bitbattle.me - no deposit, instant bets, ZERO waiting! 0-conf accepted!

[Herbert]

In case you wonder/noticed:
This morning there was a somehow strange situation. Starting from 5:59 until 10:15 not a single incoming bet transaction got confirmed. As Slim was quite active in this timeframe the available amount of confirmed coins gradually decreased until it hit the safety limit. Therefor the site went into "Backend Down"  mode, not accepting any new incoming bet and immediately refunding it. Then came Block #216886 at 10:15 including all missing transactions at once

I really did not expect that no confirmations come in for such a long time. I almost started panicking about a new/unkown type of double-spend attack . But as Slim really seems to be a nice person as far as I know him I knew it must be something else.

So, Lesson learned? Hot wallet balance needs to increase to have more confirmed coins available any time And obviously more players are needed, so that if one player/wallet has this kind of problem there are enough other transactions that still go through fine. (I suspect the main problem is quite long chains of unconfirmed transactions being built up between bitbattle and Slims wallet. Unconfirmed win payouts were immediately again coming in as new bet, again ending up in the next unconfirmed payout...)

[IXIslimIXI]

In case you wonder/noticed:
This morning there was a somehow strange situation. Starting from 5:59 until 10:15 not a single incoming bet transaction got confirmed. As Slim was quite active in this timeframe the available amount of confirmed coins gradually decreased until it hit the safety limit. Therefor the site went into "Backend Down"  mode, not accepting any new incoming bet and immediately refunding it. Then came Block #216886 at 10:15 including all missing transactions at once

I really did not expect that no confirmations come in for such a long time. I almost started panicking about a new/unkown type of double-spend attack . But as Slim really seems to be a nice person as far as I know him I knew it must be something else.

So, Lesson learned? Hot wallet balance needs to increase to have more confirmed coins available any time And obviously more players are needed, so that if one player/wallet has this kind of problem there are enough other transactions that still go through fine. (I suspect the main problem is quite long chains of unconfirmed transactions being built up between bitbattle and Slims wallet. Unconfirmed win payouts were immediately again coming in as new bet, again ending up in the next unconfirmed payout...)

lol... yeah, I was on a losing streak for the record books too!!! late night gambling... baaaaadddddd

[IXIslimIXI]

Down again.

I brokeded it?

[Herbert]

Down again.

I brokeded it?

Not broke, but same situation like this morning. Site is sitting on a pile of unconfirmed inputs from your bets, so the confirmed balance is too low to accept new bets.

Which client do you currently use? Because I was more or less assuming that all clients will prefer confirmed inputs to unconfirmed ones when initiating a transaction. I looked at some of your bet transactions and am quite surprised that seemingly all your bet's inputs are consisting of my previous payment outputs, yet unconfirmed. This is generating huge chains of unconfirmed transactions - I can understand that these transactions are not preferred by miners even if they all have txfees set.

[IXIslimIXI]

Blockchain.info

I've been using it for a while though so why is it just now starting?

[Herbert]

Blockchain.info

I've been using it for a while though so why is it just now starting?

Good question. For now I increased the hot wallet balance, but I don't think it will be enough to cover a situation like this morning where it took 4 hours to confirm the inputs. I am still trying to understand exactly how this situation evolved - Hope I can come up with a strategy different from "just put ten times more into the hot wallet"...

[Herbert]

Good news - I think i found a possibility to decrease the amount of confirmed coins necessary for filling up a payout while keeping my strict rule of using unconfirmed coins only if they were received by the same player. This requires some code change and testing, but seems totally doable .

[Herbert]

In case you wonder/noticed:
This morning there was a somehow strange situation. Starting from 5:59 until 10:15 not a single incoming bet transaction got confirmed. As Slim was quite active in this timeframe the available amount of confirmed coins gradually decreased until it hit the safety limit. Therefor the site went into "Backend Down"  mode, not accepting any new incoming bet and immediately refunding it. Then came Block #216886 at 10:15 including all missing transactions at once

Thought this might be worth sharing with you :-):
Here is a snapshot from my balance tracker at that time (Red is unconfirmed, blue is confirmed balance):

Each downwards step on the blue line is the payout of a session with positive outcome, so in addition to the unconfirmed coins that came in during the session confirmed funds had to be used for the payout.
The first part is what i usually see: After a relative short time the incoming bets get confirmed, so the amount of confirmed coins jumps up and down, but overall keeps quite stable. But then at 5:59 the confirmations just stopped and the confirmed balance started tumbling down...

[Herbert]

There was a bug in multplayer payment code that could lead to not paying out all players of a session 
So far only one session was affected by this bug (http://bitbattle.me/game/31a91d4518b14139bbe1091356ea9488/). Player SHatschiM did not receive his 0.094 payout when the session was closed. The bug is now fixed and the payment has been made (you can see it now in the session log, the latest payment was issued several hours after the session was closed).

SHatschiM, if you read this: Please accept my apology for the late payment!

[Herbert]

Site will be down a few minutes for upgrading...

Good news - I think i found a possibility to decrease the amount of confirmed coins necessary for filling up a payout while keeping my strict rule of using unconfirmed coins only if they were received by the same player. This requires some code change and testing, but seems totally doable .

The upgraded payment engine is now rolled out. With this change I am confident that the site will not run out of confirmed balance again (at least not due to long confirmation time ). I put a lot of time in testing this, but as always please let me know when something seems not correct!

[ingrownpocket]

http://bitbattle.me/bet/50000/

 

[Herbert]

Server had some troubles and was restarted, but the site did not come up clean again. Looking at it right now...

Up and running! Database needed some nudgin to start working again 

[Herbert]

Site update rolled out today with new Statistics and many more small fixes:

• Bet History
• Session History
• Payment History
• Slightly redesigned main page
• Limit the number of bets/sessions/payments displayed on the players dashboard (As info on past data is now available in the player's statistics)

Especially the last change should significantly improve the loading speed of your dashboard! And as always - Please let me know if you see any issue with the changes  

[Herbert]

Pushed some small updates today:

• Make the notification of waiting multiplayer game more prominent, including waiting opponents name.
• Make sure to close multiplayer sessions in time even when no bet was placed.
• Inform player about remaining seconds if he wants to close a session early.
• Added info on transaction acceptance policy to rules
• Show timestamp in payments history

And some numbers:
The total volume of bitbattle.me just crossed the 50000 BTC line, with almost 70000 bets placed in more than 3300 sessions!

[Herbert]

Bet limits raised!

Bet limits for all bets have just been raised by 66%! Now you can win up to 50 Bitcoin in a single bet!

[IXIslimIXI]

Remember that conversation we had a while back where I was concerned about people closing each others sessions... Well, someone just closed mine and I'm pretty sure it's happened before. Kind of retarded but I knew it would happen. Regardless, I like the setup the way it is, just thought I would point out that it's happening.

[mnightwaffle]

all them 'lost' back to back on 40%   http://bitbattle.me/game/67bd2ef1dad7485588a1740f6d43adcf/

annnd... 15x continuous loss on 55% chance http://bitbattle.me/game/b266dbc7c75f4f2dad7b5ea1e7f17801/

so rookie, so embarrassing    good times !

[IXIslimIXI]

all them 'lost' back to back on 40%   http://bitbattle.me/game/67bd2ef1dad7485588a1740f6d43adcf/

annnd... 15x continuous loss on 55% chance http://bitbattle.me/game/b266dbc7c75f4f2dad7b5ea1e7f17801/

so rookie, so embarrassing    good times !

Stick with it, you'll have much worse streaks, trust me. lol

[Herbert]

Remember that conversation we had a while back where I was concerned about people closing each others sessions... Well, someone just closed mine and I'm pretty sure it's happened before. Kind of retarded but I knew it would happen. Regardless, I like the setup the way it is, just thought I would point out that it's happening.

Oh my, like expected I think the only way to get this sorted is to add optional accounts. So when you have created an account you can only close sessions when you are logged in, but without the 30 seconds waiting time. When you don't have an account everything stays like it is.
And as a bonus this will be the enabler for adding chat in multiplayer sessions :-)

[Herbert]

Finally I found a solution to the occasional loading timeouts you might have noticed. Turned out that the websocket connections slow down the whole server process quite a lot (while the load is totally low). Now websocket and normal connections are fully decoupled and handled by separate server processes. The speed gain is impressive .