alternative to SatoshiDice

[unk1911]

the issue with satoshi dice is it is often down. in fact, it appears to be down right now. i can only imagine how frustrating it must be if it goes down in the middle of a series of bets. the users don't know whether they will ever see their money again. is there any interest in the community to build a similar service with better uptime?

[iron77]

the issue with satoshi dice is it is often down. in fact, it appears to be down right now. i can only imagine how frustrating it must be if it goes down in the middle of a series of bets. the users don't know whether they will ever see their money again. is there any interest in the community to build a similar service with better uptime?

no need to reinvent the wheel however the competition seems to always be a good thing . Lets just keep pushing for ugrading the servers.

[Stephen Gornick]

the users don't know whether they will ever see their money again.

The service is operated by one of the most active and respected bitcoiners.  Their service is responsible for well over half the bitcoin transactions occurring each day and to accommodate this they are doing improvements and maintenance on a regular basis.  If you haven't gotten a payout, it is probably just a delay.  If it doesn't show up after many hours (or a day even) make sure the transaction has been confirmed and has made it into the blockchain.

If it has and there still is no payout then perhaps posting on SatoshiDICE asking for assistance will help get your problem solved.

That thread does show that payouts are delayed apparently because of a cash management issue where they ran out of confirmed funds and made payouts using funds from wagers that hadn't confirmed yet.  That will gum up the works if they need to stop the system to reissue those payouts.  It is called growing pains.

[unk1911]

true, but it doesn't hurt to have some redundancy in the system... you are exactly right, what happened was some high rollers came in and starting betting 100 btc at a time.   in order to pay them out,  their system didn't have enough funds in the reserves, so they probably had to add more funds to unclog the system.  i think an alternate satoshidice service would limit the max bet at 10 btc and maintain a larger reserve, thus avoiding this issue... the problem is maintaining such high reserves. i would imagine you would need a 6-figure $ reserves to keep a system going, and if you want to allow 100 btc max bets, probably would have to have 7-figure reserves...?

[Bitcoin-Dice]

Right now there is one in its test phase: http://www.bitcoin-dice.com

Give it a try

[Stephen Gornick]

Right now there is one in its test phase: http://www.bitcoin-dice.com

Give it a try

Heh,

We'll fetch a real random number between 1 and 16384 from random.org.-

You completely miss the whole point of SatoshiDICE and why it (and BitLotto for instance) is different from other online wagering services don't you?

[Kazimir]

We'll fetch a real random number between 1 and 16384 from random.org.-

Really?





Oh, and most importantly:

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

[terrytibbs]

You completely miss the whole point of SatoshiDICE

Spamming the blockchain?

[Stephen Gornick]

You completely miss the whole point of SatoshiDICE

Spamming the blockchain?

Heh, ... well that's a symptom.

What I was referring to is how SatoshiDICE is cheat-proof.  (well, they could cheat and you might not be able to tell until the secret is revealed the next day, but by the next day you can know that your bets paid out or not because of math, not because the operator happened to be honest or not.)

[terrytibbs]

You completely miss the whole point of SatoshiDICE

Spamming the blockchain?

Heh, ... well that's a symptom.

What I was referring to is how SatoshiDICE is cheat-proof.  (well, they could cheat and you might not be able to tell until the secret is revealed the next day, but by the next day you can know that your bets paid out or not because of math, not because the operator happened to be honest or not.)

There are ways of cheat-proofing without spamming the blockchain. The server could provide the hash of their secret, at which point the client inputs their secret. The two secrets are concatenated and hashed in whatever way satoshidice does it.