To start, just a quick explanation of why Will was banned from the faucet/tokens when he was. When Will discovered the bug, he did not directly tell me but told some other people. Those people came forward to me saying several different accounts reported it to them first. Many (or all?) of those accounts which people mentioned were Will and his alts. Eventually, Will came to me on one of his accounts saying he discovered the bug, after which I went to check if he did indeed discover it was an account linked to him using our account-linking tools. The tool did indeed report to me that Will and the account he was on when talking about the bug to others were linked to each other, proving to me it was him who discovered the bug, but it also showed many flags for dodging faucet limitations within the same report. This is why the timing for the token ban lines up with the bug report. By the method used to link his account to the one who discovered it for paying out the bug bounty, I was also alerted to the possibility of abuse going on with those accounts.
Getting to the reason for the ban. I dug in deeper and found that one, or multiple people, who had used his account were strongly linked to other accounts which had abused the faucet based on patterns of when they logged in/out with identical or nearby IP addresses. For example, something like a user logging in with IP 100.100.100.100, claiming the faucet, then switching to another account on IP 100.100.100.101 and claiming the faucet, and so on with only minutes between accounts. It was spotted several times with a group of over a dozen accounts and over 20 million converted tokens in total. Will has by his own admission in PMs to me said that at least 3 people (including himself) have had access to his main account, and at another time told me over 5 people use his set of accounts. While there is no proof Will himself abused the system, there is proof that someone who Will gave access to his account to massively abused the system. While it is unfortunate if someone he gave access to was the one who did it, it is ultimately his responsibility to keep his account in good standing.
One important thing to note, and why we take facuet abuse so seriously, is that any conversion has an immediate cost of the entire value of the conversion to us, even if the funds are never withdrawn. If someone converts, then loses their converted coins, we typically only get a sliver of it back in commissions. We want our faucets, quests, and events to be used fairly so that everyone can get their own share. If we ignored abuse, we'd have to drastically lower our token payouts for everyone to help cover the costs.
Will's ban in chat was not directly related to this incident, we don't ban people for reporting bugs, we pay them bounties. Will was banned for his vulgar language towards our mods and admins over how he felt unfairly treated.
For the bet in question which started this series of events:
https://bitvest.io/results.php?query=77060273 With the 0-padding taken into account, we remove the extra 0 in the user seed and everything calculates exactly as one would expect and the results line up with the proof as they should. You can see the server seed is the same as it was, the user seed only has a 0 removed. This is proof we did not manipulate any results to "fix" what was broken. The "result hash" is entirely different, but that is because the "result hash" is a combination of the (now correct) user seed, and the server seed.
I do agree the upgrading timing was unusual, but the bug (Which you can see from the earlier posts was spotted over a day before I found out about it) finally got reported directly to me while our server was minutes away from being taken offline for new hardware to be installed. We also had planned hardware upgrades for days before the bug was posted. While I don't have any proof here to show that, many users can attest to the fact that I said hardware updates were coming "in a few days" many days before all this happened.
Regarding the comment about our mods committing fraud. We take all reports of fraud from our moderators seriously. If you have evidence or any concerns we should look into, you may PM me, e-mail me, or open a ticket on Bitvest and I will look into it promptly.
Such a Zodiac-ish answer. The level of faucet gaming you are saying was happening on his accounts is some next level shit. I know this behavior well and it is fun to spot when it's happening here and at other sites. It does not come from high stakes depositing players though. Thanks for discussing the 0-padding better. Sorry to beat a dead horse here but why did the check verification pass?
Will being banned permanently for vulgar language is hard to swallow. Temporary ban is the common for the worst offenders. I can't think of one day where tempers weren't flaring in that chat. Some players are worse than others and some are downright offensive to the point that I want to slap them and teach them some respect. Bitvest has always had the highest tolerance to adults using adult language. High stakes are being won and lost every day and the atmosphere is often times very intense. While I try to maintain a level of respect towards the mods, I have even let my temper get the better of me. I've sent a flurry of vulgar insults to you and Light on multiple occasions. In fact, I've been so mad a few times that I actually tried to get banned. I don't know where I'm going with this so I'll just end it here and say
#FreeWilly