bustabit – The original crash game

[devans]

All the guys. I am convinced that everything is honest. I delete my negative comments.

I respect that a lot. It was good discussing the system in chat with you (assuming that was you).

Great, thanks a lot for the API documentation. I'm not sure, if userInfo.profit works well, but userInfo.balance, so e.g. something like this :

Code:

if (config.win.value === 'base') {
   currentBet = userInfo.balance - 33333;
} ...

..works like a charm. Thanks again!

Happy to help! Both fields should work as expected–even in simulation mode, where it will use your simulated balance and net profit.

[1714185731]

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[vbond]

Devans is still a question. How to convert HASH to Busted?I did not find this information.

[devans]

Devans is still a question. How to convert HASH to Busted?I did not find this information.

The reference function (Node.js) that calculates the multiplier from a game's hash is published in our seeding event thread:

Code:

const crypto = require("crypto")

function gameResult(seed, salt) {
  const nBits = 52 // number of most significant bits to use

  // 1. HMAC_SHA256(key=salt, message=seed)
  const hmac = crypto.createHmac("sha256", salt)
  hmac.update(seed)
  seed = hmac.digest("hex")

  // 2. r = 52 most significant bits
  seed = seed.slice(0, nBits/4)
  const r = parseInt(seed, 16)

  // 3. X = r / 2^52
  let X = r / Math.pow(2, nBits) // uniformly distributed in [0; 1)

  // 4. X = 99 / (1-X)
  X = 99 / (1 - X)

  // 5. return max(trunc(X), 100)
  const result = Math.floor(X)
  return Math.max(1, result / 100)
}

[devans]

Some clarification of my previous post: The function parameter "seed" is the game's hash in binary form and "salt" is the salt that was chosen during the seeding event in textual form (0000000000000000004d6ec16dafe9d8370958664c1dc422f452892264c59526).

To calculate the multiplier from the hash of game #1 for example:

Code:

const salt = '0000000000000000004d6ec16dafe9d8370958664c1dc422f452892264c59526';
const hash = Buffer.from('9f57575fd54cd441e962448537e155ace9555df10cd27fa817bbcaf48a59ebcf', 'hex');
console.log(gameResult(hash, salt)); // outputs 15.49

[cowbay]

All the guys. I am convinced that everything is honest. I delete my negative comments.

Few in bitcoinland will admit they are wrong even when faced with evidence. You have my respect.

[vbond]

All the guys. I am convinced that everything is honest. I delete my negative comments.

Few in bitcoinland will admit they are wrong even when faced with evidence. You have my respect.

Thanks! I have checked a chain more than 100K of games. Intervention wasn't!
Justice is proved.

[vbond]

There is no Game Verification Script on github.com. There is no trust to it. Service offline for honesty check is necessary.With a chain everything is all right and with result, I am not sure.
I am not a programmer. In (Node.js) I don't understand.

[devans]

There is no Game Verification Script on github.com. There is no trust to it. Service offline for honesty check is necessary.With a chain everything is all right and with result, I am not sure.
I am not a programmer. In (Node.js) I don't understand.

You can find an open source script to verify rolls at https://jsfiddle.net/Dexon95/2fmuxLza/embedded/result/. To see the source code just click on "Edit in JSFiddle" at the top right.

[Timetwister]

Are all the statistics shown on the website from Version 2, or just some of them?

[Timetwister]

And of those people playing for bonuses, they were pretty much totally dominated by two bot-owners (who had several bots) that were exceedingly good at bonus play. One of which didn't have a huge bankroll, and couldn't play high-stakes and the other guy who net'd about 1.1M USD profit in a 1 year period.  I think it's fantastic that people are taking the game so seriously and doing exactly what it was designed for  -- but I think the mistake was that a 1% bonus was small enough that casual players assumed it wasn't worth worrying about.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know there was a game with positive EV around. Are there any other games with positive EV (other than potentially poker)?

[devans]

Are all the statistics shown on the website from Version 2, or just some of them?

Users' stats such as net profit and total wagered include version 1. The figures you see on our statistics page also include version 1 unless it says version 2 only.

[Timetwister]

...
The benefit of using the offsite, is that you fully retain control of it (you literally never even send it to the site). But the downside is you also risk getting "margin called" (basically if ever a max-win would result in your onsite being negative, you get margin-called and the site forcable sets your offsite to 0). And then if you don't put more money in the bankroll you can potentially miss out on any recovery.

There's pro's and cons to both approaches. ...

The major disadvantage of offering offsite investments is that it basically forces everyone
to use offsite once a certain percentage of users use a high leverage. Otherwise your
investment gets diluted and you literally have no real chance to participate in the profits
generated by the site.

In my experience the phenomenon that I described above happened at every single
dice site that offered or is still offering offsite investments.

Due to the advantages it still is a great feature, but this is the major disadvantage
of offering offsite investments in my opinion.

Exactly. In practice it’s mostly used to leverage, so you are forced to do it too. At least here it is “just” 3, not like in other casinos...

[Timetwister]

Are all the statistics shown on the website from Version 2, or just some of them?

Users' stats such as net profit and total wagered include version 1. The figures you see on our statistics page also include version 1 unless it says version 2 only.

So about 211000 BTC have been wagered just since February?

[devans]

So about 211000 BTC have been wagered just since February?

Yeah, that's correct

[Visteryy]

Are all the statistics shown on the website from Version 2, or just some of them?

I think. That is the statistics are clearer.

[Timetwister]

Considering the distribution of bets, what would be the optimal leverage ratio? If people were constantly max betting, then no leverage should be used, but the fact that most bets are smaller (safer for investors), should make some degree of leverage optimal.

[RHavar]

Considering the distribution of bets, what would be the optimal leverage ratio? If people were constantly max betting, then no leverage should be used, but the fact that most bets are smaller (safer for investors), should make some degree of leverage optimal.

At the moment, probably the max offsite if I had to guess. But keep two things in mind:

a) It's very explicitly not a leverage system, it's an offsite system. It's designed to allow you to keep money in your own cold storage, while "risking" it. If you use it as a leverage system, you're probably going to have a bad time.

b) What is "ideal" based on the recent betting, might not be ideal going forward. The last time there was some serious whale action on bustabit, the site profit was 747 BTC and then got totally smashed and finally recovered to 613 BTC. Which makes it look like investors were hurt a bit. But in reality I was invested in that time period, and made a profit. The reason? Some of the overly leveraged investors got margin called on the way down, and the remaining investors made a profit on the up.

Really the entire purpose of offsite investing is to reduce your counter-party risk. But it doesn't do a super great job against maliciousness (e.g. if the house was intentionally draining the bankroll) as to use the offsite system properly you should be topping up your investment. But it provides very strong protection if the site were to suddenly vanish, or something of that nature.

[Timetwister]

Considering the distribution of bets, what would be the optimal leverage ratio? If people were constantly max betting, then no leverage should be used, but the fact that most bets are smaller (safer for investors), should make some degree of leverage optimal.

At the moment, probably the max offsite if I had to guess. But keep two things in mind:

a) It's very explicitly not a leverage system, it's an offsite system. It's designed to allow you to keep money in your own cold storage, while "risking" it. If you use it as a leverage system, you're probably going to have a bad time.

b) What is "ideal" based on the recent betting, might not be ideal going forward. The last time there was some serious whale action on bustabit, the site profit was 747 BTC and then got totally smashed and finally recovered to 613 BTC. Which makes it look like investors were hurt a bit. But in reality I was invested in that time period, and made a profit. The reason? Some of the overly leveraged investors got margin called on the way down, and the remaining investors made a profit on the up.

Really the entire purpose of offsite investing is to reduce your counter-party risk. But it doesn't do a super great job against maliciousness (e.g. if the house was intentionally draining the bankroll) as to use the offsite system properly you should be topping up your investment. But it provides very strong protection if the site were to suddenly vanish, or something of that nature.

I understand the purpose of allowing offsite investments, but I bet it's mostly used as a proxy to use a higher Kelly multiple (leverage). I doubt people investing are worried about counterparty risk. If we didn't trust Devans, we just wouldn't invest at all. If I'm willing to invest say 2 BTC, because I like the investment and I trust Devans, why would I invest just 1 and have to spend all day watching for whales and be ready to deposit the other BTC if things go wrong (and still trust Devans at that point, which some investors wouldn't as they may be suspicious)?

Even considering that some leverage was optimal, having to manually adjust it and monitor the investment makes it way less attractive than if it was automatic. Allowing investors to choose to risk up to 0.5, 1, 2, etc. Kelly (as you explained in a previous post) would be way better and we could stop that "offsite" farce. I think there was already a casino using that method, Safedice if I remind correctly.

Right now, using 1:2 leverage would mean that a max bet would be 2 times the Kelly criterion? I read mentions to people multiaccounting involving a higher risk for the casino, but I didn't understand that part well.

[RHavar]

I understand the purpose of allowing offsite investments, but I bet it's mostly used as a proxy to use a higher Kelly multiple (leverage).

I can assure you that it wasn't the design intention (although it's frequently (mis?)used for that purpose).

I doubt people investing are worried about counterparty risk. If we didn't trust Devans, we just wouldn't invest at all.

Hm? I don't think reflects how most people think. I trust Daniel, but it also doesn't make me blind to the fact there are risks in giving someone your money. There's really a lot of potential ways things could go sideways -- but even forgetting exotic hypothetical scenarios, I have no idea if there's a plan in place to make investors whole if he got hit by a bus.

All of these scenarios (and more) fall under "counterparty risk". The solution of course is "don't invest at all" because even when you factor the counter-party risk it can still be profitable -- but it's absolutely logical to try minimize your counterparty risk.

If I'm willing to invest say 2 BTC, because I like the investment and I trust Devans, why would I invest just 1 and have to spend all day watching for whales and be ready to deposit the other BTC if things go wrong (and still trust Devans at that point, which some investors wouldn't as they may be suspicious)?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the benefit of doing that would be the difference between losing 1 and 2 bitcoin if the site simply disappeared.  I'm not 100% sure, but I remember Daniel talking about "margin call emails" to warn you when you were getting close. I'm not sure if this is actually implemented or was just hypothetical though.

Even considering that some leverage was optimal, having to manually adjust it and monitor the investment makes it way less attractive than if it was automatic. Allowing investors to choose to risk up to 0.5, 1, 2, etc. Kelly (as you explained in a previous post) would be way better and we could stop that "offsite" farce. I think there was already a casino using that method, Safedice if I remind correctly.

Unfortunately this doesn't really work. The ideal if a "max whale" is betting is 1x kelly (by definition). But lets say a whale was betting 1/10th the max bet, then the ideal leverage would be 10x. But if everyone dynamically adjusted their leverage like this, it's *identical* to everyone just being at a 1x kelly. So I don't think there's any justification for implementing an actual leverage system, as it's just an unstable way of having the same net result. The whole point of an investor system is so you can support large whales, but a leverage system results in people (either intentionally or by -BRG) leveraging less when whales are playing.   

Right now, using 1:2 leverage would mean that a max bet would be 2 times the Kelly criterion?

I'll leave that to Daniel, I'm not entirely sure if I'm still up to date with how it related to the kelly.

I read mentions to people multiaccounting involving a higher risk for the casino, but I didn't understand that part well.

In bustabit (in constrast to bustadice) there are two limits. One is the essential "total-max-profit" limit, which is total the bankroll can possibly lose in a single round. But since BaB is a multiplayer game, it is be awful if a single could win the entire thing (and force other players to cash out) which was a real plague in the BaBv1 -- so in the current BaB  there's a restriction that a single player can only win (50? or 75%?) of that limit, so there's some left over to not affect other players.

So normally a whale will be hitting against the max-win-per-player limit, but if they multiclient they'll be hitting against the total-max-profit  ... which will represent extra risk for investors.

[devans]

Ryan already made some good points, so I'll just add a few things

I understand the purpose of allowing offsite investments, but I bet it's mostly used as a proxy to use a higher Kelly multiple (leverage). I doubt people investing are worried about counterparty risk. If we didn't trust Devans, we just wouldn't invest at all. If I'm willing to invest say 2 BTC, because I like the investment and I trust Devans, why would I invest just 1 and have to spend all day watching for whales and be ready to deposit the other BTC if things go wrong (and still trust Devans at that point, which some investors wouldn't as they may be suspicious)?

Of course there is no way for me to tell with any certainty whether investors actually have the the funds they claim to have offsite or are just abusing the offsite system to leverage. But based on their behavior when high rollers won a lot, I do think that the offsite system is largely being used as intended.

Besides reducing your counterparty risk, freeing up liquidity is the other big advantage the offsite investment offers you as an investor. You could expose the same sum of money to both bankrolls of bustabit and bustadice at the same time for instance.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the benefit of doing that would be the difference between losing 1 and 2 bitcoin if the site simply disappeared.  I'm not 100% sure, but I remember Daniel talking about "margin call emails" to warn you when you were getting close. I'm not sure if this is actually implemented or was just hypothetical though.

If you've set a recovery email address we'll send you an email when you are margin-called. Currently investors aren't notified when they are close to being margin-called, however.

Right now, using 1:2 leverage would mean that a max bet would be 2 times the Kelly criterion? I read mentions to people multiaccounting involving a higher risk for the casino, but I didn't understand that part well.

Without leverage, the maximum risk per player and round is 0.75% of the bankroll (1x Kelly). If a player were to exceed that he is forced to cash out, but other players aren't. The maximum risk for the entire round is 1.125% (at worst 1.5x Kelly).

If you don't leverage, you will always be guaranteed a positive expected bankroll growth. But if you leverage by 2x you are risking 3x Kelly in the worst case scenario of a super whale use multiple accounts, so your expected bankroll growth may be negative in the worst case scenario.