage of your sloppy coding and testing.  So I ask you this- what could convince you otherwise?

I show you something that's 1 in 277,000 in happening, it's just bad luck.  I show you a bug report, it clearly is impossible for any bugs to exist.  I find several bugs in your code that benefited the player, but the rest of your code must be perfect (and all of php libraries you call into).

So tell me this, give me an example of something I could actually do to show you that the deal was unfair without you blaming it on bad luck?  If it is nothing, then let me know so I quit wasting my time.  You don't seem interested in actually detecting anything, just finding an excuse to push me off.  If that's the case, just be honest about it.

Why would anyone lend at a negative interest rate?  It's not like there is a cost to store bitcoins.

But people can price that in.  It's not like it will be a big surprise when that hits.

This may be true.  The flaw I found made cards near yours about 2x as likely as cards further away.

So the odds of getting an ace, 2, 3, 4 were all quite similar, and the odds of getting a 10, J, Q, K were lower (although not impossible to get).

I'd have to see what the odds of getting a tie was.  The odds of normally getting a tie are 1/17.  In the sample file you sent me yesterday, there were 14 draws out of 216 hands.  I would expect 12.7, so it would be a bit higher, although it's not statistically significant enough to know for sure.  I have no idea what the expected value based on the improper shuffling algorithm would be, but if needed, I could calculate this.

I'm not saying any such things.

I'm saying use Bayes Theorem.

If only one guy plays the lotto, and he wins right away, yes, it probably is rigged.  If 10 million people play, and someone hits, it's far less likely that it's rigged.

If I run a simulation, if I don't apply every possibility (well, if you get below 15 bets, you quit), you dismiss it.  I'll run that test if you want.  But say it's 150,000:1 against that happening in a legit deck.  You'll just say "oh well you had bad luck, so sorry!"  It is impossible to provide enough proof to you.  I wish you would have let me know that no proof would be good enough before I wasted my time.

How could you ever prove something is rigged?  In your case, run a million samples, and if it shows a pattern the wrong way "oh, I guess you were just unlucky!"  There is no way you would ever accept any evidence no matter what.  You are taking out the fact that you got exploited by someone else out on me.

Yes, over the short term, being down 4-5 bets is not unreasonable.  You only will hit a few ties, and the player edge exists on the tie scenario.  Getting down 15 bets is MUCH harder.  Getting down 30 bets is EXTREMELY hard.  So yes, what you are showing is not hard at all to have happen.  BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED.  A much bigger downswing happened.  The distribution of the cards was EXACTLY the result of the PHP bug that I found where shuffling was flawed (cards tend to be much closer to their original shuffling positions, which make the dealer, who gets the 2nd card, much more likely to get a higher card).  Everything makes sense.

I have no idea why you run 50 sample size, it's noise at that point.  And even then, you never run so badly that you get down 15 bets or 30 bets.

I'll give you the exact odds, but being down after 50 samples is probably about 40-45%.  I'll have to run the math to simulate it, and I don't have that computer with me now.  So the odds of your scenario happening (lose 3/4) is 20% based on that number.  20% vs. 0.000036% is a huge difference.

So tell me this, what, if anything, could convince you of a problem that you could not blame on "bad luck"?  Is there anything other than an obvious payout problem (you win but never get paid any chips, or only half the proper amount)?

How could I possibly prove that the deck was rigged?  Every piece of proof I've given (php shuffle bug, empirical evidence, etc...), you claim it isn't good enough.

I found a problem that rewarded the player too much, and I LET YOU KNOW IMMEDIATELY!  I am not trying to scam you.  I am not the guy who took advantage of your flawed logic.  Do not take it out on me.

You claim it is bad luck.  But be honest with yourself, it is much much more likely that the deck was unfairly shuffled (http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18401) shows that it was broken.  This exact problem favors the house by giving the player lower cards than the house more often.
If you want to run a buggy casino that might be rigged, might not be, but there is no recourse, you will get very few players.  If someone finds an exploit, rather than telling you, they will play until you have no money left to pay out.  Especially when you treat your honest customers this way.  Your reputation is not worth it.  We are talking about 15BTC.  You offered a bet of 10BTC in the game, so it's less than two of those bets.  Did you even have money to cover a player winning (say I got as lucky as you re describing but was betting 10BTC each time, I would have been up 300 BTC, would you have paid out?)

I noticed that the test server now is running much different results.  Did you update PHP to include that bug fix?  Did something upgrade on there?  It is an impossible situation to prove at this point.  I can only look at likelihood that such a situation could have happened with a fair deck.  The odds are incredibly high (277,000:1).  You'll see on the test server, whatever changed since last night, the player wins almost all the time.  So did you upgrade it to fix the problem and then try to get me to shut up?  Because that's what it seems.  277,000:1 vs. buggy code (and you already have bugs everywhere, php had this bug before, so we know there is a high possibility of it).  Be realistic.

227,000:1, but it's impossible that it's rigged.

The bugs we found *were* in favor of the player.  Quite severely.  Yet the player still lost in most simulations.  Not only lost, but lost a fairly large amount.  This makes it far more likely that an even bigger bug is still present and harming the player.

This is incredibly statistically significant proof that there is something not right in the game.  Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  There is a >99% chance of something incorrect going on harming the player, and <1% chance that we were just really unlucky.

Yet you are taking the stance that the <1% chance is much more likely.

I urge you to reconsider.

I ran the numbers and it was 227,000:1 against what happened for 3 players to lose 15, 15, and 30 bets at that game with the incorrect payouts.  This means beyond any reasonable doubt, the game was rigged (likely unintentionally, but still not a fair game).

I'm hoping that BCE does the right thing and refunds my money for playing on a rigged game.  It would let the entire Bitcoin community know he is committed to running a fair game and if a problem is found, he is willing to come forward and repay players when there is a mistake.  It would speak very positively for his casino that as a pioneer, there will be bugs, but if they harm the player, the player will not be taken advantage of.