CoinSpeak.net - [NEW! Free-play mode] Unique game of skill and persuasion!

[coinspeak]

coinspeak
How silver is your tongue?

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We're very excited to introduce CoinSpeak (www.coinspeak.net), a brand new three-player game of persuasion, where you can steal your opponent's Bitcoin just by outtalking them!

It works like so:

• Three players join a game, and each bets 0.01 BTC
• Two players are randomly selected to speak, and the other player becomes the judge.
• All players enter a chat room, and the two speakers have a minute (or five tweet-length messages) to convince the judge that they should win their opponent's stake.
• Anything goes! You can try to make an intelligent argument, or you could simply lie or beg - you can employ any strategy you like to impress the judge.
• When the minute is up, the judge selects their winner, and the winner receives the opponent's stake (the judge simply gets his stake back).

There's a more complete FAQ on the home page, but a few points:

• Importantly - if you're the judge in a game, you must make a decision! Otherwise, you lose your stake (and the speakers have their stake returned). This is to ensure that every game has an attentive judge (don't worry, in about two of every three games, you'll be a speaker and you'll have the chance to win!)
• Note that the site launched recently, and so initially, after joining a game you may have to wait a few minutes for your opponents to join. The game begins automatically when the room is full.

Good luck, and have fun! All questions/feedback welcome, either message or post in this thread.

Screenshots:

Homepage
http://imgur.com/6IDxW3T.jpg

Screenshot of two terrible players duking it out...
https://i.imgur.com/omz5r5J.jpg

[1714068393]

1714068393

[coinspeak]

[Reserved, and moved to the Gambling section]

[StinkyS4L]

It would be helpful to have a ticker showing how many people are online/how many games you have going. I've been waiting for a game for 10 minutes and not knowing when it will start makes me wonder if I'm going to miss it while looking at other things.

[coinspeak]

It would be helpful to have a ticker showing how many people are online/how many games you have going. I've been waiting for a game for 10 minutes and not knowing when it will start makes me wonder if I'm going to miss it while looking at other things.

Thanks for your interest, and noted - admittedly traffic isn't particularly thick on the ground at the moment. We're launching an advertising campaign very shortly which should vastly reduce the waiting time for a game (in the meantime, tell your friends! ).

Some other improvements that'll be included in our next push (this week):
- Notification sound when the game starts (to avoid you missing it)
- A free-play practice mode, to help new players get to grips with the game (we've had feedback that the concept's not very clear)

I'll also pass on your idea for a user-count ticker - thanks for that.

[Ruzka]

I'll definitely try out the game soon! Although I am concerned if I'll even be able to get in one haha.

[b!z]

Very interesting game. I will check it out now

[coinspeak]

We've just launched Practice Mode!

https://i.imgur.com/awKKziH.png

Now prospective users can check out the format of the game before moving on to try to win some BTC.

In other news, confirmations have been lowered from 6 to 3, and work continues on some sexier features...

[TheJacob]

Good luck with running the most collusion friendly game I've ever seen. If that isn't a big enough problem people will just offer the judge part of their winnings if you somehow ever have an honest game.

[coinspeak]

I'll post the same thing we posted to Reddit, as it deals with the same question (tl;dr - we take collusion as seriously as poker sites do, and they seem to do just fine). We're also planning to add a security FAQ post-haste - we do a whole bunch of stuff to stop our users losing money unfairly.

[edit: you can't offer the Judge money - the Judge is silent and the game anonymises a user's identity. There is no way for the Judge to profit from the game]

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We treat the collusion problem in the same way poker sites treat cooperation between players/multi-accounting. As soon as a player is his own judge (this applies to having an accomplice judge, and also to bots judging each other), the game becomes unfair - so we have to disincentivise this (beyond checking IPs etc, which can only go so far).

Basically, to profit from cheating, you have to become your own Judge. It is infeasible to do this regularly without detection when the number of players is high, but even running only two accounts from different locations (for example), one could expect to become their own judge every so often.

However, in all the games where the player is not their own judge, and is instead a speaker, they must make some sort of argument - otherwise their opponent will beat them easily (judges tend not to give money to silent opponents/obvious bots). So a bot will lose around 2/3 of games where they do not also control the judge, and the strategy is unprofitable.

This means that if somebody did decide to flood the site with bots (ignoring the fact that they would quickly be banned), the genuine players would actually see an increase in profits - but the quality of the game would go down (you'd be matched with a bot, likely you'd win, and that would be that).

If this becomes a problem we will add a CAPTCHA to the decision-making stage - then any judging bot would fail to make a decision, would lose its stake, and neither player would lose any BTC.

[TheJacob]

What do bots have to do with collusion exactly? No one is going to use bots.

You aren't treating collusion in the same way poker sites do at all. The good ones at least don't even offer double or nothing SNGs anymore.

Why? Because they figured out the best way to secure games against collusion was to not offer games where massive collusion rings had a huge incentive.
 
I think you entirely underestimate how hard people are going to come at this if you actually get games running. The only way you are going to stop it is if the fees are high enough they can't win.

[StinkyS4L]

I've tried playing this game several times over the last week or so and have never been able to. I finally gave up and decided to withdraw my 0.02 BTC and just call it a bust.
Now I get this error message when I attempt to withdraw:


Cannot find info on how to contact owners on the site. What to do?

[coinspeak]

Hey - are you trying to withdraw the full 0.02? You have to withdraw the available balance (0.02 minus tx fee). We process all withdrawals manually for additional security, and will be able to do this once it's gone through.

Apologies for your experience with the site, and thanks for your early interest. We're tweaking things at the moment and once we've made some matchmaking improvements, we're focusing on bringing new users to the site. Maybe check back soon

Message me if you still cannot get a withdrawal through after removing the tx fee, as that'd be a serious bug (if that's the case I'll put it through manually).

[StinkyS4L]

I subtracted the fee when I tried it and it gave me that message. I was about to try again but now I get this message while trying to access coinspeak:
Another user is accessing coinspeak from your IP address - try again in ten minutes

There is no one else here and I don't have any other browsers going. I feel like I'm in one of those horror movies... "The calls coming from inside the house!"

[StinkyS4L]

Just withdrew to pending status.
Thanks!

[StinkyS4L]

BTW - The site looks very professional and I love the idea of the game. Hopefully you get some more traffic so I can come back and play!