ApopheniaBTC - Bet and solve the challenges to win BTC.

[nocube]

Awesome! Thank you!

[Stunna]

Have any images not been solved?

[Tritonio]

Have any images not been solved?

Nope. Nothing has reached the "expired" state.

I posted two new pics:

[Tritonio]

New text picture:


EDIT: fixed the picture

[Tritonio]

Sorry for this. I had forgotten to add the answer "spiral notebook" (I didn't think of it even though we also call them like that in Greece) to the notebook picture. I noticed now while looking at answers given by other players and since nobody had solved it, I added the answer and revalidated the bets.

The only bad thing is that AFTER the player that answer "spiral notebook" someone (else) had submitted the other correct answer "notepad" BUT he/she hasn't paid for it fully. To get a refund for his pot though he will have to fully pay for the bet so that the site checks it. If he doesn't do so in the next day I'll try and do the refund manually. (The site will ONLY check/refund/reward bets that are fully or over paid)

[AngryCatfish]

Excellent that spiral won, me and my girl friend spent last night wracking our brains trying to solve these. I've never found any gambling appealing until now, thanks for coming up with something fun and creative. One idea we had was what if the amounts rewarded started higher, and as the picture begins to clear the pot decreases (still going up with guesses of course), that way people are rewarded with earlier more difficult guesses.

[Tritonio]

Excellent that spiral won, me and my girl friend spent last night wracking our brains trying to solve these. I've never found any gambling appealing until now, thanks for coming up with something fun and creative.

I'm very happy that you like it AngryCatfish.

One idea we had was what if the amounts rewarded started higher, and as the picture begins to clear the pot decreases (still going up with guesses of course), that way people are rewarded with earlier more difficult guesses.

There are many different ways the reward system could work and honestly they all seem fun to me. I choose this one because it guarantees that at some point, every picture will be worth betting on. The way it worst now the starting pot is 4 times the bet. So if by the time you are 25% sure that you know the answer, you HAVE to play. And if you miss, you increase the pot which probably means that someone that was 20% sure that he knew the answer, now HAS to play. In theory it can cause a chain reaction of bets, which I believe we witnessed on the "goldfinger" picture last week. I am a bit afraid that if the starting pot was decreasing, it MIGHT in some cases cause some of the harder pictures to be not worth betting on. If you start for example with 20% certainty about your answer and then, because of the improvement in the picture you get 5% certainty every hour but the starting pot decreases so it's always less than 1/certainty*bet then then nobody should be expected to bet on the picture. I would have to manually check pictures to evaluate whether they will be easy enough at some point to be worth the bet (which is impossible since my opinion would be highly subjective and biased).

Bets are still few in numbers so I don't make any profit from this, just very minor losses. My ideas to cope with this currently are:

1. Spend money on advertisement. The bad thing is that it looks like that most people that visit the site through ads don't place bets. The highest bet/visit ratio is the one from people coming over from the bitcoin wiki, this forum and through betwithcoins. Obviously this is because of better targeting. Maybe if I did a custom deal for advertising on some other site, or perhaps betwithbtc, I would get more players for the money spent.

2. Do an IPO and sell shares to earn money and have a few people (the shareholders or "chairmen" voted by shareholders) to advise me on how these money should be spent to advertise and develop the site. Shares will pay dividends from the equity.

3.Increase the starting bet AND also increase the fee. An idea would be startingpot=9*bet and fee=90% of bet. This would cause the chain reaction to happen earlier BUT it would also mean that multiple bets from a single player wouldn't make that much sense. Right now it's 4 times the bet and 40% fee so you can bet a second time to regain 60% of the previous bet plus the pot. 90% fee would mean you only recover 10% of your previous bet by betting again. In both cases (4x/40% or 9x/90%) the breaking point for me would be 10 bets per picture. That's when the site starts earning something.

4. Increase the starting pot and keep the fee at 40%. This would mean that my breaking point would move to more than 10 bets. Making the starting pot 8x the bet would mean I need 20 bets to break even. I doubt that this is viable for the time being. I believe it will be viable in the future but I don't know how far this future will be so I don't won't to play with the starting bet, increasing it today just to decrease it next week/month.

5. Make the starting pot 10x the bet and increase the fee for the first 10 bets to 100%. This means that in during the first 10 bets the reward will be huge so many different people will have an incentive to try one answer each (there is no way to win back your money spent during the first bets though so I don't expect a second answer for most players). After 10 bets have been accepted the fee is reduced to x% (x could easily be lower than 40% too at this point). This solution has a few problems. First of all it increases the complexity of the site, both for the development and the players. Secondly it will be somewhat hard to be certain whether you bet will fall into the first 10 or not, thankfully this uncertainty is one-directional: you expect it to have 100% fee and it ends up having less, which is not bad. If you expect it to have less than 100% it will never have more than what you expect. So my main objection here is the complexity but if people like this idea though I shall seriously consider it because it offers a middle ground between (3.) and (4.), it increases the starting pot, this rewarding early players more, while keeping my break even point the same (10 bets).

EDIT:
Two more pics:

[Mooshire]

One of them reminds me of Rambo.

[Tritonio]

The text one was harder than I expected. It took ~3 days just to reach the point where I start to see the text. Sorry for that I'll keep it simpler next time. Consider this picture to be added just now. ;-)

Oh and I added one more picture:


BTW do you people want higher or lower bets?

[Boelens]

The text one was harder than I expected. It took ~3 days just to reach the point where I start to see the text. Sorry for that I'll keep it simpler next time. Consider this picture to be added just now. ;-)

Oh and I added one more picture:


BTW do you people want higher or lower bets?

Higher would be pretty awesome.

[Tritonio]

Some arithmetic bug caused the whole hot wallet to be gradually sent to the player that answered the Vera Miles picture.

No worries though. The hot wallet had little money in it, the bug is fixed and I'm refilling the hot wallet in a few minutes. :-)

[Boelens]

Some arithmetic bug caused the whole hot wallet to be gradually sent to the player that answered the Vera Miles picture.

No worries though. The hot wallet had little money in it, the bug is fixed and I'm refilling the hot wallet in a few minutes. :-)

Ouch, how much was in it? Great for the person who won though =P.

[Tritonio]

Ouch, how much was in it? Great for the person who won though =P.

He got 0.334BTC because of the bug. Plus the pot for the picture of course.  

Really stupid bug... It took me some time to find what was really wrong. It turned out that while the whole site works on integers for prices, there was a point the price was not cast to an integer. So the value 0.00875 (his bet) was supposed to be converted to 875000 but instead it was some value very close to that which caused some comparison to always recognize the bet as something that was just paid and then, because the picture was already solved, the site kept returning the bet back to him over and over every 5 minutes until the cold wallet was emptied.

EDIT:
Tomorrow when I'll post new pictures, the fee will be 50% (it now is 40%) but the starting pot will be even higher: 6 times the bet (it now is 4x). This should reward more those that take their chances earlier.

[Tritonio]

This is will expire in a few minutes!

[Tritonio]

1. The player that got the hot wallet contacted me and offered to return it. :-) How cool is that??

2. I added a new picture. It's a person. The starting pot is 6 times the bet. It's quite high compared to older pictures AND it has a bonus carried over from the expired picture. So it's a pretty high starting pot: 0.04375BTC for a bet of 0.005BTC (x8.75). And as I said yesterday I also increased the bet fee from 40% to 50% (in other words my breaking point is somewhat higher now but I think it's worth it).

[uncaer9]

Just solved my first picture - "spare parts"  
I really like that website though I've lost more than I won.

[Tritonio]

Nice work uncaer9. I was wondering why people hadn't solved that one yet. :-)

[Mooshire]

Dang it, someone got to the text one before me lol. Good job!

[vit1988]

think i need new glasses  i'm wondering how you did solve that

[Tritonio]

New pic!


Would you guys be interested in having multiple ways to distort an image? Each image getting distorted randomly by one of the available algorithms?