Using the old rule is much clearer and fairer for everyone in my opinion.
What was the old rule?
The "old" rule is in fact still in vigor. We are currently considering changing it,
hence this thread.
The rule in question is described here:
https://bitbet.us/faq/#1121In short, it states that bets received (where "receives" means "transaction is included in a block")
after betting closes or after the resolution event occurs will be considered "donations" to BitBet.
I remember people talking about this. The best policy is not to honor the bet and refund it. Considering it a donation is wrong, as clearly it was intended to be a bet. If you start allowing the bets you'll open up yourself to being scammed.
We certainly won't allow late bets into the pool as they are blatant abuse of the legitimate bettor.
We tend to agree with the "refund late bets" policy (that's what we've actually been doing in practice since taking on management of the site). It seems like the right thing to do.
However, this amounts to manually beating scammers away with a stick, a fairly time consuming affair.
Our current thinking is that we're going to refund late bets, but with a much higher fee than normal to discourage would-be abusers. It feels like a nice middle-of-the-road between the current, fairly extreme
approach and the "laissez-faire, BitBet mods will clean up the mess" approach.
Thoughts ?
