FAIRLAY - SPORTS BETTING for experts - highest liquidity, provably best odds

[FairlaySupport]

@DT3  we won't change it anytime soon.  Try to use the search for that.

[DT3]

Sorry @VTC!

This is a bit unclear for me, can you offer an example?
Say a user deposits 10 btc.  They can create 10 unmatched bets of 10 btc each for a total of 100btc in market liquidity, right?

right.

Are you saying that after the first 10 btc gets matched, the other 90 btc won't get canceled?

yes.

And if another user tries to bet against those remaining 90btc will the system allow a match putting the original user into a negative balance plus 0.1mBTC fee?

no, the system won't allow a match. The offer will be cancelled and the penalty deducted from the account.

Why not have the system auto cancel once they got filled on the 10 btc? This sounds annoying for the person thinking he's accepting an offer.

[VTC]

Sorry @VTC!

This is a bit unclear for me, can you offer an example?
Say a user deposits 10 btc.  They can create 10 unmatched bets of 10 btc each for a total of 100btc in market liquidity, right?

right.

Are you saying that after the first 10 btc gets matched, the other 90 btc won't get canceled?

yes.

And if another user tries to bet against those remaining 90btc will the system allow a match putting the original user into a negative balance plus 0.1mBTC fee?

no, the system won't allow a match. The offer will be cancelled and the penalty deducted from the account.

With the 90 btc in the given example not being auto canceled, won't this effect other users who see these bets as on the books as providing liquidity, yet they can't bet against it?

What is the purpose of the penalty, is it to deter users from providing liquidity, or to fund supports time as a manual review/operation has to be done?

Technically users can set up a 24/7 system to self monitor and cancel bets over there balance via api, but that is much more work then fairlay doing it on their side by default (with perhaps an option to opt out, for liquidity providers who plan to add more balance and don't want bets canceled)

Your system is able to monitor and impose a penalty (and I'm assuming avoid any race condition bugs/exploits) yet it can't be set up to auto cancel these bets instead?

[CoolWhiteStare]

Shouldn't a deposit sent 40 minutes ago, showing 11 confirmations be credited to my balance by now?  I have sent 2 messages to customer service with nothing but an automated reply.  Come on guys, get with the program.  The whole point of BTC is to not have delays like this, isn't it?  (I did use my newly issued deposit address, fyi)

[FairlaySupport]

Shouldn't a deposit sent 40 minutes ago, showing 11 confirmations be credited to my balance by now?  I have sent 2 messages to customer service with nothing but an automated reply.  Come on guys, get with the program.  The whole point of BTC is to not have delays like this, isn't it?  (I did use my newly issued deposit address, fyi)

Sorry we had a general outage for 2 hours. We will be back shortly.  We sincerely apologize.

[CoolWhiteStare]

OK, unfortunately the NCAA title game starts in less than 10 minutes.  Please do what you can ASAP.  Ty.

[FairlaySupport]

We fixed it. Everything is back to normal.

[FairlaySupport]

Fairlay is currently unavailable. We are working on it.

EDIT: Someone is DDoSing us (again).  We are trying to bring the site up.

[sirvish]

Hi, I haven't read about this before I made my deposit. Are you back to normal? My deposit hasn't been credited yet (8 Confirmations) so I'd like to know if you're able to credit it before 12:00 CET.

Kind regards

[FairlaySupport]

Your deposit has been credited.

[Kepler510]

Very cool and very-very interesting.I'd also like to be able to sort events by matched amount, or some other mechanism to see where people are actually betting. just thought I would come and vouch that this site really is a great site to bet on. I have a bit of BTC stored here and consistently active in bets. Love it!

[sirvish]

Your deposit has been credited.

Thank you! However, could you let me know why the deposit took that long? I am not used to be waiting on fairlay.

[FairlaySupport]

@sirvish  We are pushing a lot of updates these days.  We got rid of Armory just the other week and switched to a new system.  Sometimes a bug is introduced. It has been fixed now and there won't be any further delays.  


@Kepler  Good proposal. The sorting option is on our list.

[ctlaltdefeat]

Please explain the whole account migration issue. I am currently unable to bet for the last 24 hours at least.

[FairlaySupport]

Please explain the whole account migration issue. I am currently unable to bet for the last 24 hours at least.

Your account was disregarded by mistake. We migrated your account right away upon request.  

A few announcements:

We migrated almost all accounts by now and have disabled betting with old accounts.

As "blockchain betting" cannot be recommended with current transaction fees and as we have simplified our sign-up process tremendously, we also disabled anonymous betting. To compensate for that we will probably implement some kind of "pre-deposit betting", where you can place a bet before your deposit arrives. The bet will than be released on the orderbook once your account has the necessary funds.

Due to increased traffic and higher network fees we will also implement a withdrawal fee of 0.2mBTC per cashout in June 2016.   Why 0.2mBTC?  There are usually 2 transactions required for each withdrawal we process. The first one moves the funds from our cold storage to the hot wallet, the 2nd one is the actual cashout from the hot wallet to the user. Each one costs about 0.1mBTC on average.

We will also raise the minimum deposit amount to 5mBTC in June. Deposits below that amount will be disregarded.

[TeaGie]

Hi fairlay,
I sent a PM the other day but haven't heard back, so am trying in this thread.

Whenever I accept large offers in the sports market, there is an immediate reaction at other large sites such as matchbook or pinnacle.  It seems most of the offers are just an intermediary to betting on those sites.  If pinnacle offers 1000usd, your site offers 2.4 btc.  If I place a bet for 2.4 btc, the price immediately moves on pinnacle.

Is this how your site is set up to operate?

[FairlaySupport]

Hey, sorry we missed your message.   We are aware that at least one of our market makers is hedging certain positions on pinnacle (directly or indirectly via a broker). This should explain the move.

[sbrzol]

Hi fairlay,
I sent a PM the other day but haven't heard back, so am trying in this thread.

Whenever I accept large offers in the sports market, there is an immediate reaction at other large sites such as matchbook or pinnacle.  It seems most of the offers are just an intermediary to betting on those sites.  If pinnacle offers 1000usd, your site offers 2.4 btc.  If I place a bet for 2.4 btc, the price immediately moves on pinnacle.

Is this how your site is set up to operate?

I said the same thing earlier too.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=673475.msg13814311#msg13814311

[ctlaltdefeat]

In general I still really like this site, mainly because the margin on the lines is unbeatable and there is a wide variety of markets available.
As I've written before, the guy who runs the site is generally trustworthy from my experience.

However, there still are a few overarching issues, most of which have been mentioned already:
1) Pace of changes and improvements to the site is quite slow (although recently it has improved).
I think it's fairly uncontroversial to see areas where improvements are needed: performance and load times are poor, the user interface is really lacking (compare it to smarkets, for example), the API is unreliable and often out-of-date (leading me to scraping lines often, which I'm sure causes even worse site performance...) etc.
Do you need help in terms of developers? I could chip in...
2) Response time to messages (i.e support) is quite slow.
3) Lack of clarity regarding market makers. Obviously without a market maker there would be very little liquidity, and having them hedge their bets on other sites is reasonable, but them having various advantages of other players in an "exchange" is unfair. Now that all players can simultaneously stake the same funds on different outcomes it's better, but still having some information about them would be better.

[FairlaySupport]

@ctlaltdefeat  thank you very much for your constructive criticism. Very much appreciated and we really mean it.

Addressing your comments:

1) We think we improved the speed in the last months despite ever increasing traffic and DDoS Attacks. It takes less than 0.5 seconds to load a page or do a search. Also the UI improved.
2) You should try sending your message to our helpdesk and not info@fairlay.com.  If you like to help out and have good programming skills get in touch with us and we will see what we can do.

3) Since the migration all users have the very same account  as our market makers.   What we need to improve is indeed the API. The API for our main market makers is a bit faster than for the general user.

To address this point futher we also like to announce that all users, who provide a small security deposit, will be able to create markets on Fairlay soon.  We will also provide basic market making tools to anyone.