bitZino - Bitcoin Casino - Blackjack, Roulette, 3 Card Poker, Slots and more!

[fatigue]

Great to hear the site's doing great! I've been having fun with those 0.25 BTC

I do have a small suggestion: could you add a way to see how much you've won/lost per game and total you've deposited and withdrawn? It was easy to add them up myself before when I only had a few deposits, but now it starts taking some work...

If you walked away from a casino with the amount you've lost blazing on a neon sign in front of you, they might not see too much more of your business.

[dooglus]

Great to hear the site's doing great! I've been having fun with those 0.25 BTC

I do have a small suggestion: could you add a way to see how much you've won/lost per game and total you've deposited and withdrawn? It was easy to add them up myself before when I only had a few deposits, but now it starts taking some work...

If you walked away from a casino with the amount you've lost blazing on a neon sign in front of you, they might not see too much more of your business.

I was thinking along the same lines.  Since the majority of customers are going to be net losers it might not be good for business to show them how much exactly they've lost.  Gamblers often like to believe that they "broke about even".  Presenting the true situation to them makes that harder to believe.

[ErebusBat]

Great to hear the site's doing great! I've been having fun with those 0.25 BTC

I do have a small suggestion: could you add a way to see how much you've won/lost per game and total you've deposited and withdrawn? It was easy to add them up myself before when I only had a few deposits, but now it starts taking some work...

If you walked away from a casino with the amount you've lost blazing on a neon sign in front of you, they might not see too much more of your business.

I was thinking along the same lines.  Since the majority of customers are going to be net losers it might not be good for business to show them how much exactly they've lost.  Gamblers often like to believe that they "broke about even".  Presenting the true situation to them makes that harder to believe.

I can say that I would not auto-sum if I was bitZino.  Those who want it will add, those that don't (like dooglus pointed out above) will go on believing they broke even.

[libertaad]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I think we're going to continue to strike a middle ground here: some people like certain things to be left unsaid, so we are going to avoid automatically summing up your deposits and withdrawals. However,  we will always provide you with full access to your withdrawal and deposit history, so importing this data into a spreadsheet should be a fairly simple operation.

[titeuf_87]

Fair enough! Thanks for the replies.

[jagallout]

Found your site recently, and I am hooked!
Its clean, easy to use, fast, and well uses BTC!

Keep up the good work!

[libertaad]

Found your site recently, and I am hooked!
Its clean, easy to use, fast, and well uses BTC!

Keep up the good work!

Thanks, I'm glad you like it!

We are in active development, and constantly working to make the site better. If you have any feedback for us, let me know!

[KajiMaster]

I've been playing on bitZino for a while now.  I've had to contact customer support a few times in the past for password rests and have nothing but great things to report.  Bravo on an awesome and well developed product.  My only complaint is I SUCK at BlackJack .  I still play from time to time tho.

My request for the developers.  Craps!  I would be so down for investing in on such a product for development.  Just let me know where to contribute.

-kaji

[libertaad]

I've been playing on bitZino for a while now.  I've had to contact customer support a few times in the past for password rests and have nothing but great things to report.  Bravo on an awesome and well developed product.  My only complaint is I SUCK at BlackJack .  I still play from time to time tho.

My request for the developers.  Craps!  I would be so down for investing in on such a product for development.  Just let me know where to contribute.

-kaji

Thanks Kaji!

Stay on the lookout for Roulette and Craps - those will likely be the next 2 games we launch.

[Micon]

really cool site.  Just fired off .13 bitcoins.  extremely simple, clean interface + love that it's 30 second anon account / pure bitcoin play.

glglgl

[isthisreallife]

Tried this out on my iPhone today with play money. Really cool.

Great site and impressive response to customer feedback. Well done!

[libertaad]

really cool site.  Just fired off .13 bitcoins.  extremely simple, clean interface + love that it's 30 second anon account / pure bitcoin play.

glglgl

Tried this out on my iPhone today with play money. Really cool.

Great site and impressive response to customer feedback. Well done!

Thanks you guys, I'm glad you're enjoying it!

We'll be launching roulette at the beginning of next week, which I'm really excited about! We're also getting close to launching craps.

Also, we've made some substantial changes on the backend which significantly improve our system's reliability and loss-prevention. All of our data is backed-up in realtime and stored in geographically diverse locations. So now, even if our primary data center completely falls off the map, we'll be able to failover with no data loss and minimal downtime.

[Stephen Gornick]

we'll be prioritizing importing private keys after this. From a cursory glance, I think it really shouldn't be that hard, and empowering bitcoin notes would be a huge benefit!

Any chance that is coming anytime soon?

[libertaad]

we'll be prioritizing importing private keys after this. From a cursory glance, I think it really shouldn't be that hard, and empowering bitcoin notes would be a huge benefit!

Any chance that is coming anytime soon?

Thanks for keeping us on track We haven't forgotten about it, we just ran into some technical problems, which have slowed us down.

I thought this would be simple to implement by using the importprivkey API call, but it turns out that method is really slow to run, and basically locks up bitcoind during the time that it's running. It seems like the only solution may be to run multiple copies of bitcoind, or use some sort of modified client - both of which don't seem ideal. Do you have any technical advice on a good way to implement this? It seems like a lot of other services do this, so there must be a good way!

[Stephen Gornick]

Do you have any technical advice on a good way to implement this?

Well, you don't need to import the key into the wallet.  You are simply doing a one-time redeem to spend any funds on that coin.  And because the key is compromised (as it comes from an external source), I certainly would never mix it in with a wallet holding other funds.

I just assume you create a spend transaction with the output address being one that is tied to that user's account.  The Bitcoin.org client v0.7 has raw transaction support.  You could also build a transaction and use Blockchain.info's pushtx I believe.

 - https://people.xiph.org/~greg/signdemo.txt

Or use genjix's Subvertx:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50721.msg604667#msg604667

[libertaad]

I certainly would never mix it in with a wallet holding other funds.

I agree - this was what got me originally thinking about just running a second bitcoind for the purpose of importing the private keys. We could just throw away the wallet from the 2nd bitcoind periodically, or immediately after the funds are sent to the primary bitcoind wallet.

I just assume you create a spend transaction with the output address being one that is tied to that user's account.

The problem is that with the standard bitcoind, it seems that you can't even figure out the balance of a private key without either importing it first, or importing the blockchain into a separate external data structure. So, since you don't know the balance, you can't really create a valid transaction

Or use genjix's Subvertx:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50721.msg604667#msg604667

Thanks for the link! That does seem like a cool set of tools. However, the requirement to import the entire blockchain into a separate database is starting to border on overkill.

To be honest, none of these solutions is ideal. They all pose very real costs: both in terms of server resources and engineering effort. They also pose a potential security risk: I'd much rather be relying solely on bitcoind, since it is simply the most well-tested client out there.

I really do want to support importing private keys - I think the ability to for people to use bitcoins in a similar way to how they currently use paper cash is a worthy goal that will certainly help bitcoin's adoption. Ideally, I'd like there to be a sendprivatekey API call in bitcoind, which would really trivialize the whole operation.

I haven't given up hope though! I'll keep exploring all the potential options.

[ErebusBat]

What about using blockchain.info's API to get the balance of the key?

[Stephen Gornick]

The problem is that with the standard bitcoind, it seems that you can't even figure out the balance of a private key without either importing it first, or importing the blockchain into a separate external data structure. So, since you don't know the balance, you can't really create a valid transaction

Armory, which uses the blockchain from bitcoind appears to provide this:

Code:

unspentTxOuts = walletObj.getAddrTxOutList(addr160, 'Spendable')

 - https://github.com/etotheipi/BitcoinArmory/blob/master/createTxFromAddrList.py

Which can be called using a script from:

 - https://github.com/etotheipi/BitcoinArmory/blob/master/extras/sample_armory_code.py

[libertaad]

What about using blockchain.info's API to get the balance of the key?

I would prefer not to rely on a third-party if possible. This may end up being one of the most practical solutions though, given the current feature-set of bitcoind.

Armory, which uses the blockchain from bitcoind appears to provide this:

Armory does seem quite promising, but I think they still require the entire blockchain to be stored in ram (which makes sense, how else would they be able to quickly get the balance of any address). I also am wary of the security implications of Armory. It definitely doesn't have as many eyes on it as bitcoind itself has, and just because it uses bitcoind for the underlying networking doesn't mean it is fully secure.

Thanks for the advice everyone! I definitely didn't think this feature would have so many pros and cons involved in the decisions we'd have to make! Right now, I think running 2 copies of bitcoind is sounding like the best solution, but I'm not 100% sold yet.

[IveBeenBit]

Out of curiosity - what are the maximum bets for your games? Your OP claims 10 BTC as the maximum, but the bankroll required for you to operate with people betting that much has to be massive. Is 10 BTC really the max bet and do you think that's sustainable? Do you actually get much action that high? As I said, I'm more curious (or nosy -- take your pick) than anything.