Topic: BTCOracle : Bet on the future price of bitcoin ! - page 4. (Read 8511 times)

Hello guys, we just did a major update with all of the following :

We have just proceeded to a major upgrade including the following changes :

Added 2 new time frames : 15 minutes and 1 day
Improved leaderboard
Improved address selection system
Added Coinbase support
Added live chat
Added history page
Improved FAQ

www.btcoracle.com

Looks cool enough.

Ladies and Gents,

We added a set of new tools for users to check their bets and the prices we use to determine wins and loses !

Have a look and tell us what you think.

Good luck !

I have come up with a very low-fee way of gambling on the future value of BTC. 

Now, this might be a little crazy, but I take this one step.  I buy some BTC!  My winning potential is unlimited.

Half-kidding, it seems like an amusing idea.

brada, i think you wanna make money without any skill. the site based on full standard odds. really?
lets try make dynamic odds maybe...  if the trend is UP, offer smaller odds on up... and smarter margin will be able to. you understand me. best regards

Actually,

Thats a very good point, and one that is bothering us, as we want to offer a possibly profitable service (as can be leveraged trading like bitfinex / bitcoinica etc.). And one that can feels profitable to the users, beyond those that are here purely for the thrill of gambling.

So first let me expand on WHY our margin seems so big :

- If the people and the price is truly random, then obviously the true odds would be 1:2. That would makes our margin insane.
What we are aiming for is not a frightening 15% fee or whatever, but rather a less than 5% house edge.

But in a practical world : So far we have a few traders that managed to win a TON, like winning 2/3rd of their bets. And they are betting BIG. We lost almost 10 bitcoins since starting this business.

Is this random luck ? Are we just randomly running very bad ? We can't really tell. Maybe a few guys are super skilled, using some walls patterns, betting at the right time, or even having a way to slightly manipulate the market. We really have no idea.
Obviously winning day traders exist in real markets, so that's definitely a possibility.
 All we know is that, if we were to break even for all bets so far, we would need to offer a 1.60 price multiplier.
As our pockets aren't infinite and since our statistical data is far from being wide enough, we have no over protection mechanism than to lower the odds to these theorical odds

- Finally, comparable business often have payout very low like 60% etc. even with crazy volumes (binary options trading website "scam" which tends to market themselves as investment "win 10 000$ in a few hours from home ! easy without market knowledge" etc.)

What we are thinking to introduce now, is a hedging service : For example, You think 1.60 price multiplier is really too low ? Ok, we let you propose 1.80 to everybody using our website, and then the betters are matched against your offer using your bitcoins. If you are convinced that this is profitable long term, then you have an easy mechanism of making money by playing the "banks" instead of us.

Of course this is not something we actually propose, just something we are thinking of designing to allow the fairest deal we can offer to the users.

Would people be interested to put their money at stakes and proposing better odds than us for the same service ?
Thats an idea we wanna explore.

15% profit margin not too much guys?

Thanks for your feedback, I updated the FAQ for grammatical mistakes and incorrect information.

http://btcoracle.com/faq.php

As our odds, I think they are low enough right now :-)
Our goal is still to have them as high as possible, but so far players are winnings on most of the big bets so thats hard to sustain

We still paid another ~3 bitcoins to our "top" player which manage to keep winning :p Congrats !

I'd suggest working on the FAQ pages, but other than that you may have to decrease payouts again!

That's how gambling works. Have you ever been to a casino before?

Yes - That would be cheating We want to try to run a business as fair and ethical as possible, where everything from our side can be verified easily (feed, timestamp etc.)

Awesome - I was worried about delaying the bet for a while to catch a good price, but that isn't the case then

@TradeFortress :

To let you know more about our system, your bet might not show instantaneously (it can takes up to 5 minutes) on our website but we guarantee that the price you'll get will be the price at the time blockchain.info tag your bet. Which can be quite instantaneous or almost, especially using blockchain.info as a wallet since we use them as our source for "neutral" time certification.

So we might be late in showing your bet, but we will show it starting at the blockchain.info timestamp with the corresponding mtgox price, which you can verify directly from our website.

Hopefully that answer a few of your questions

Hello TradeFortress, can you show me which bet you are talking about so I can check it out ?

Regards,

Emilien

@DeadTerra thx

I can vouch for OP,
I am working with him on some other projects and I have meet him in real life
//DeaDTerra

Why is it taking more than a minute for you to accept a bet I placed? I'm using Blockchain.info which should be directly connected to your node.

Okay, you listed it, however I'm still questioning why it's taking you this long. Bets should be accepted within 5 seconds max.

Hello guys, a quick update to congratulate all our winners on www.btcoracle.com : So far we have given away 4 bitcoin more than what people have lost !

We are still working on many new features, thanks all for playing !

The odds might seems bad on up, but they reflect the fact that our players have been quite skilled : they are winning much much more than it would be expected with a random guess.

Thanks to everyone for your feedback

I'm hoping not to play at all.  I'm horrible at predicting price movements.

I was pointing out a possible way that people could exploit your site, but it seems that you have it all worked out already.  Reducing the odds you offer once your "book" is out of balance should mitigate the risk significantly.

I did send a big email at coinbase. They are the one having your 0.014c. I asked them to send your bitcoins back.
We are not compatible coinbase right now so stop using it to play : They add stuff to the payout so we dont have any way to know which address is using it.

I am recommending blockchain.info wallets but any desktop client must be fine, I guess.

I sent you by PM my huge mail I sent to coinbase.

Fully automated. but sometimes we got issues (problem with feed, wallet etc.) so sometimes it can be late.