DiceBitco.in - New Thread to Discuss

[suchmoon]

I think their mistake was to not halt betting when the issue was discovered.

Mistake? They were asked repeatedly to do just that, even before the mass exodus of investors. The fact that they didn't and blissfully claimed that the issue has been resolved is as much of a smoking gun as about a dozen other facts in this story.

They received the advise to not allow bets to continue. They made the business decision to not stop bets as they were likely trying to avoid any downtime. I think they were hoping that allowing betting to continue and not stopping withdrawals would allow them to maintain their credibility. It was a calculated risk that did not work in their favor.

Or it worked very much in their favor. I was ready to give manl the benefit of the doubt as he seemed to be a reasonable bloke before this whole fiasco. But the way he mishandled this situation is beyond belief, even if you assume that everything he said was true. He's sitting on a $3m pile of OPM and what's the first thing he does after the site is compromised? Hastily rolls back the code and insists everything is great. Starts issuing half-assed refunds. Yells at anyone doubting his decisions. Closes chat and then the official thread. Proceeds to lose 80-90% of last investors' coins to a freaky lucky whale. Did I miss anything? Did he do anything that was even remotely rational?

I'm not even sure what he could possibly do or say to try to extract himself from this shit, if he'll be at all interested in that when he cools down. Maybe start with publishing mateo's lucky seeds and rolls.

[Quickseller]

I think their mistake was to not halt betting when the issue was discovered.

Mistake? They were asked repeatedly to do just that, even before the mass exodus of investors. The fact that they didn't and blissfully claimed that the issue has been resolved is as much of a smoking gun as about a dozen other facts in this story.

They received the advise to not allow bets to continue. They made the business decision to not stop bets as they were likely trying to avoid any downtime. I think they were hoping that allowing betting to continue and not stopping withdrawals would allow them to maintain their credibility. It was a calculated risk that did not work in their favor.

Or it worked very much in their favor. I was ready to give manl the benefit of the doubt as he seemed to be a reasonable bloke before this whole fiasco. But the way he mishandled this situation is beyond belief, even if you assume that everything he said was true. He's sitting on a $3m pile of OPM and what's the first thing he does after the site is compromised? Hastily rolls back the code and insists everything is great. Starts issuing half-assed refunds. Yells at anyone doubting his decisions. Closes chat and then the official thread. Proceeds to lose 80-90% of last investors' coins to a freaky lucky whale. Did I miss anything? Did he do anything that was even remotely rational?

I'm not even sure what he could possibly do or say to try to extract himself from this shit, if he'll be at all interested in that when he cools down. Maybe start with publishing mateo's lucky seeds and rolls.

From a financial standpoint yes, it worked out in their favor if you believe they were behind the "lucky whale". At this point saying that this is the case is pure speculation. Until the database can be audited (if this would happen, IDK) we really cannot say this as a fact. From a reputation standpoint it did not work in their favor.

I am curious to know how much of their own money they had invested in the site/bankroll, the estimated gains by mateo et el, and the estimated amount of money they refunded investors and victims of the nonce issue. I think this would give a better picture as to what they were able to potentially have scammed and what the ROI on their scam was. It would also paint a picture as to what their potential profit could have been if they had continued running as a legit site.

Their site is showing ~91k BTC bet (over it's lifetime?), this would have an EV of ~910 BTC profit for the bankroll, and an EV of ~91 BTC for their 10% commission on bankroll profits. Assuming they have been in operation for 6 weeks this works out to ~15 BTC per week, or ~780 BTC per year, or ~$390,000 per year before expenses.

[suchmoon]

I am curious to know how much of their own money they had invested in the site/bankroll, the estimated gains by mateo et el, and the estimated amount of money they refunded investors and victims of the nonce issue. I think this would give a better picture as to what they were able to potentially have scammed and what the ROI on their scam was. It would also paint a picture as to what their potential profit could have been if they had continued running as a legit site.

They had 200 BTC of their own investment initially. Site went from +280 to -330 during mateo's lucky run, so that's 600.

I don't know exact amounts of refunds but considering that the site gained maybe 250-300 BTC during the period of time when the "rogue" code was in production, the refunds wouldn't have exceeded that. I think it was A LOT less than that since he was selectively refunding only certain deposits.

Keep in mind that ~half of that 90k BTC was wagered by mateo, and a large part of the remaining bets were tainted to an unknown extent by the "rogue employee", which makes any kind of revenue projection questionable at best.

[dooglus]

He's sitting on a $3m pile of OPM and what's the first thing he does after the site is compromised? Hastily rolls back the code and insists everything is great. Starts issuing half-assed refunds. Yells at anyone doubting his decisions. Closes chat and then the official thread. Proceeds to lose 80-90% of last investors' coins to a freaky lucky whale. Did I miss anything? Did he do anything that was even remotely rational?

Rolling back code to remove the commit written by the new employee was rational.

Thinking that rolling back his commit would leave a secure codebase was reasonable too, if that was his only commit.

Losing to a lucky whale isn't something he could control (unless he was the whale, or gave him the seed, of course). When a whale is playing, you don't want to stop him because he's probably going to end up losing back his gains.

The refund policy, the yelling, and removing chat were all questionable, as was not freezing betting for longer.

[Cluster2k]

Just out of interest I wrote a program that simulated tens of thousands of dice rolls, over thousands of sessions.  Assuming a 100btc bankroll and a target bankroll of 600 (mateo took DB from about +250 to -300, so not unreasonable), over 10,000 sessions with a 1% edge the player didn't reach the target once against the house.  Sometimes it took just 2500 rolls, sometimes 45,000 or more, but the bust was inevitable.  Top bankroll was 378 across all sessions.  

Of course, we don't know how big mateo's bankroll was, but I would suggest it wasn't in the thousands.

[Cluster2k]

Rolling back code to remove the commit written by the new employee was rational.

Thinking that rolling back his commit would leave a secure codebase was reasonable too, if that was his only commit.

DB rolled back the code, but did DB check all the PCs and servers for backdoors that would allow remote access and rigging of the game again?

[dooglus]

DB rolled back the code, but did DB check all the PCs and servers for backdoors that would allow remote access and rigging of the game again?

I don't know, but apparently the employee didn't have access to the live server.

Edit:

Of course, we don't know how big mateo's bankroll was, but I would suggest it wasn't in the thousands.

It doesn't matter, because we know he didn't need it. He didn't lose thousands and win it back...

[Stars]

Off topic : Dooglus can you read my PM I sent you earlier? Thanks.

On topic:  So is he still re-funding investors when they withdraw? Or has he run off with the bankroll?

[onlinepro]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

[itod]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

[bitcoboss]

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

[a1choi]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

apparently if they remove the sig, they lose out on the commissions from the sig campaign.. or a % of it at least.  But i agree.  the longer people keep up the sigs, the more people will still think of that site as being legitimate.

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

Start from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=716312.msg8714248#msg8714248

[sherbyspark]

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

After the bug they gave an excuse that it was one of their employ who did it deliberately  and now the bug is fixed. Then people started divested as no one trusted them. Also, they stopped paying people who lost due to the bug. And once they ran out of funds, they probably created a player who knew the seeds and started flat betting and took the profits from +250 BTC to -332 BTC in a day, and tried to act as if it was no them.

[a1choi]

DB rolled back the code, but did DB check all the PCs and servers for backdoors that would allow remote access and rigging of the game again?

I don't know, but apparently the employee didn't have access to the live server.

Edit:

Of course, we don't know how big mateo's bankroll was, but I would suggest it wasn't in the thousands.

It doesn't matter, because we know he didn't need it. He didn't lose thousands and win it back...

Doog, if we now know (with 99.99999% certainty) that Mateo is a cheat, why didn't Manl take back Mateo's funds to refund investors that got devastated by that run?  What it does seem like is that instead, Manl took back the funds from Mateo's winnings and put it back into their bankroll.

Either that, or they allowed Mateo to withdraw and magically got 500BTC from a secret investor.

[bitcoboss]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

apparently if they remove the sig, they lose out on the commissions from the sig campaign.. or a % of it at least.  But i agree.  the longer people keep up the sigs, the more people will still think of that site as being legitimate.

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

Start from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=716312.msg8714248#msg8714248

Thanks! it is really really crazy

[onlinepro]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

I want my sig payment, thats why.

[itod]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

I want my sig payment, thats why.

And you don't care if someone get's scammed by the scammer you advertise as long as you get your payment?

[onlinepro]

Now they have locked the main theard too
Fucking scam I say.

And you are still displaying their signature while talking like this? At least remove the sig.

I want my sig payment, thats why.

And you don't care if someone get's scammed by the scammer you advertise as long as you get your payment?

If they send coins to something just because they saw ad without doing any recearch about it they would lose them anyway.
There is even link in my sig to the offical theard that shows that it is clearly having problems.

[snuffish]

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

After the bug they gave an excuse that it was one of their employ who did it deliberately  and now the bug is fixed. Then people started divested as no one trusted them. Also, they stopped paying people who lost due to the bug. And once they ran out of funds, they probably created a player who knew the seeds and started flat betting and took the profits from +250 BTC to -332 BTC in a day, and tried to act as if it was no them.

Of course manl cheated everyone. The only right thing would be to suspend mateos betting. So this doesn't make many any sense at all..
When a massive bug like this appear you always suspend the betting or just "un-plug" the server until it's solved.

I read that someone wrote that they "didn't earn enough each day" from dicebitco.in.. but come on! They earned a lot from their investors.. because of the 10% commision.
I think they earned ~10 BTC in commision the first week after launch. That's a massive amount in my opinion.

Just think about the profits it would generate in the long-run.

[bitcoboss]

Could someone summarize what exactly happened ? I have lost track after the bug in the code that made people loose

After the bug they gave an excuse that it was one of their employ who did it deliberately  and now the bug is fixed. Then people started divested as no one trusted them. Also, they stopped paying people who lost due to the bug. And once they ran out of funds, they probably created a player who knew the seeds and started flat betting and took the profits from +250 BTC to -332 BTC in a day, and tried to act as if it was no them.

Thanks for the explanation. this is crazy! unbelievable stuff, it all happened in two days...