SatoshiDICE.com - The World's Most Popular Bitcoin Game

Quote from: transc3ndent on March 30, 2015, 11:59:08 PM

Quote from: SatoshiDICE_PR on March 30, 2015, 09:36:57 PM

Yes unfortunately the system was down and it doesn't support bet cancelling. A free 0.2 is not a bad compensation considering that the bet and payout was still going to be processed and you could have made a much bigger profit. If we cancel bets (even if only having the possivility to cancel bets), it would be possible for us to cheat by accepting cancellation of winning bets and stall cancellation of others. The system would no longer be provably fair.

We apologize for the problems that the downtime caused you. We do everything we can to keep everything running smoothly and we have improved the server configuration to help correcting similar failures much faster in the future.

If you cancel only the winning bets and stall the losing ones then that is cheating. But if a user asks you to cancel a bet and you do it regardless of the outcome that you already know then there is nothing wrong with it. You just have to respect your customer's choice as the mental stress is on them. The user should have the right to decide weather that should happen or if they want to proceed in special circumstances. The reason I asked for it is very reasonable as it took two days for my bet to get processed when it should have been instantaneous. I asked for a refund more than a day before and told you I would rather give you back your 0.2 and have my peace of mind but you did not respect my decision. It is a simple thing for your company to do and we could have done it many ways but you would not communicate with me. What I disliked the most about the situation is you ignoring me. I sent several emails and PMs without response for a couple of days.

Also another problem with bets that take longer than usual to get processed is the seed used. So some might argue that it should be the seed of the day it was bet or the day it was processed and if you do not have a clearly stated company policy on which is used that can even be considered cheating and get rid of the provable fairness. You could just wait until the day where you are happy with the total outcome and then process it. I am pretty sure that this is not the case with you but this is in theory possible.

Even if we would allow bet cancellations we could say the email got lost and we didn't see the cancellation request for losing bets and it would require rules for cancellation, so we don't do it.

You can check with the provably fair calculation that the hashes and secrets for the correct day was used. If the numbers check out for the secrets and hash for the day the bet was placed, it's proof that it was was processed fairly. Hashes are provided in advance so we can't change the day of the secrets to be used with a particular bet.