bustadice – Next Generation Dice

[Stunna]

So, if I see everything correctly, you are both (partial) owner of bustabit and bustadice? Or is bustadice just the site that 'evolved' from bustabit?

I am the exclusive owner of bustabit, and a partial owner of bustadice. Bustadice is it's own project separate from bustabit. I would describe it as "a bustabit inspired dice site".

Daniel is the guy who will be running it on a day-to-day basis (and in fact, for security I do not and will never have access to the servers). I helped a bit with the development, and going forward my primary role is just running the "seed server" and auditing the game results and co-signed of the cold-storage.

Another question: what is the model that should make profit behind this? Is there a commission on profits for the investors?

The site charges investors 25% of the house edge on each bet (regardless if win's or not). Other than that, everything goes directly to the bankroll (and thus investors).

Site looks very promising, excited to try it out. Not sure how I feel about 25% of the house edge regardless of win or loss, would suck to lose money on the investment and then have to pay fees but profit wise it still should work out in long run. The dilution aspect would make me a bit apprehensive to invest but it's pretty unique and seems good for longterm investors.

[NLNico]

Looks good Some questions:



Who is the "neutral third party" of the cold storage?

Can you still adjust investment amounts without being charged the dilution fee (eg to lower the onsite amount or increase/lower the offsite amount of your investment - I obviously don't mean increasing onsite which is of course charged.)

The audit system sounds a bit like the idea I had 3 years ago, so cool to see that I am just confused to not see the audit hash anywhere and not mentioned in the verifier either. If audit seed is used in game calculation, wouldn't it be needed in verifier too?

[RHavar]

Site looks very promising, excited to try it out. Not sure how I feel about 25% of the house edge regardless of win or loss, would suck to lose money on the investment and then have to pay fees but profit wise it still should work out in long run. The dilution aspect would make me a bit apprehensive to invest but it's pretty unique and seems good for longterm investors.

Thanks! Daniel and I spent a bit of timing going back and forth about how the commission structure should work, but I think it's a pretty reasonable compromise. Only charging a commission on profits is definitely better for investors (even though over a long period of a time it's the same) but I think it makes sense to offload as much variance to investors as possible: after all, that's what they're +EV (and +Expected bankroll growth) for!

That said, investing is inherently very risky and the commission structure does exacerbate that, so it is pretty sane to risk less than you otherwise would.

[RHavar]

Who is the "neutral third party" of the cold storage?

The neutral third party is quite well known in the bitcoin community, but has asked to not be named to avoid their participation looking like an endorsement. In the case of any dispute or problems between me and Daniel, the third key holder will not arbitrate nor in the general case has enough information to sanely do so. So their primary role is simply help out in the case of Daniel or me has an issue that would prevent us signing (e.g. gets hit by a bus). You can pretty much think of it was 2-of-2 cold-storage, with a backup in case someone dies.  (This could have also been achieved using time-locked transactions, but it's incredibly tedious)

Edit: In the interest of transparency, we are still working on testing/verifying the cold-wallet solution. So there is currently no money held in it, and we've told interested investors to hold off for a day while we make sure everyone is comfortable with it.


 

Can you still adjust investment amounts without being charged the dilution fee (eg to lower the onsite amount or increase/lower the offsite amount of your investment - I obviously don't mean increasing onsite which is of course charged.)

You are charged the dilution fee on the difference of your (onsite+offsite). So if you add 1 bitcoin to the onsite, and subtract the same from the offsite (at the same time) your net position is the same and you are not charged any fees.  I think the whole UI needs a bit of improvement, but it should be more obvious when it tells you the expected dilution fee, so you can easily see how it works.

The audit system sounds a bit like the idea I had 3 years ago, so cool to see that

Yup! Nice job on that. It looks like pretty much the exact same thing. The only difference I see is that instead of a weekly audit, we do it in real-time. We require users to reveal their hashes before using their money


I am just confused to not see the audit hash anywhere and not mentioned in the verifier either.

If audit seed is used in game calculation, wouldn't it be needed in verifier too?

Yeah, but it's abstracted away. The "Server seed" is actually the concatenation of the two seeds. But the user just needs to copy and paste the whole thing into the verifier script. So from their perspective it's exactly like verifying any other game. We'll come up with a more technical specification, but this is the high level overview:
https://gist.github.com/RHavar/285c295f7906e03369cd66580a1b5f45

But you can see it in the verifier:
view-source:https://bustadice.github.io/verifier/

Code:

const seeds = serverSeed.split("_").filter(v => !!v)
...
const [ auditSeed, gameSeed ] = seeds

[RHavar]

I'm going to stop taking over Devan's thread, but one last thing:

The audit system sounds a bit like the idea I had 3 years ago, so cool to see that

One future extension I'd like to make, is introducing *another* party: the arbitrator. Currently the game-server and audit-server communicate through a (validated-on-both-sides) tls connection. So instead of communicating directly, you could proxy the connection through an arbitrator (who is running on the same datacenter to avoid latency) and acts as a dumb proxy with no means to decrypt or modify the connection. However, the arbitrator would run tcpdump on the traffic for logs.

Now if the audit-server and the game-server ever got into a dispute (either because 1 party was malicious, or one party was undetectably hacked and had wrong data). The tls keys could be revealed, and the arbitrator sees who was right. This would work especially well if the arbitrator was the 3rd (2-of-3 cold storage key holder), so in a hypothetical dispute would know who to side with.

But this is a bit overkill for now 

[michkima]

Awesome project you have here guys, something refreshing to see. Great that you didn't go the old and tiring dice again route.
Although, I would like to know the difference with how bustabit works here. Since from the sample game you have on the site
it seems like it's the same as bustabit without the graph and that each player can play their own bustabit game by themselves.
Any more differences we should know off?

[devans]

Awesome project you have here guys, something refreshing to see. Great that you didn't go the old and tiring dice again route.
Although, I would like to know the difference with how bustabit works here. Since from the sample game you have on the site
it seems like it's the same as bustabit without the graph and that each player can play their own bustabit game by themselves.
Any more differences we should know off?

I think that's a fair comparison. bustadice is close to what I imagine a single-player bustabit might look like.

The most important gameplay differences to bustabit are that all bets are instantaneous and players don't share the same rolls. This means that games are faster and the max bet–though not necessarily the max profit–is much higher, which should be interesting for whales.

Also, because players don't share the same rolls, bustadice has less variance for the house than bustabit, which is nice for investors.

[BTCevo]

Nice job here, as I can see this is a nother new dice game which offer really simple design but of course with huge bankroll in it. But if I can ask here, is the method of getting the multiplier exactly the same as bustabit? From what I see here, there is no actual number that become our result, there is only multiplier which give the result of our profit

And one more question here. Do you intend to give out the max bet that we can bet here or may be max profit that we can take so people do not confuse when it comes to martingale strategy

[devans]

Nice job here, as I can see this is a nother new dice game which offer really simple design but of course with huge bankroll in it. But if I can ask here, is the method of getting the multiplier exactly the same as bustabit? From what I see here, there is no actual number that become our result, there is only multiplier which give the result of our profit

Each bet's multiplier is calculated from its hash, just like in bustabit. The way we come up with the hash is different, though. You can read about how it works in this high-level technical overview from Ryan.

But from the player's perspective, verifying bets is virtually identical to how it's done in other provably fair dice casinos: The server generates a server seed and you pick a client seed. Then, after you've finished playing, you reveal the server seed and check your rolls. Take a look at the open-source verifier or look at its source code for details.

And one more question here. Do you intend to give out the max bet that we can bet here or may be max profit that we can take so people do not confuse when it comes to martingale strategy

The max bet is only limited by the max profit, which in turn is 0.75 % of the bankroll. Any bet whose potential profit doesn't exceed the max profit is allowed. For example, at the current max profit of approximately Ƀ 6 you could bet Ƀ 6 at 2.00x or Ƀ 600 at 1.01x because both have a potential profit of of Ƀ 6.

Of course you don't need to calculate this yourself. The current max profit will always be shown next to the game controls.

[michkima]

Awesome project you have here guys, something refreshing to see. Great that you didn't go the old and tiring dice again route.
Although, I would like to know the difference with how bustabit works here. Since from the sample game you have on the site
it seems like it's the same as bustabit without the graph and that each player can play their own bustabit game by themselves.
Any more differences we should know off?

I think that's a fair comparison. bustadice is close to what I imagine a single-player bustabit might look like.

The most important gameplay differences to bustabit are that all bets are instantaneous and players don't share the same rolls. This means that games are faster and the max bet–though not necessarily the max profit–is much higher, which should be interesting for whales.

Also, because players don't share the same rolls, bustadice has less variance for the house than bustabit, which is nice for investors.

Thought as much. It's nice especially for the people that love bustabit, since this is the bustabit on fast forward mode. Indeed the name suits the game mechanics.

Well, I am looking forward playing here and hope to hit that 1,000,000 multiplier. Good luck and I hope more investors come in so that max win goes up some more.

[CrazyCraig]

Congrats on the release devans and Ryan. Very nice looking UI.

[veleten]

a breath of fresh air in the pool of the regular dice sites
and the investment system is well worth looking into
pretty confusing for a newbie to be honest with you,took me a couple of re-reading to understand myself
the provably fair with the third party is something totally new
but I could not find the actual HE figures and how do you calculate investor's profit/loss from each separate bet?

[devans]

Congrats on the release devans and Ryan. Very nice looking UI.

Thanks, CrazyCraig!

a breath of fresh air in the pool of the regular dice sites
and the investment system is well worth looking into
pretty confusing for a newbie to be honest with you,took me a couple of re-reading to understand myself
the provably fair with the third party is something totally new
but I could not find the actual HE figures and how do you calculate investor's profit/loss from each separate bet?

The house edge is 1 %. I'll add an example to the FAQ's section on offsite investing with the next update to (hopefully) explain it a little better.

Investors are collectively charged 0.25 % (25 % of the house edge) of each wager as a commission. After that the investors receive the entire profit or loss of every wager. How much an individual investor gains or loses is proportional to his share in the bankroll. For example if your onsite plus offsite makes up 1 % of the bankroll, you'll receive 1 % of the profit/loss.

[devans]

With only eight hours to go until betting starts, investors have contributed a total of Ƀ 1,745 to the bankroll so far.

Quick reminder: Until the countdown on the play page reaches zero, the dilution fee of 10 % is waived. If you plan on investing, be sure to take advantage of that!

[JackpotRacer]

With only eight hours to go until betting starts, investors have contributed a total of Ƀ 1,745 to the bankroll so far.

Quick reminder: Until the countdown on the play page reaches zero, the dilution fee of 10 % is waived. If you plan on investing, be sure to take advantage of that!

very nice Bank Roll already

are bustadice owners allowed to invest in the Bank Roll

good luck

[Awnar]

I would like to ask this simple question if there's an affiliate program on your dice site? 

I'm too excited for the release hope to see an active players on the chat box. 6 hours and 30 minutes before the release, see you later guys.

[devans]

I would like to ask this simple question if there's an affiliate program on your dice site? 

I'm too excited for the release hope to see an active players on the chat box. 6 hours and 30 minutes before the release, see you later guys.

We don't offer an affiliate program right now and don't have any plans for one in the immediate future.

I'm looking forward to the full release as well. See you there in a couple of hours!

[RHavar]

Just 3 hours to go, and the bankroll is looking pretty healthy!

So at launch it looks like the max-profit is going to be >21.645 bitcoin ($93k USD at current prices). As far as I can tell, this is the largest max-profit[1] of any bitcoin casino at the moment. Or anyone aware of something bigger? Hopefully the whales take note 


[1] Sites like bustabit have a bigger max profit, but they constrain the max-bet. So I'm looking at it from the perspective someone trying to do something like a 2x bet

[Josepht]

Just 3 hours to go, and the bankroll is looking pretty healthy!

So at launch it looks like the max-profit is going to be >21.645 bitcoin ($93k USD at current prices). As far as I can tell, this is the largest max-profit[1] of any bitcoin casino at the moment. Or anyone aware of something bigger? Hopefully the whales take note 


[1] Sites like bustabit have a bigger max profit, but they constrain the max-bet. So I'm looking at it from the perspective someone trying to do something like a 2x bet

As you can see in my casino overview thread, Primedice has a max win of 50 BTC. I couldn't find it on their site, but I've asked around a bit, and it seems that it's 50 BTC. It isn't confirmed by a mod or something, but it looked like everyone agreed on that amount.

Still an impressive result I'd say. I'm looking forward to the launch in a few hours

[NLNico]

Just 3 hours to go, and the bankroll is looking pretty healthy!

So at launch it looks like the max-profit is going to be >21.645 bitcoin ($93k USD at current prices). As far as I can tell, this is the largest max-profit[1] of any bitcoin casino at the moment. Or anyone aware of something bigger? Hopefully the whales take note 


[1] Sites like bustabit have a bigger max profit, but they constrain the max-bet. So I'm looking at it from the perspective someone trying to do something like a 2x bet

As you can see in my casino overview thread, Primedice has a max win of 50 BTC. I couldn't find it on their site, but I've asked around a bit, and it seems that it's 50 BTC. It isn't confirmed by a mod or something, but it looked like everyone agreed on that amount.

Still an impressive result I'd say. I'm looking forward to the launch in a few hours

The PD FAQ says max win is 30 BTC (so on 2x it's 15 BTC = less than 21 BTC.) Unless FAQ is outdated (which is possible I guess.) Technically SafeDice has a higher max profit but the HE will be 1.7 - 5% on those amounts.


edit: either way, bustadice BR/max profit indeed looks good