Topic: Hypothetical battle comparison (Donald Trump vs whale) (dooglus vs whale) (Read 1445 times)

It might if you were lucky.

But in the long term it wouldn't, because the payout is always less than the reciprocal of the probability.

If you bet with a 0.2 probability of winning, the payout is a little (1%) less than 1/0.2 = 5 times your stake when you win.

I manage that address manually.

I used to move coins in and out of it a lot more frequently than I do now.

The way I manage the coins now is that there are usually enough coins available to the site to process most withdrawals. Whenever there are too many online, the excess are automatically sent to a local (to me) online wallet.  When that in turn gets "too full", I move 500 BTC into the cold wallet. So the local wallet acts as a buffer to save me having to go to the offline machine too often, because frankly it's a pain to use the offline machine. I never use networking or physical storage devices on it; I only use webcams and QR codes to pass messages to and from it, to keep it airgapped from the 'net. This 'buffer' wallet between the 'hot' and 'cold' wallets will be why you see weeks of inactivity on the cold wallet - the buffer was big enough to smooth out the ebb and flow of coins.

The 100 data points in a single day would probably be the day that I decided I was going to use individual transaction outputs of 500 BTC in the cold wallet, and tidied the whole thing up into neat 500 BTC bundles - that's the big dip you see over the word 'Nov' in the chart.

Why wouldnt this work if you had a massive bank roll. Bet 1 BTC 49.5% you win store it to the side, keep betting till you lose, whne you lose a bet increas your bet by double till you win back lost bet. 50% chance at worst you have to roll 4x-5x your original bet to win it back. Every BTC you win you either set to the side IE send it to you wallet then use your main bank roll for winning your bets back. If you have a 500 BTC bank roll big deal rolling 5x to settle back out, then start again winning BTC then covering losses.

I'm fairly convinced that the 1% Max Profit had almost no effect on Nakowa. It is pretty clear that the 60 some hours when it was reduced to 0.25% was subduing, but there was little or no difference between 0.5% and 1.0%.

I am curious about that cold storage data. Why is there over 100 data points in one day, and then no data points for days to 2 weeks at a time?


I admit, my post was sloppy.

Even 0.1% of bankroll is actually a large bet. Even the biggest casinos will not routinely admit bets over $10,000 routinely. Ceasar's Palace and other big gambling casinos have a few tables, but you still have to ask permission if you are going to placing $100K bets.

I agree that when a lot if wagered it is probably because a big player is placing big bets so the variance increases but you implied that more wagered=more variance; big bets=more variance, if the operator doesn't want the big bets he can limit the max bet

Yes you are correct, but the wagering doesn't seem to zoom because thousands of extra people have just discovered JD. It is because a few people are making huge bets. That is what makes the variance large.

As we observed, the profit has been 1.23% of the wagers over the last 250 days. There was one day when 70K BTC were wagered, but all other days have been 30K or less. The median has been only 3K bitcoins.

The variance is not necessary higher if more is wagered everyday!!

While investment is a type of gambling, most investors want to see a lot less variance than a gambler. If the bank is about 50,000BTC you can tolerate the amount of day to day variance with an average of 10,000 BTC or fewer being bet per day, while still getting a great return over the long run.

Adding the last two days of the year to the table, I just think most investors don't want to see people wagering many times the value of the bank in a day. It makes them feel like they are the gamblers.

FULL 365 DAY YEAR

I don't understand why you say 10K/day would be the ideal level of activity, the more the better!?

So looking at your table and my summary table, there can be plenty of activity at 0.5% max profit.
You were still getting 25K of wagering on the three days that MaxProfit was 0.25%. Your ideal level of activity would be 10K BTC per day. Investors see some ups and down on a daily basis, but overall you have much better returns.

The thing is martingale are fun and playing casino should be about having fun

Right.  The best way to play is to risk as little as possible.  Running a single martingale sequence is a good way to do that.  If you run it over and over again, you're increasing the amount you expect to lose.

If you want to win more than a single unit, you need to redesign your martingale sequence such that you achieve your target in a single run...

You are correct :

If you want xBTC and you either get it with a martingale starting at x : x; 2x ;4x; 8x or a big bet of 15x at 1.067 you are better off playing the martingale

BUT

When you play a martingale you are usually looking for a bigger win than a single unit win, for exemple it is commun for martingales to wait to get 30% 50% or 100% before stopping

-Your expected loss for a single bet of 127 @payout 1.5 is 1.27BTC

-Your expected loss for a 1;2;4;8;16;64 martingale where you stop when you reach a 62.7profit is twice as much (I only give an order of magnitude)

I may be wrong 

Very interesting. So you actually did very little by reducing the max profit to cramp his style.

This chart pretty closely follows the amount in the bankroll over time.  It's actually showing how many coins the site was holding in offline cold storage over time, which also includes player balances, and doesn't include the flat that is kept on-site, but those two pretty much cancel each other out.

So the bankroll was around 30k in mid July and around 40k in late September.  Those are the two times nakowa played a lot.

Here's a video somebody made of him playing on 20th September, when he was getting warming up for his 2nd attack on the house.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjMnKtTWeKM

Note the bankroll is 48k and the maximum profit per bet is 478 BTC.  Almost all his large bets are for 100 or 200 BTC, so he's not betting more than 0.5% of the bankroll even though he could.

Here's a table showing all nakowa's bets on account 2548 at 49.5% of 1 BTC or more:


The biggest bet was for 303 BTC.

I mean if nakowa flat bet at 9% for an 11x payout until he doubled or bust, what are his chances of success then?  What is the optimal chance-per-bet to double your bankroll before busting, given a constant profit per bet?  The equation we used assumes the random walk is taking equally large steps backwards and forwards, but in this case we aren't.


I would definitely allow the betting to happen. Since the bankroll is crowd-funded, each individual would decide for themselves whether they wanted to take on the mighty nakowa. Historically it has been a losing proposition to do so, but even at the height of his power when he was kicking us all over the place, the vast majority of the crowd had faith in math and the house edge, and were quite vocal in protesting me reducing the maximum profit per bet to 0.25% of the bankroll.  They wanted a rematch.  They wanted their chance to take back what he had won from them.  I'm sure most still feel the same way, that math will win in the end.

I don't know if I would personally remain part of the bankroll myself. I couldn't help but take it personally when he won so much, like he was attacking me and the site. I know that's stupid, but it's how I felt. Not being a part of the bankroll made it a little better, and allowed me to sleep at night, so that's what I did.

You're saying that you have a higher chance to turn 10 into 15 if you bet it all on a single bet than if split the 10 into smaller pieces and bet them at a higher multiplier, smallest first, until you win one, and then quit?

Because that seems obviously incorrect to me.  Betting all your coins you expect to lose more than betting just some of them.

An easier example:

Suppose you have 7 coins and want to have 8.

You could bet all 7 on a 1.125x bet.

Or you could bet 1 at 2x, then 2 at 2x, then 4 at 2x, stopping if you win at any point.

Is the single 7 or the 1,2,4 martingale better?  What are the odds of success of each one?  What's your expected return for each?

Work it out.  The 1,2,4 martingale is *better* than the single 7.

Given that Nakowa was playing 500 BTC bets (that means 10,000/500=20 units) there is a 40% chance of doubling 10K before losing the stake.
But now that he is restricted to roughly 250 BTC bets  (i.e. 40 units) there is only a 30% chance of doubling 10K. It may not be a bad business decision to publicly goad him into playing again.

I am not sure about Donald Trump in 1990. Typically there is not a lot of information. The first time he won $6M it is unknown how big a bet he was permitted. Keep in mind that in 1990 all three of Trump's casinos combined were making over $2m per day (gross revenue).

The question was wether it was a good business practice for the casinos owners to propose the bets

Both players should call it a day. The more time you spend on the game the less likely you gonna win