[ANN] Metadice: A Litecoin dice game that doesn't spam the blockchain

[jade087]

I noticed that there seemed to be a lack of Litecoin dice sites, http://ltcdice.net/ seems to have disappeared and many of the others look boring, so over the last two days I've put together a dice site that tries to be a little bit smarter in the way it operates.

http://metadice.com

http://metadice.com/img/screenshot-small.png

Features:

•     Fully automated betting with 98%+ break-even odds.
•     Faster to verify than BTC betting since LTC transactions are naturally processed faster!
•     Provably fair betting algorithm (of course), no need to sign up - but you must send LTC from a wallet that lets you receive coins on the same address (default client works great).
•     Improve your winnings and reduce blockchain spam by using non-confirming addresses - instead of receiving 0.001 LTC on a loss, non-confirmation improves your winnings by 0.2%.
•     Accessible over Namecoin DNS, http://metadice.bit - e.g. through dot-bit.
•     Combat problem gambling by blacklisting addresses - I was inspired by patrikr's comment on Reddit, if you find you have a problem you can force the system to ignore your bets.

The most interesting learning experience has been just how much the default Litecoin client tries to avoid blockchain spam. Any payment smaller than 0.0001 LTC is ignored by the client, and for anything but large transactions the client requests a 0.02 LTC transaction fee. Therefore you'll probably have most luck with bets above 0.02 LTC.

The site is kinda still in beta but if you have any feedback or ideas I'd love to improve the game. The site only has a limited wallet so maximum bets are low for a while. Feel free to PM me! I have a lot of other ideas that I'd like to implement e.g. accessible over Tor?

[jade087]

We've had to increase the standard transaction fee to 0.1 LTC, which has also meant that the minimum bets for some addresses have had to increase as well (so that you would actually win something after fees!). When the upcoming Litecoin client based on 0.8.1 is released - which hopefully will have lower default transaction fees - we'll be able to reduce the necessary transaction fees as well.

So far we've had 225 bets win a total of 178.7 LTC.

[jade087]

Someone made a 1 LTC bet on an address with a 16.9 LTC minimum. It didn't make much sense to consider this a donation, so now if you make a bet that is lower than the minimum bet yet higher than the transaction fee (0.1 LTC), it will also be returned back.

[jade087]

The site's been so popular we're going to move to dedicated servers! We'll be migrating this weekend, which will let us enable much faster transactions, and to push out some minor interface updates. Downtime will hopefully be minimal. Bets will continue to be processed and paid out as usual.

The server switch will occur Sat 18 May between 5am-10am GMT / 10pm-3am PDT. It should be finished much earlier than that. Updates will be posted to @metadice on Twitter and to http://metadice.com.

[TheSwede75]

So you are saying that instead of spamming the blockchain it spams altcoinforum. Hmmm... Innovative!

[jade087]

Better to inform users of a site migration than wonder why everything's broken!

The server move has been a fantastic success, we're now being served from the Netherlands. Until the DNS has propogated you should be silently redirected to http://new.metadice.com.

We've also given the site a modern refresh with icons (from the Nuvola set), doubled the frequency of bet checks and payouts, and add tons of little details to improve your site experience. If there's any problems please send us an e-mail or a tweet.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

What exactly is a non-confirming address? It's the first time I hear about this. Technical explanation?

[jade087]

A confirming address is one that, if you lose on a 1 LTC bet, you will get 0.001 LTC back.

A non-confirming address is one that, if you lose on a 1 LTC bet, you won't get anything back. Instead you can check your bet status on the website.

Because LTC network fees are currently so high, it doesn't really make sense to send 0.001 LTC back with a 0.1 LTC fee (for example), so non-confirming addresses work really well.

[jade087]

Today we updated the Litecoin daemon to 0.8.3.x, and everything seems to be working perfectly. Since we're now on 0.8.x, we can reduce the transaction fees for winnings and confirming losses to 0.02 LTC (from 0.1 LTC) - so your winnings will be higher!

Enjoy.

[jade087]

Metadice is now up for sale: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=315263