Topic: Just-Dice.com : Invest in 1% House Edge Dice Game - page 89. (Read 435457 times)

+1. everyone was tired of hearing mechs whining all day.... someone that stupid really doesn't deserve to have so many BTC. 

Hopefully he's gone for good and never comes back.

Except he can't stand the massive loses the site has made, even if its not his money being lost. Please read dooglus's posts. He has mentioned wanting to shut the site down quite a lot.

dooglus cares a lot about the investors and the losses they are incurring does not sit well with him.

The show is on, nakowa playing with 11k roll.

Wow.

Edit: he changed his mind after a few bets:

The only urgent change that has to be done as soon as possible, in my humble opininon, is a very simple one, and is putting a huge warning on the investing windows about how risky the investment is, how returns aren't at all guaranteed, how there will be a lot of variance and there can be huge losses on the short term, only invest what you can afford to lose, etc, etc. Maybe even put a little warning always next to invested amount when it is >0.

Maybe increasing investors awareness, there would be less whining, which is the biggest problem at this moment...

Oh. Nakowa divested his 11k.

+1

Dooglus is making good money by taking 10% weekly commission on ALL the profits made on his site. That's a good, risk-free business model for him, so let me strongly disagree on your statement quoted above.

If Dooglus had skin in the game he would have shut the site down and the investors would have no chance to make their losses back.

With have two options: dooglus wants out, he can't stand the variance and the ONLY reason the site remains is to be fair to the people who are still invested.

option 1 - no site.
option 2 - doogus keeps the site up out of respect to the people that want a chance to make profit.

If dooglus reinvests, and loses more coins he might just withdraw all the coins back to the owners and sell the code, calling it a day.

Dooglus current decision is the right one for him. (I would do the same being in his position)

I'm must say I'm not too happy about your answer. I think you need to have some skin in the game. It doesn't have to be that much but it has to be something. The reason for that is to ensure that your incentives are aligned with the investors.

Dooglus, did you look into my proposal?

As a (passive) investor, I have a few points to make and a few suggestions to improve the site.

Point of views:

- I believe doog is not cheating us, since there is no real benefit for him in that. He can earn lots by being legit. If any investor beliefs otherwise, you should divest, since it cannot be proven one way or the other anyways

- daytrading does improve the expected return for passive investors, not decrease it. There's no point in forbidding that. Cant handle the swing? Invest fewer coins

- I prefer a plain and simple approach over complexity. I'd therefor prefer a fixed maxbet/risk which is the same for all investors

- the main focus should be on making the site more attractive for gamblers. The better it gets, the more volume there should be, the faster losses can be regained


Suggestions and things I noticed within the last days:

- there is sometimes a lag of several seconds where no bets are being processed. I do not know how to solve that, just that it annoys gamblers. This should be a priority to solve. Maybe dont update unnecessary stats so often (i.e. only update gain/loss of investors every 5 min; only the total bankroll is required to process gambling bets), maybe use memcached more on static values, etc.

- lets improve the experience of gamblers. There's lots of working stuff that we can learn from online games, for example:

   - Add a nice sound on winning bets (like the sound of a group of clapping people, etc). Make it possible to disable the sound.

    - Add badges/achievements for a set of actions or outcomes. Display those near the chat name and/or on the front page. Add an achievement frame where others can see who has earned an achievement the last couple of minutes/hours. Possible achievements: "The Master of Luck" (i.e. for winning a bet which had a probability of <0.01% or so), "Cant be stopped!" (i.e. for winning 10 bets in a row with no more than 49.5% probability each), "Balls of steel" (i.e. for betting >20 btc on a single roll with no more than 33% prob.), "Robbing the house" (still up more than 10 btc after > 10k bets), etc, etc. There's infinite possibilities. And this stuff has a huge effect on activity, as proven by almost any current MMORPG or browsergame.

- the chat needs to be restricted some more. Cant have people trying to scam others (posting bad links, maybe to infected files?) or investors behaving badly towards gamblers. I dont really know how to solve that, maybe only allow chatting for people who wagered at least 0.1 btc at some point or something?

You are right, I'm clearly overinvested. I trust dooglus, I trust math, and while I think 1% is very small, its clear that all this concern started to grow in me when I invested 4x the amount of coins I had before we went to 1/4 Kelly. After that, I went berserk and invested exactly 15x my initial investment. Too many coins to think clearly. The fact remains that the only rational thing to maximize long term profits is too go full kelly, while realizing this is a risky high variance/high potential profits investment - and thus investing just what you can comfortably afford to lose for good.

I will man up, take the 20% loss I had in the last days and divest at least 50% of my funds, so I can comfortably ride the waves without whining like a little bitch

Wise investors vote with their money.

Have you?

Nothing wrong with proposing a better system can be setup but when it becomes pressing, I think you forgot to vote with your money first.

Wachtwoord? Shut the fuck up.

I've said it before, and I mean it: insulting other people's intelligence because they disagree with you on a non-trivial problem is about as neckbeardy as it gets.




Thanks for an excellent question, Rampion. And thanks for an honest reply dooglus.

I think your reasons for how you handle the situation (divest, because too much risk, but let the site run, because investors ask for it) very understandable. On the other hand, I think some of your reactions don't really fit together with those reasons.

Example: a number of investors, including me, point out that they're unhappy with concentration of losses and dilution of profits through "daygambling". Your answer: it should be -EV long-term, so it's a non-issue. Another example: some investors point out that they believe that maybe 1% house edge is too low. Your reaction (at least the one I've seen so far): edge shouldn't be raised, will drive gamblers to the competition.

Can you see where I'm going? If you feel somewhat disattached from the investor's bankroll, that's okay. But as a consequence, that also means (in my opinion) that investors' opinions should hold a greater weight in determining how to make the site profitable again.

Note please that I'm not claiming that there necessarily is a majority for the two proposals I mentioned, but I *do* think we need a way for investors to make their opinions heard in a more formal way, and a way for you to determine what a majority of investors wants. I really think a voting mechanism for investors, on-site, is needed. The final decision, as alway, is yours, but at least you can say with more certainty what the "collective decision" of investors really is.

Ideally, vote weight would be a function of amount invested and time the amount has been invested (or something similar), to reward the early investors who stuck through the period of losses, and who have shown they really have the interests of the site in mind (as well as their own :D). The voting mechanism details still need to be worked out, but I do think something along those lines would make sense.


tl;dr Good idea to not care too much about the investors' bankroll, dooglus. But as a result, please give investors a way to form a collective decision (i.e. voting based on amount invested and duration of investment), and seriously consider implementing the results of that collective decision making.

I think you are overinvested Rampion. You had more trust in it a few weeks ago but now you propose changes and question Doog his care.

Are you prepared for a -80% drawdown from here?

If not, why not?

This is exactly what he just did, and what he is planning to do in the future.

I think the decision of putting the variance to 0.25% was completely rational and mathematically justifiable. May I note that if we were all such "rational investors" knowing "what we do", this forum would contain no messages? But now there are a lot of pages also from the "rational" people, which feel bad of the losses.

If you run some simulations you may see that with Kelly 1% you can easily go to down to  20% of the initial bankroll. Easily. If that happens (it can still happen...), dooglus would be in real danger because no one would believe in the fairy tale of math. Then what does he do? Will the rational investors convince the irrational ones with "mathematics"? No.

Now someone explains me what will happen if nakowa starts playing again with max bet, put the bankroll down to -10K (it can easily happen and it is mathematically provable), and then he invests again.

Thanks for this answer. It gave me some insight why someone like you (highly intelligent and rational) could make such an irrational decision. Try not to care about the ups and downs of the bankroll and if you can't help yourself from caring, don't watch. It's like managing a stock portfolio and selling a stock because it is down ....

Variance can get to the best of us

I missed that question in the chat so thanks for pointing it out.

If the funds on the bankroll were 100% my own, I would have shut the site down by now.  I would have lost enough already.  I wasn't expecting variance to be this much of a bitch at all.  I was expecting ups and downs, but not like this.

For the first couple of months I felt like the bankroll was mine.  I couldn't sleep with the worry that it would be lost.  I have found that the only way I can relax is to stop worrying about the bankroll.  It's not healthy for me to be constantly stressed about the ups and downs of the site's bankroll.  I'm still happy to see it go up, and sad to see it go down, but I'm not as attached to it any more.  I think it helped when I put the max profit down to 0.25% and got a massive "no, put it back, we want the variance" from the majority of investors.  It made me realise that the investors know what they're doing, and that I don't have to baby them.  I still sometimes feel like the best thing to do would be to shut the site down, but then I remember that the investors want the chance to recoup their losses.

Having said that, I was watching mechs almost lose everything just now, and hoping he wouldn't.  It would have been great for the house if he had lost it all, but so sad for him too.

I hope that answers your question, and isn't too disappointing.

Notice he was betting whole numbers of chance to win.

If the house edge was 10% instead of 1%, he would have bet the same chances to win, with the same results.  The payouts would have been a little lower, but he still would have doubled his 1700 BTC.

Of course if the house edge was 10% instead of 1%, his investment would probably have not gone down*, so he wouldn't have withdrawn it to an address on a paper wallet that he then had to spend 2 hours digging through a dumpster to locate, and so wouldn't have got into the state of mind where repeatedly risking it all seemed like a good idea.  So maybe you have a point.

* it would have stayed at its initial value, because nobody would be playing on the site