We've considered raising the primedice edge for a long time, 1% is extremely risky and often unsustainable without a solid bankroll or low max bet. It would be interesting to figure out the elasticity of the house edge on dice in terms of how much volume/profit a site would lose or gain by shifting the edge.
I'm curious to know that too. I suspect that most gamblers don't really care too much about the edge. All the bars in Canada have state-run gambling terminals where you can play Keno, lotto, some kind of fake poker, etc. Some games have a house edge as high as 50% and yet people still play them constantly.
From
http://lotto.bclc.com/keno-and-keno-bonus/prizes-and-odds.html :
That top row though: you have a 1 in 4 chance of doubling your money.
House edge percentages for those 4 games:
>>> (1 - 2/4) * 100 # pick 1 number
50.0%
>>> (1 - 10/17) * 100 # pick 2 numbers
41.17%
>>> (1 - 20/73 - 2/8) * 100 # pick 3 numbers
47.60%
>>> (1 - 50/327 - 5/24 - 1/5) * 100 # pick 4 numbers
43.87%
Of course, that's different because the state has a monopoly on gambling. If you don't like the 40%-50% house edge they offer, there's no legal alternative other than not playing at all.
When primedice had a 0.9% edge I don't think it made any difference on volume, however the way we integrated it via jackpot made it still seem like a 1% game with an easily forgettable added incentive.
I thought the same. Giving 0.1% back in the form of a jackpot for rolling a specific number is easily forgotten, by virtue of the fact that it happens so rarely. It would have been much more visible if you just dropped the house edge to 0.9% instead. That also would have resulted in less variance for the house I think, than paying out the occasional big jackpot.
When PD was about to launch we had decided on a 1.5-1.6% edge if I recall correctly, satoshidice had plans to release a new off-chain site around then (may '13)
Did PD really launch that late? JD launched in June 2013 and I thought PD had already been around for a while then.
and coinroll had kept a 1% edge due to that reason and we ended up matching it to stay competitive. I wonder what sort of edge bitcoin casinos would have if things didn't progress that way though, if primedice was sitting at a 1.5-2% edge would just-dice and all investment sites have followed suit?
I saw the biggest two offchain sites at the time (coinroll and primedice) both having a 1% house edge. I didn't see any possibility other than to match it. I didn't want to get into a price war with either site by undercutting them, but also didn't think that charging a higher edge would work. If you guys had set the bar at 1.5% then I'm sure I would have followed suit.
My original concept for JD was that the investors would set their own house edge, like traders set their own price for BTC/USD on the exchanges. The ones offering the lowest house edge would be the ones who got the action, in the same way that the traders offering their BTC for sale at the lowest price on BitStamp are the ones who get matched first.
I didn't figure out a good way to present such a market to the players. It's probably too confusing to have the house edge bounce up and down as investors compete with each other for a bigger share of the betting action, so I didn't end up doing it. That would have been an interesting experiment, to see where the free-market would decide the house edge should be.
