Topic: ApopheniaBTC - Bet and solve the challenges to win BTC. - page 35. (Read 58241 times)

One of them reminds me of Rambo.

I'm very happy that you like it AngryCatfish.


There are many different ways the reward system could work and honestly they all seem fun to me. I choose this one because it guarantees that at some point, every picture will be worth betting on. The way it worst now the starting pot is 4 times the bet. So if by the time you are 25% sure that you know the answer, you HAVE to play. And if you miss, you increase the pot which probably means that someone that was 20% sure that he knew the answer, now HAS to play. In theory it can cause a chain reaction of bets, which I believe we witnessed on the "goldfinger" picture last week. I am a bit afraid that if the starting pot was decreasing, it MIGHT in some cases cause some of the harder pictures to be not worth betting on. If you start for example with 20% certainty about your answer and then, because of the improvement in the picture you get 5% certainty every hour but the starting pot decreases so it's always less than 1/certainty*bet then then nobody should be expected to bet on the picture. I would have to manually check pictures to evaluate whether they will be easy enough at some point to be worth the bet (which is impossible since my opinion would be highly subjective and biased).

Bets are still few in numbers so I don't make any profit from this, just very minor losses. My ideas to cope with this currently are:

1. Spend money on advertisement. The bad thing is that it looks like that most people that visit the site through ads don't place bets. The highest bet/visit ratio is the one from people coming over from the bitcoin wiki, this forum and through betwithcoins. Obviously this is because of better targeting. Maybe if I did a custom deal for advertising on some other site, or perhaps betwithbtc, I would get more players for the money spent.

2. Do an IPO and sell shares to earn money and have a few people (the shareholders or "chairmen" voted by shareholders) to advise me on how these money should be spent to advertise and develop the site. Shares will pay dividends from the equity.

3.Increase the starting bet AND also increase the fee. An idea would be startingpot=9*bet and fee=90% of bet. This would cause the chain reaction to happen earlier BUT it would also mean that multiple bets from a single player wouldn't make that much sense. Right now it's 4 times the bet and 40% fee so you can bet a second time to regain 60% of the previous bet plus the pot. 90% fee would mean you only recover 10% of your previous bet by betting again. In both cases (4x/40% or 9x/90%) the breaking point for me would be 10 bets per picture. That's when the site starts earning something.

4. Increase the starting pot and keep the fee at 40%. This would mean that my breaking point would move to more than 10 bets. Making the starting pot 8x the bet would mean I need 20 bets to break even. I doubt that this is viable for the time being. I believe it will be viable in the future but I don't know how far this future will be so I don't won't to play with the starting bet, increasing it today just to decrease it next week/month.

5. Make the starting pot 10x the bet and increase the fee for the first 10 bets to 100%. This means that in during the first 10 bets the reward will be huge so many different people will have an incentive to try one answer each (there is no way to win back your money spent during the first bets though so I don't expect a second answer for most players). After 10 bets have been accepted the fee is reduced to x% (x could easily be lower than 40% too at this point). This solution has a few problems. First of all it increases the complexity of the site, both for the development and the players. Secondly it will be somewhat hard to be certain whether you bet will fall into the first 10 or not, thankfully this uncertainty is one-directional: you expect it to have 100% fee and it ends up having less, which is not bad. If you expect it to have less than 100% it will never have more than what you expect. So my main objection here is the complexity but if people like this idea though I shall seriously consider it because it offers a middle ground between (3.) and (4.), it increases the starting pot, this rewarding early players more, while keeping my break even point the same (10 bets).

EDIT:
Two more pics:

Excellent that spiral won, me and my girl friend spent last night wracking our brains trying to solve these. I've never found any gambling appealing until now, thanks for coming up with something fun and creative. One idea we had was what if the amounts rewarded started higher, and as the picture begins to clear the pot decreases (still going up with guesses of course), that way people are rewarded with earlier more difficult guesses.

Sorry for this. I had forgotten to add the answer "spiral notebook" (I didn't think of it even though we also call them like that in Greece) to the notebook picture. I noticed now while looking at answers given by other players and since nobody had solved it, I added the answer and revalidated the bets.

The only bad thing is that AFTER the player that answer "spiral notebook" someone (else) had submitted the other correct answer "notepad" BUT he/she hasn't paid for it fully. To get a refund for his pot though he will have to fully pay for the bet so that the site checks it. If he doesn't do so in the next day I'll try and do the refund manually. (The site will ONLY check/refund/reward bets that are fully or over paid)

New text picture:


EDIT: fixed the picture

Nope. Nothing has reached the "expired" state.

I posted two new pics:

Have any images not been solved?

Awesome! Thank you!

There you go, I sent you the pot , enjoy it! =).

this game can be brutal
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Aw, that sucks! You should've gotten it correct, what is your BTC adress?

i've tried "gta". tough luck. congrats boelens. 

You're on fire lately. :-)

It's a pity that someone had already bet GTA and someone else bet Clucking Bell none of the two bet the full title of the game.

Wooh, got another one! Got the GTA IV one =).

An archive is something that I already think about implementing. I'll give it a try right now.

Oh and here is a new pic:

Today is movie/painting/game day. :-)

Congrats Stunna for the scale. I didn't expect this picture to last that long to be honest. I don't think though that I will ever be able to technologically solve the problem of possible cheating. I mean even if there was a conceivable system that prohibits me from betting on my site you would have to trust that I am actually implementing it. But if you trust me with that, you could start me for not cheating in the first place. In theory I could give access to another person to verify that I have indeed implemented that system and allow him to do random checks on the server. But in that case you'll have to trust that the person doing the checks will not cheat himself since he will have to have root access on the server to verify that I haven't hidden any code that disables the system that prohibits me from betting. Let alone that I can't even think of a system to block me since I can always bet from an internet cafe for example.

Huge distortion isn't bad. It just wastes time before someone makes the first guess. Nevertheless try reducing the max distortion a bit, I will do it over the next days because I don't currently have a way to change the maximum distortion just for the newly uploaded pictures. (I just reduced it by 6.6%)

In the future, as more players join I'll place more pictures. Maybe as a first step I should aim to have only one "solved" picture on display, currently I've noticed on average 2 to 3 pictures. This will mean that'll I'll post more than one pic per day. I'll consider starting this tomorrow.

Thank you both for the suggestions. ;-)

An archive would be also nice.

Website is indeed trusted thus far, I've won 2 prizes. One for the scale and other for the graveyard.

I do suggest implementing a different system that will ensure that you cannot bet or know what the answers are to the images if the website picks up some more steam.

I'd suggest starting some of them less scrambled nobody really has a shot of getting a correct guess when it is 100% distorted so it just wastes time, more people are willing to place bets when it is slightly more visible. Also I suggest having more images running at once.

Keep up the solid work!  

Today is Hintless day, the most difficult of days! Starting pot is 0.015. :-)

I was the one to guess that after you said it and got it wrong XD

Very interesting game. That guy in the picture looks like al pacino in godfather.