Some people may already know that we are working on building a platform for gambling on bitcoin’s difficulty value, I hope this post may help more people know what we are doing and why we are doing this. Generally speaking, we invented a game about gambling on the future difficulty value. (Detailed information about difficulty, click
here.)
Why we want to gamble on difficulty?Gambling by using bitcoin or on bitcoin is not a novel idea, and we guess that Satoshi Dice is known here. However, Satoshi Dice depends on pure luck. This kind of games doesn’t sound interesting for us who believe that the fun of winning a game originates from how to outmaneuver your opponents, not merely depends on luck. Therefore, we want to create a more interesting gambling game like horse racing. If you know much about the horses and the riders in the race, your chance of winning is higher than others. Luck is also important, since unpredictable things will happen in the real race.
Mining difficulty in bitcoin network will fluctuate along time like stocks’ prices. Yet unlike random number, difficulty value is determined by us, who are watching the bitcoin network. So we believe that betting and predicting on difficulty value is more interesting than guessing random number on Satoshi Dice. Therefore, why not making a game that let us bet on the difficulty? Currently we are building a platform for people to gamble on future bitcoin network difficulty value.
Details – How to play?Difficulty value is a number we can get from every bitcoin block. Everybody can check the difficulty value. It’s open and transparent to everyone, e.g. you may check difficulty value
here. Difficulty value changes every 2016 blocks, approximately every 2 weeks. So beginning with the first block which has different difficulty value from previous blocks, to the last block that still holds the same difficulty value as before, we call that those 2016 blocks form a round. Blocks in the same round share the same difficulty value. People can bet on every future round’s difficulty value. When you are betting, you should specify your round, your estimated difficulty value, and your betting amount. We will collect all the bets on the same round to form a pool, that is to say, every round will have a pool, which composes of all the money betting on that round. Noting that next round’s difficulty value is calculated by information of current round, everyone can easily deduce the exact difficulty value right before the beginning of next round. So we only allow betting on the round that will begin in at least two weeks, that is to say, you can’t bet on next round, and the available rounds for betting start from the round after next round.
When to pay out?The payout time is in the beginning of every round. Once the difficulty is fixed for a round, we will start to pay out the money in the corresponding pool.
What’s our paying out strategy?Generally, we follow below three principles.
- The earlier you make your bet, the bigger share you win from the pool.
- The closer your guess is to actual difficulty, the bigger share you win from the pool.
- The greater your money in your bet, the bigger share you get back from the pool.
The first rule is to award players who are willing to take risk to make a long-term guess. The more risk you take, the more gain you should get.
The second rule is to award players who have keen sense of bitcoin computing power. The smarter and luckier you are, the more gain you should get.
The third rule is to award people who are willing to take risk by putting a big fortune. The higher risk you take the more gain you should get. Also, this rule is fair for all the participants. If you are betting on a big fortune while others only put one nickel, it is unfair to lose all your bets to others who are not brave enough to take risks.
If you are interested in details of how to pay out, this link leads to payout formula we designed according to the principles mentioned above. Details on
Payout FormulasWhat’s our business model?We maintain the gambling platform not for free. We will get a small percent from every pool as house fee, e.g. 3%.
Current progressCurrently we are polishing the front-end of the website, and the back-end part is already completed. Our server is built on Google App Engine, therefore, security and scalability won’t be big problems for us. The estimated date is on Feb.
Should you have any comments or questions or suggestions, please kindly let us know. Usually we will be online from 7:00am to 11:00 am EST.