Just-Dice.com : Invest in 1% House Edge Dice Game

[dooglus]

Can someone explain to me why a site that allows the house to have both seeds/keys and can use that information against player money 'invested' in the bank's position, wouldn't be suspected of being a scam? Per your SD and other statistical analysis, it could easily manipulated by the con in several ways. One way would be to intentionally lose a number of bets to create a distribution to their liking and simply betting more less times.

To me it seems like a perfect setup for a con. I'm not saying it is a con, but if I were a betting man....

Just-Dice is suspected of being a scam by some.  Barely a day goes by without me seeing someone saying "dooglus == nakowa".  Mostly they're joking, but it's certainly on people's minds.

Personally, if I was going to make a 2nd account to win the investor's money with I don't think I would make it an account with such a forum presence.  nakowa has set up a competing dice site, closed it, then funded the IPO of a 2nd competing dice site almost singlehandedly, posted threads in which he offers to sell his 'strategy', and made a huge amount of noise on the site.  He argues with me in threads here too.

That seems like an awful lot of work to go to in order to steal from the investors.  If I was wanting to steal from the investors it would be a lot easier to do it from an account that never speaks in the chat and has no forum presence.

Even easier than that would be to run an honest site and collect commissions week after week.  That's the plan.  I hope it will work out in the long run.  Geese, golden eggs, etc.

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[chriswen]

Can someone explain to me why a site that allows the house to have both seeds/keys and can use that information against player money 'invested' in the bank's position, wouldn't be suspected of being a scam? Per your SD and other statistical analysis, it could easily manipulated by the con in several ways. One way would be to intentionally lose a number of bets to create a distribution to their liking and simply betting more less times.

To me it seems like a perfect setup for a con. I'm not saying it is a con, but if I were a betting man....

Just-Dice is suspected of being a scam by some.  Barely a day goes by without me seeing someone saying "dooglus == nakowa".  Mostly they're joking, but it's certainly on people's minds.

Personally, if I was going to make a 2nd account to win the investor's money with I don't think I would make it an account with such a forum presence.  nakowa has set up a competing dice site, closed it, then funded the IPO of a 2nd competing dice site almost singlehandedly, posted threads in which he offers to sell his 'strategy', and made a huge amount of noise on the site.  He argues with me in threads here too.

That seems like an awful lot of work to go to in order to steal from the investors.  If I was wanting to steal from the investors it would be a lot easier to do it from an account that never speaks in the chat and has no forum presence.

Even easier than that would be to run an honest site and collect commissions week after week.  That's the plan.  I hope it will work out in the long run.  Geese, golden eggs, etc.

Are you prepared to do this for the long haul?  After this big loss, you might not be earning commissions for awhile.

[shawshankinmate37927]

I know the majority of people on here don't like or respect towtoad/Nakowa/or whatever he wants his name to be, but I think you do have to respect his winnings. Doing it once or twice might have been luck, but it appears he has found a way to consistently beat the game and that is not going to change any time soon IMO.    

He doesn't win every time he plays.  He's had losing sessions in the past.  He's got a big bankroll and isn't afraid to risk it.  This is normal variance for low-edge, even-money bets between 100 and 500 BTC.

[drawingthesun]

Are you prepared to do this for the long haul?  After this big loss, you might not be earning commissions for awhile.

This is not true, any new investors will pay commision on their profits.

Last time this happened many new investors came to the site and dooglus was earning commision even though some investors were still negative.

Remember its commission on profits, so a new investor who has not taken a loss will be generating profits.

[Peter R]

Here are the results of a simulation, running off the Nakowa = cake bet sizes and odds from Monday morning (PST) that dooglus posted.  The simulation assumes that Nakowa will stop betting as soon as he either hits his target profit (which I took as what he actually won as cake [4494 BTC]) or he busts at -10,000 BTC. 

So, unless I made a mistake, the odds were in his favour (just considering his session as cake):



In case anyone wants to check my methodology, I just modified the Mathematica code I described earlier in this thread to get the bet size by looping through cake's actual bets.  (Cake always went for 2X, so only the bet size was needed).

In[249]:=

betResult := If[Random[] > .505, 1, -1]
betSize := cakeData[[1 + Mod[Length[cakeData] - 1, ++j], 6]]

bankroll = 10000 * 10^8;
target := 4494 * 10^8;
n = 10000;

profitLogs = Table[{}, {n}];

outcomes =
 
  Table[profit = 0;
   
    While[profit < target && bankroll > -profit,
      profit += betSize * betResult;
      profitLogs[[k]] = Append[profitLogs[[k]], profit]];
   
    If[profit >= target, 1., 0],
      
      {k, 1, n}];

100 * (Plus @@ outcomes)/ n

Out[256]= 51.72

[mechs]

There are only 3 potential security vulnerabilities I can see.  They should be addressed as best as is practical to improve investor and player confidence in the site.

1. The OP is running a scam to fleece investors.  Since there is no way to blind the OP to the server seed, investors have no choice but to assume the OP is honest or to not invest.

2. The implentation of the RNG is flawed.  It would be useful to review the RNG implementation and see if there are any possible ways to further ensure the results are truly random with no predictable pattern.
Some ideas:
A. Perhaps re-randomizing the server seed every roll would help since nonce would always be 1. If this was too taxing on the server, then only re-randomize the server seed every roll for bets over a certain size (eg. 10 BTC).
B. Pull random numbers from a hardware RNG.  Could use a site such as random.org (my concern though would be trading the risk of the OP for risk of a new entity).  This random # would be used as the server seed (cannot be used as the seed # for hashing since would not be provably fair).

3. Security of the server.  This is the biggest concern since hosted on a cloud VPS.  A VPS employee could be compromising the server directly.  Solution would be to move to a dedicated server for increased secured which would seem prudent (even if this is not the issue with nakowa's improbable wins).  Millions of USD worth of bitcoins are at stake afterall.

[molecular]

So what do I do?  Continue to let the investors take these horrific losses?

make absolutely sure the server seed is/was safe. Is it an option to change it?

[molecular]

B. Pull random numbers from a hardware RNG.  Could use a site such as random.org (my concern though would be trading the risk of the OP for risk of a new entity).  This random # would be used as the server seed (cannot be used as the seed # for hashing since would not be provably fair).

why not pull random numbers for use as (additional random to) server seed from the blockchain (every block or so)?

[mechs]

B. Pull random numbers from a hardware RNG.  Could use a site such as random.org (my concern though would be trading the risk of the OP for risk of a new entity).  This random # would be used as the server seed (cannot be used as the seed # for hashing since would not be provably fair).

why not pull random numbers for use as (additional random to) server seed from the blockchain (every block or so)?

That actually seems like a pretty good idea. What you think Doog?  Would that be difficult to implement?

[Rannasha]

B. Pull random numbers from a hardware RNG.  Could use a site such as random.org (my concern though would be trading the risk of the OP for risk of a new entity).  This random # would be used as the server seed (cannot be used as the seed # for hashing since would not be provably fair).

why not pull random numbers for use as (additional random to) server seed from the blockchain (every block or so)?

That actually seems like a pretty good idea. What you think Doog?  Would that be difficult to implement?

A player can randomize their server seed as often as they want. Blocks are many minutes apart most of the time. So the blockchain is not a good source of entropy in this case.

Even if you combine the blockchain with another source of entropy (the servers RNG for example), the quality of your random number generation is still limited by your second source, because if that contains a flaw, players have the option to gamble quickly enough and place many bets before the next block is found.

I honestly doubt that the source of entropy used is insufficient in the case of J-D, but even if it is and it needs to be replaced, it needs to be replaced with something that doesn't have a rate-limit like the blockchain.

[elm]

Here are the results of a simulation, running off the Nakowa = cake bet sizes and odds from Monday morning (PST) that dooglus posted.  The simulation assumes that Nakowa will stop betting as soon as he either hits his target profit (which I took as what he actually won as cake [4494 BTC]) or he busts at -10,000 BTC. 

So, unless I made a mistake, the odds were in his favour (just considering his session as cake):



In case anyone wants to check my methodology, I just modified the Mathematica code I described earlier in this thread to get the bet size by looping through cake's actual bets.  (Cake always went for 2X, so only the bet size was needed).

In[249]:=

betResult := If[Random[] > .505, 1, -1]
betSize := cakeData[[1 + Mod[Length[cakeData] - 1, ++j], 6]]

bankroll = 10000 * 10^8;
target := 4494 * 10^8;
n = 10000;

profitLogs = Table[{}, {n}];

outcomes =
 
  Table[profit = 0;
   
    While[profit < target && bankroll > -profit,
      profit += betSize * betResult;
      profitLogs[[k]] = Append[profitLogs[[k]], profit]];
   
    If[profit >= target, 1., 0],
      
      {k, 1, n}];

100 * (Plus @@ outcomes)/ n

Out[256]= 51.72

sorry but I dont understand how a gambler can have an advantage or turn the odds in his favor over an house edge of 1% by risking 10,000 to win 5000. sure that he can win and get his target before losing his bankroll. but how were the odds in his favor? would You be so kind and explain this to me? there are many games out there in many casinos (not online) with less than 1% edge games. interesting what I missed here.

thanks

[Peter R]

sorry but I dont understand how a gambler can have an advantage or turn the odds in his favor over an house edge of 1% by risking 10,000 to win 5000. sure that he can win and get his target before losing his bankroll. but how were the odds in his favor? would You be so kind and explain this to me? there are many games out there in many casinos (not online) with less than 1% edge games. interesting what I missed here.

"The odds were in his favour," was a bad choice of words on my part.  What I meant was that given the strategy I assumed (either he reaches his target profit and stops, or he goes bust), that he was more likely to succeed than to fail during his session as cake [uid = 145625].  The expectation value of his profit is still negative, because when he does lose, although it happens less frequently, the loss is bigger in a way that more than cancels out his expected winnings. 

For instance, if he could bet his assumed 10,000 BTC bankroll on a 1.5X payout, he would earn a profit of 5,000 BTC 66% of the time (most the time), but 34% of the time he will lose all his 10,000 BTC.  In this case, his expected profit would be 0.66 * 5000 - 0.34 * 10000 = -100 BTC, even though he would be more likely to win than to lose.  He is applying a similar strategy, just over many bets instead of a single bet (and thus at worse odds than the single "bold move" I just described).

The fun part is that we don't actually know how much he is willing to lose in order to win! 

[Professor James Moriarty]

 I don't think dooglus owes anyone anything , I mean this is something investors take responsibility , what if someone lost 10k? would dooglus win all 10k? no , investors would.

 So basically , if you invest , don't expect wins all the time.

[trout]

for those who like to run simulations, make a play with a player always betting max bet
and starting with 2x the size of the site's bankroll. This is very close to the actual situation.

You'll see that we haven't seen the worst yet, but the player will lose all eventually

[Rampion]

At the end , if he did 100k wagered,   he should have won 99k back ,  but he won like 107k   ( in this last week)

Edit :  i think he did more about 200k wag   , so instead of 198k he got 206k

Also, he gets to choose when to stop.  He could have chosen to stop when he was down, but instead waited until he was up.  The site doesn't get to make that choice.

"Ok, you've lost a couple thousand; no more bets for you.  thanks for the coins".

It wouldn't fly...

As an investor I don't blame you at all, this is just variance. I agree that the 1% house edge is low but its also good to attract more players. I would change nothing, nakowa's winnings are driven by variance and math and nakowa's personality ("I'm not a gambler", I found a flaw") are definitely on our side, and he is doing quite a lot of advertising for JD.

Plus, this was never a risk free investment as some implied just a few weeks ago. We need very big numbers, just that.

[elm]

sorry but I dont understand how a gambler can have an advantage or turn the odds in his favor over an house edge of 1% by risking 10,000 to win 5000. sure that he can win and get his target before losing his bankroll. but how were the odds in his favor? would You be so kind and explain this to me? there are many games out there in many casinos (not online) with less than 1% edge games. interesting what I missed here.

"The odds were in his favour," was a bad choice of words on my part.  What I meant was that given the strategy I assumed (either he reaches his target profit and stops, or he goes bust), that he was more likely to succeed than to fail during his session as cake [uid = 145625].  The expectation value of his profit is still negative, because when he does lose, although it happens less frequently, the loss is bigger in a way that more than cancels out his expected winnings. 

For instance, if he could bet his assumed 10,000 BTC bankroll on a 1.5X payout, he would earn a profit of 5,000 BTC 66% of the time (most the time), but 34% of the time he will lose all his 10,000 BTC.  In this case, his expected profit would be 0.66 * 5000 - 0.34 * 10000 = -100 BTC, even though he would be more likely to win than to lose.  He is applying a similar strategy, just over many bets instead of a single bet (and thus at worse odds than the single "bold move" I just described).

The fun part is that we don't actually know how much he is willing to lose in order to win! 

thanks for taking the time to explain. so we agree that to overcome 1% house edge is only possible by luck or by cheating 

[IdealDarkness]

What if Nakowa will robb all the profit from JD? Can we withdraw all of our money?

[Jls.]

What if Nakowa will robb all the profit from JD?

What if earth is flat ?
Nakowa already won all the profit, since site is in -.

Can we withdraw all of our money?

JD investment is liquid. That means you can divest at the very moment you like, and withdraw if hot wallet has enough funds (refilled daily).

[IdealDarkness]

What if Nakowa will robb all the profit from JD?

What if earth is flat ?
Nakowa already won all the profit, since site is in -.

Can we withdraw all of our money?

JD investment is liquid. That means you can divest at the very moment you like, and withdraw if hot wallet has enough funds (refilled daily).

Ok, but how do I know how much is the "enough" funds

[drawingthesun]

Ok, but how do I know how much is the "enough" funds

This is not a concern, as soon as you divest your money is no longer being used as bankroll. Just because you cannot withdraw a large amount of coin immediately does NOT mean you can't pull all your investment whenever you want.