bustabit – The original crash game

[JollyGood]

Thank you for the explanation.

The assumptions you refer to are essential for any investor to keep in mind and as you rightly stated there is no consensus on exactly what would be considered as reasonable assumption. Everybody has their own opinion.

A potential for any form of divestment on any scale that has an impact can only take place if investors know what estimates to expect and how they would be compared to their previous and current calculations. No matter how many investors might divest the website/business is far too big for it to have a negative impact in the long run.

bustabit saw gross gaming revenue of 26,851,012 XDR in 2020. Let's assume that the gross gaming revenue will be the same going forwards. With the current commission rate of 40.55% an estimate for the bankroll's annual return under the current system would be 15,962,926 XDR, which represents a return of 12.17% on its current value of 131,120,101 XDR. If the new commission structure were in place today, the estimated return would only be 6,927,561 XDR or 5.28%.

However, that doesn't account for the commission rate reacting to size of the bankroll or Bitcoin's price, investments or divestments being made, the gross gaming revenue being smaller or larger compared to last year etc. Estimates for the bankroll's expected rate of return can vary wildly depending on what assumptions you make and every investor needs to decide for themselves what assumptions they consider to be reasonable.

[higgg]

Decreasing or suspending the dilution fee is problematic because existing investors paid this fee with the understanding that future investors would in turn pay this fee to them.

This makes me realize that I never totally understood how this works--so when someone invests say 1 BTC to the bankroll, their portion of the bankroll is 0.98 BTC and the other 0.02 BTC is divided proportionally among all existing investors?

[RHavar]

This makes me realize that I never totally understood how this works--so when someone invests say 1 BTC to the bankroll, their portion of the bankroll is 0.98 BTC and the other 0.02 BTC is divided proportionally among all existing investors?

Imagine the existing bankroll is 1 BTC, and you are going to invest 1 BTC.

You are given a stake of:

($yourInvestment * 0.98) / ($bankroll + ($yourInvestment * 0.98))
= 0.98 / 1.98
= 49.49%

But the bankroll increases by 1 BTC (AKA the new bankroll is 2 BTC)


So your stake is worth 0.98989 BTC.  (AKA you only lost ~1% even though the dilution fee was 2%)


---

The high-level reasoning behind it is that if you didn't recoup some of your own dilution fee, it would incentivize people to "fragment" their large investment into tiny ones (possibly over multiple accounts?).  So the dilution fee is split amongst all investors (including yourself), so that the smart way to invest a lot of money is just simply invest a lot of money.

[higgg]

This makes me realize that I never totally understood how this works--so when someone invests say 1 BTC to the bankroll, their portion of the bankroll is 0.98 BTC and the other 0.02 BTC is divided proportionally among all existing investors?

Imagine the existing bankroll is 1 BTC, and you are going to invest 1 BTC.

You are given a stake of:

($yourInvestment * 0.98) / ($bankroll + ($yourInvestment * 0.98))
= 0.98 / 1.98
= 49.49%

But the bankroll increases by 1 BTC (AKA the new bankroll is 2 BTC)


So your stake is worth 0.98989 BTC.  (AKA you only lost ~1% even though the dilution fee was 2%)


---

The high-level reasoning behind it is that if you didn't recoup some of your own dilution fee, it would incentivize people to "fragment" their large investment into tiny ones (possibly over multiple accounts?).  So the dilution fee is split amongst all investors (including yourself), so that the smart way to invest a lot of money is just simply invest a lot of money.

Ok thanks this is very helpful. I'm still not quite there yet, what I'm not exactly clear on is how the dilution helps the existing investors. In your example, let's say that the bankroll was previously split between two people with 0.5 BTC each, so they each previously had a 50% stake. Without any dilution they would expect to have stakes of 25% after the new investment of 1 BTC.

Are their stakes now instead 0.5/1.98 = 25.2525...%? Since the bankroll is actually 2 BTC, this would give them 0.505050... BTC each, in other words their personal stake increased by 0.005050...BTC upon the new 1 BTC investment.

Indeed 2*0.005050... = 0.0101... which is how much the new investor had deducted from his investment so that works out, so I'm guessing this must be what happens.

[RHavar]

Without any dilution they would expect to have stakes of 25% after the new investment of 1 BTC. Are their stakes now instead 0.5/1.98 = 25.2525%?

Yeah, exactly. I think of it as the investor is first investing 98% of his funds  ... and everyone's stake gets adjusted according to that. And THEN the 2% gets added to the bankroll (without affecting anyones stake)

[higgg]

Without any dilution they would expect to have stakes of 25% after the new investment of 1 BTC. Are their stakes now instead 0.5/1.98 = 25.2525%?

Yeah, exactly. I think of it as the investor is first investing 98% of his funds  ... and everyone's stake gets adjusted according to that. And THEN the 2% gets added to the bankroll (without affecting anyones stake)

Clever. How'd you settle on 2% as the right amount?

[devans]

Ultimately just experience and a little trial and error. Unlike the commission rate formula, which actually targets a specific size based on assumptions about the wager volume and returns that investors demand, there's probably no "correct" size for the dilution fee. 2% is high enough to discourage investing/divesting in response to high rollers playing but low enough to not be too big of a barrier for new investors.

[SquallLeonhart]

I do not know if 2% is the right or wrong since I am not expert enough to say it, but we are in a situation where we have 150+ million dollars last I checked, which shows that its not only a good amount but its actually tiny, people are making so much money even with this version that they invested like crazy and instead of making the optimum amount of profit people decided it would be fine making MUCH less money and kept on investing and keeping their money there.

So, 2% rate is not bad at all, it could be 5%+ at this point and I would be fine with the decision, not for my own investment but I would rather see the weak hands get out so that we could start making more profit, devans said 50 million was enough to cover almost all bets ever, so if we had 5% even 10% that would make some people scared and go, and putting new money in would be difficult so we could actually drop to a reasonable level.

[jaberwock]

Ultimately just experience and a little trial and error. Unlike the commission rate formula, which actually targets a specific size based on assumptions about the wager volume and returns that investors demand, there's probably no "correct" size for the dilution fee. 2% is high enough to discourage investing/divesting in response to high rollers playing but low enough to not be too big of a barrier for new investors.

I do agree that 2% is looking like the perfect spot right now, I haven't seen anything out of 1-5% range ever anyway, no place does more than 5% that gets famous (would be way too high to get interest from people) and no place could survive with under 1% neither, so it was always bound to be between 1-5% levels for sure.

A great thing about this in between situation is that as long as people do not really end up with extreme responses to these changes, it should actually end up doing what you wanted.

Sometimes it is not about what you do as the owner, it is a bit about how people respond, and if people respond the way they should, you will get success, but sometimes people overreact to some changes and that results with bad things, but here in bustabit people will probably not overreact so it will probably be the perfect situation, I do not remember this place ever being that chaotic ever.

[devans]

To avoid any confusion: 2% is the dilution fee that is only charged once on every investment. The dilution fee has been 2% for a very long time and is not being changed. What is being changed is how the commission–which investors are charged every time the bankroll earns a net profit–is calculated. You can read about it in detail here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2897545.msg56252341#msg56252341

[devans]

You can now get historical daily statistics about bustabit–including the BTCXDR rate and its moving average–from https://www.bustabit.com/bankroll_stats.csv. In addition, the current and upcoming commission rates are shown at https://www.bustabit.com/bankroll/overview.

[RHavar]

You can now get historical daily statistics about bustabit–including the BTCXDR rate and its moving average–from https://www.bustabit.com/bankroll_stats.csv. In addition, the current and upcoming commission rates are shown at https://www.bustabit.com/bankroll/overview.

Oh wow, thanks for that. That's actually really helpful.

Also if anyone needs an easy way to format it, you can copy&paste it into google spreadsheets or even gist.github.com: https://gist.github.com/RHavar/b915276d257175172369e3c8648f051b

which makes it a bit easier to read 

[BayAreaCoins]

then the commission rate would be about 238% (capped at 100%) as the bankroll is way over the target size at the moment.

Making things so complicated that it basically fucks investors is way worse than just forcing people to devest and withdraw or preventing investment in the first place.

"Starting on March 2, 2021 the commission rate is calculated by converting the bankroll to special drawing rights (XDR), then dividing the result by 55,000,000 XDR. The reference exchange rates for Bitcoin and special drawing rights will be fetched once every 24 hours and the data made available publicly."

I don't even remotely understand this Special Drawing nonsense and the best I can tell it has nothing to do with your projects except to make them so complicated that people don't understand they are being taken advantage of.



   So I google Bretton Wood System and turns out it collapsed just 2 years after this "Special Drawing" stuff.


Right now a new investor would pay a 2% dilution fee + 100% commission?  I think it's irresponsible to allow that to happen by design...

My understanding is there isn't commission on the dilution fee... so, new investors could only earn back their dilution fee by earning from more dilution fees generated from more new investors.  It's a dangerous trend.  (sorry if this sentence is hard to read)

I am confident that we'll see significant divestments after the new commission rate comes into effect fairly quickly, if not right before.

I'm confident that people aren't going to understand, continue to invest and you're going to profit from it.

If you want people to divest or not invested more... divest them and/or prevent investments.

Don't rob them until they say "fuck this" and bail.  That's a dangerous long-term business plan.  

If you have 5000 BTC, but you only want 2500... Chop everyone invested by 50%, add it to their available balance for withdraw or play (play hopefully), then prevent investments if the BR is >2500 with nice clear understandable static fee that doesn't make your website related to fiat.

Dooglus, for example, was one of MoneyPots (Bustabit) first investors... he was divested by the website when his Bitcoins were no longer needed

The only reason to make this more complicated than it needs to be is if you want to absolutely milk the people who have trusted you and those previous to you. This stuff isn't rocket appliances.

[RHavar]

I don't even remotely understand this Special Drawing nonsense and the best I can tell it has nothing to do with your projects except to make them so complicated that

The idea of the "special drawing rights" is that it's like a stable version of "fiat money". Right now 1 XDR is (0.58252 USD + 0.38671 EUR + 1.0174 CNY + 11.9 JPY + 0.085946 GBP). Picking a single currency would be simpler, but less stable.

I'm confident that people aren't going to understand, continue to invest and you're going to profit from it.

I don't think it is Daniel intention is to obsfucate how it works, like on the "bankroll" page (which you use to invest/divest), it pretty prominently shows:



and he has made a lot of stats available as an .csv which makes it pretty simple for anyone who can use excel to work with

[BayAreaCoins]

I don't think it is Daniel intention is to obsfucate how it works

obfuscate

The irony... obfuscate means "render obscure, unclear, or unintelligible".

I think keeping things as simple as possible is a good route or you stand a chance at making things "obsfucated"!  

[RHavar]

obfuscate

The irony... obfuscate means "render obscure, unclear, or unintelligible".

I think keeping things as simple as possible is a good route or you stand a chance at making things "obsfucated"!

I'd like to claim it was some higher-order humor to obfuscate the word obfuscate, but the truth is I never learned the English very well and my browsers spell checker is set to another language. Anyway, thank you for the correction -- I hope I won't make the same spelling mistake again.

[tygeade]

I understand that these changes may not be liked by people and that is understandable if you have a good amount of investment here, however I haven't really seen an alternative that was better than the current system we are changing into. If you really do not like the system that bustabit is moving towards, why not provide something much better both for the system, for investors and for bustabit team as well, shouldn't that be the case here if you do not like the setup?

If you can offer something better then you could argue that it should be like that, but so far there is only complaints and things that would hurt the team, that's about it, and devans is a nice person so he is not really saying how it would hurt him neither so it is just staying there like a legit idea. All in all, this is the best method anyone can think of, there hasn't been a better idea, that is why I am 100% in support of it.

[micky123]

I haven't really seen significant disinvestment, im useless at math, could someone please let me know how much needs to be disinvested for the commission to go down to an acceptable level? It was a nice touch to add the potential change information to the investment page, i guess many investors have just not seen this announcement as yet.

[devans]

I wouldn't expect any significant divestment until the changes come into effect or right until before then. Currently we'd need to see a divestment of about 1,400 BTC after the change to bring the commission rate back down to 50%. More will be required eventually if Bitcoin's price remains at this level or continues to increase, but since the calculation uses a 360-day moving average that will happen gradually.

[justdimin]

The funny thing is, even with all these complaints about the changes to discourage overinvestment to a point where we shouldn't invest way way more than needed for the bankroll.... there is still overinvestment. I mean nothing took into affect yet and people are still holding their money like crazy. There is really no reason why we should be keeping the old system and not move to new system and even literally cut ALL profits from investors for a while just so they could leave, we need them leaving, and they are still not doing it.

So, if you think this is excessive and it should not be this punishing to have too much bankroll, think again because even with this excessive looking method, we are still nowhere near the levels we should be, hence I am in 100% support of cutting every single profit until some of them leave.