I've been working on code to allow big investors to reduce their counter-party risk by declaring "offsite" coins that they want to invest.
It goes like this (in the prototype):
You have 10k coins. You want to invest them at JD, but you don't want to trust them to a dodgy dice site that might run off with them. You also don't want to contribute to the centralisation of all the CLAMs.
So you deposit 1000 coins, invest them, then in the chat you type "/cold 9000" which means "I have 9000 more coins in at home that I also want to invest". The site takes you at your word, adds another 9k to the bankroll, and you get to risk 0.5% of the 10k total on every roll from now on. The max profit on the site goes up an extra 180 in addition to the 20 it went up when you invested the 1000.
If the site does badly you'll take losses, and they come out of the 1k you deposited. If it ever gets to the point that you can no longer afford for the site to suffer a full max-profit loss without it driving your on-site investment negative, your "/cold" command will be undone, and you'll be left with just whatever is left of your initial 1000 coins invested.
This gives you all the benefits of depositing and investing you
r full 10k bankroll with only 10% of the counter-party risk.
I've put a rough prototype up at
https://doge-dice.com/ for you to try it out. It spams the chat with INFO: lines about upcoming forced divestments and such like, which wouldn't appear in a final release, but I think they help make it clearer what's going on. It also gives you a target to aim for - "if I win just 2k more I can force <user 27> out of their position" etc.
So I figure it's worth having people play around with it before making any decisions about how and whether to go live with it on JD. The test site uses worthless play coins. You get 100 free with every new account, and people are mostly happy to tip them to you if you run out. Please let me know if you discover any issues with it, and I'd like to hear comments and ideas about how it should be changed before going live on JD.
Currently you can set your "/cold" amount to be anything up to 199 times your actual onsite investment amount, meaning the total of onsite and offsite investments can be up to 200 times your actual onsite amount. Since you risk up to 0.5% of your investment per roll, that means that specifying the maximum of 199 times for the offsite amount is effectively saying you are prepared to risk your entire deposit per roll. That's clearly insane.
Some have suggested that I should pick a nice low maximum multiplier, like 10x or something. But I worry that if the maximum is half sensible then everyone will use it, whether they have coins offsite or not. What should the maximum be?
I notice that with this system there's no way to risk less than 0.5% of your deposit per roll. So how about if we lower the max-profit-percent to 0.1%, and increase the maximum multiplier to 1000x - this gives the same top limit, but allows ultra-conservative people the chance of running at 1/10 Kelly.
Another question is how to distribute the staking rewards. If there are two investors, both deposit 1000 coins, and one uses "/cold 3000" to increase his effective investment to 4000, he now has 80% of the bankroll, and gets 80% of all betting profits and losses. But what about staking rewards? Should he also get 80% of those? Or should they be split in proportion to the actual onsite invested amount, since those are the only coins that are earning staking rewards?
Lots of questions - hopefully I'll get some thoughtful answers...
The testing is going well. I still need to limit changes in user offsite balances to maybe 5 changes per day, because the test site suggests that otherwise people will mess with it constantly which is annoying for players. Aiming at a constantly changing maximum profit gets tiresome fast.
I also need to add some documentation and warnings. It's easy to lose your whole balance very quickly if you use the /cold feature without understanding it.
I have it sharing out the stakes based only on onsite investment amounts now.
I guess I'll be putting it on JD in 2 or 3 days.
I put the code live immediately after yesterday's commission run, at midnight.
Very quickly the "bankroll" shot up due to people declaring offsite coins, but the actual coins on the site didn't change much at all. One of our big investors sold a significant part of his balance to a newcomer, but the newcomer left it on the site. We now have a bankroll of 4.6 million CLAMs, most of which don't exist.
Are you happy with the rollout of this feature? So far it does not appear to have led to investors moving coins off site to minimize counter party risk. JD shows as invested as 5 times the total amount of clams that have been dug.
I'm a little disappointed that nobody has moved their coins offsite, since that was the whole point of adding the feature. Then again, even I haven't moved any of mine offsite.
I think part of the problem is that there's not really anywhere else to put them. I have a pretty poor Internet connection and so can't stake from a local machine with any reliability. I don't know of any "staking pool" where I can have someone else stake my coins for me and take a fee, so what option am I left with? I expect most investors feel the same way, except that rather than blaming their Internet connection they'll say they can't be bothered to learn how to stake efficiently.
I'm thinking some of your investors are not being totally honest about how many coins they have!
I realize you have safeguards in place, but it does look weird. It seems that your investors got caught in an interesting situation, face dilution on their investment or be compelled to claim to have more coins than they really do.
I'm going to change the display such that only onsite coins are displayed. It will look like ~340k are invested, but show the max profit as 0.5% of the combined "onsite" and "offsite" amounts. This will make things look less weird for the uninformed visitor. I wasn't expecting so many people to ask "how can there be more coins in the bank than exist". You're right about the dilemma faced by investors. The crux of the problem is that a couple of large investors have declared offsite stashes 99 times bigger than they already sizeable onsite investment. That almost makes everyone else's share of the bank tiny to the point of it not being worthwhile any more. The fact that staking rewards are shared according to the size of onsite investments probably still makes it worth staying invested for people with no other way of having their coins staked.
I'd say the first real test will be when a high roller wins, but given that gamblers actually have to have the coins, while investors need only 1%, and how thinly traded the CLAM market is (since 70% of the actually dug up clams are already invested on JD), I don't think high rollers of the scale you've seen in the past are likely unless a major investor (or you) gets really bored.
I don't think that's quite fair to say. For an investor to risk 1000 CLAMs per roll, he has to deposit and invest at least 2000 CLAMs and declare another 99 times 2000 CLAMs offsite, for a total of 200k CLAMs. He's allowed to risk 0.5% of his total. The gambler on the other hand only has to deposit 1000 CLAMs to win those 1000 CLAMs at a 2x multiplier (and significantly less if he's playing at high multipliers).
The thin market is a problem. If a gambler wants to buy 1000 CLAMs, he'll push the price up buying them. Then if he wins and wants to cash out, he'll push the price down trying to sell them. So not only does he have to worry about the house edge, he also has market slippage to worry about.
I'm linking to this post in the JD FAQ, in the hope that people will post their views in reply.
