Topic: bustabit.com -- The Social Gambling Game - page 161. (Read 293938 times)

Of course you need to tell us when you're going to do it, not after you've done it - or it has the same problem (you could generate 100 chains, publish all their hashes in the blockchain, and pick the one with the best client seed) - and even then posts can be edited, so you'd probably want people to quote it before you send it to the miners.

Then there's the concern that maybe you rent a bunch of hashrate so you can pick a nice block hash... (withhold the transaction from other miners, so you know you will mine it; check the block hash before broadcasting the block; only publish the block if it's "good") but I guess however you do it there's scope for cheating. If you have me pick the client seed people can suspect us of colluding.

And yes, that's fine. I can review it for you.

Hmmmm. I need to run the maths, as I'm don't have an intuitive sense of if it would matter or not -- as my house odds are a bit different than a normal gambling site: https://www.moneypot.com/faq#odds (I try give conservative gamblers a much fairer deal).

However, I don't think the typical large-gambler would play like that. If they do, that's fine -- they can run into my 10% bankroll loss rule. But for normal cases, the 1 BTC / game to be the limiting factor. If a whale came in my casino, doing hundreds of normal style 1 BTC bets -- I'd be ecstatic. If a whale came in, and wanted to make a big win or big loss and then walk  ... I'd be shitting bricks.


True, that's quite nice.  Once I tell everyone the process, I'll could publish the last hash in the blockchain -- and use the block hash as the "client seed". If you don't mind, I'll send you all the details before I push the button and you can do a final review?

I'm planning on using this process for my next game on moneypot -- which is pretty similar in requirements (real time, social game)

Good luck with that. I just wanted to make you aware of the risk you were taking if you weren't already.

You're the third instance of someone limiting the maximum bet (and not just the maximum profit per bet) I've seen recently.

PrimeDice effectively does that, by limiting the maximum payout per bet (including the return of your stake) to 40 BTC. So if you want to bet at 98%, 1.01x, you're limited to betting around 39.6 BTC to win 0.4 I think.

Then dice.ninja launched, and they limit the max bet to 5 times the max profit (which is 0.5% of their bankroll). Apparently the same guys own dark-dice or some such, which lost a lot of coins to someone betting high stake, high chance of winning, low payout bets over and over and getting lucky.

I wonder if there's a good reason to limit the max bet beyond just limiting the maximum profit per bet. The Kelly criterion tells me no, but when I see it happening in three different places maybe there's a reason for it.


Well, this is still better than the current situation, which is that you get to create whatever house advantage you like, whenever you like. Don't you?

The problem could be solved using the server-seed, client-seed technique of other sites. Only instead of per player and per randomize, it only happens once.

Create your chain of a billion sha256 hashes, publish the billionth hash, then (and only then) have someone trusted pick a client seed which will be combined with each of your billion hashes in turn to pick the outcome of each game. That basically makes you commit to your hash chain before you are able to tell whether it is a "good" or "bad" one.

Hmm.  I just tried it, and was able to create a 0.2% undetectable house advantage for me, for the first year of operation. The problem is quite simple, I don't (and can't!) publish the starting seed -- which means I can cherry-pick the best one for me. Certain sequences are going to be more or less favorable to me. When I tried generating thousands of starting seeds -- and picking the one the lead the the most favorable opening year for me -- I was able to pretty quickly find one that would give me a 0.2% advantage. If I spent a bit more time, I'm sure I could do even better.


Given this, I'm not sure if I should bother continuing down this route?

Yeah, that's right. Although there is *also* a 1 BTC max bet, so it's not as bad as it would first seem -- but my bankroll simulations are still quite terrifying. I can promise you, if someone starts placing max bets -- my heart will be racing faster than theirs.

My total savings is about ~77 BTC, give or take a little -- so risking just 1% of that isn't really an appealing max-win at this stage. To be honest, I'm pretty ok with losing up to 10% in a single game -- I just hope that it's because my site has continued to grow in popularity -- I'll eventually recuperate my loses. But if not, I'll survive -- life is cheap here (Guadalajara) and I also work a part time job.

But yeah, there's definitely a real danger of someone putting a significant dent in my bankroll. But hey, I guess I'm just a gambler at heart. At least this time the odds are with me

See the "how does it work?" answer here: https://lbaat.net/howtouse for where I first saw this idea.


That's why we crowd-source our bankrolls these days, so we don't have to risk our savings...

Have you done any analysis to determine what a safe amount to risk per game is?

Do I remember reading that you risk up to 10% of the bankroll per game? That seems very dangerous for a game with a 1% house edge.

Neat idea! Oh man, how do you expect me to fix my UI bugs when you give me such tantalizing ideas to play around with. I've got a little script generating my sha256 chain now. But it's quite an intrusive change, so I don't think I'll be able to get it live for a while.


True. Although if I did that, I'd be vulnerable to someone who knew I did that, and switched.


Good point. I'm working on another social real time gambling game at the same time, which has the same problem -- so using a chain like that is quite appealing.


hehe. Thanks man =) To be honest, I was driven out of fear that you might want to muck around with a few BTC on my site. Even though the odds are in my favor, I find the prospect of being the counter-party against your bets rather terrifying (when the bankroll is also known as my personal savings) =/

Let's stop spamming that poor guy's thread with moneypot discussion.


I didn't notice it. Maybe because I was new to the site and didn't know what was going on anyway. I did see a message saying that I needed to refresh the page, but then it seemed to refresh itself and I didn't have to do anything.


I had an idea about that. Publish the algorithm by which you come up with each game's multiplier. Presumably it will be seeded somehow. Pick a random seed that you will use for game 1 billion. sha256 hash it to get the seed you will use for the game before that, and so on. Each games seed is the sha256 hash of the game that comes after it. So you have a billion-long chain of sha256 hashes. Before each game you publish the hash of the current game's seed, which allows everyone to verify all the previous games but none of the future games. Now you can't be accused of rigging the outcomes.


But you still get to see, in real time, whether most people are playing the regular or inverse game, and adjust the outcomes to be mostly under 2x or mostly over 2x accordingly.


That's always a possibility, but that needn't stop you from making the game as provably fair as possible.


It's kind of useful. It means I can appear to lose my whole balance and still have a decent amount left for the next time I play.


You're welcome. Thanks for the 'bits'. I managed to get greedy at just the wrong time and lost almost all of them.

That's a great idea. I'll first add a leaderboard of the day / week / month  -- and then start a prize scheme for it.

Any chance to give some prize for top 10 at leaderboard for some period (daily,weekly,or monthly?)

Thanks everyone! Really appreciate the strong showing. We've had 22.3 BTC wagered from our 362 signups.

The most won goes to: https://www.moneypot.com/user/Kasurak who currently has a net profit of 54.5 thousand bits, and most gross profit goes to https://www.moneypot.com/user/kolloh with 1.8 million bits gross profits (winnings, excluding loses)

The bitcoin community can not make up it's mind about the "bit" unit. First it was 1/10 of a satoshi (made popular by faucets at the time). Now it's equal to 1 μBTC which we already have a name for. Where will the madness end??

Credited your account with 3k bits. Use how ever you like =)

My username is Ruzka

Thanks a lot

Thanks. What's you're username? I'll send you few thousand bits so you can keep enjoying =)

Really enjoying this game Just wish I had some actual bitcoins I could deposit right now haha.

That is incorrect. A bit, a µBTC and a uBTC  all are referring to the same thing: a millionth of a bitcoin. See: http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/05/02/bitpay-bitcoin-and-where-to-put-that-decimal-point.html

Or blockchain.info select uBTC as your currency and it'll express it as "bits"

Bits are 1/10 of a satoshi. 1 millionth is a Micro unit or µBTC 0.000 001

Very nice concept. wish you luck!

Both ideas are now on the live site. Thanks!