Topic: Peerbet.org - Play without house edge! - page 19. (Read 106577 times)

Many thanks, that's reassuring & yes my few bets were way too small a number to be making judgements, I shall wait for a more personal (hopefully) auspicious time to try it out again.

What happened here is not because of fairness, but rather because of strategy.

There are strategies in Peerbet that are almost guaranteed to lose one their money. These strategies effectively convert Peerbet to a low-rake lottery. One of the common ones is the proportional bet strategy, which many people subconsciously adopt.

For example, imagine a hypothetical person with 1000 XBT to bet. He always bets 10% of his balance at 50/50 odds. You may expect him to have a 50/50 chance of being in the green. But let's examine the actual case.

After one bet, your expectation would be accurate.

But after two bets, it becomes clear that this isn't the case.

There's a short return to the mean at three bets:

But that is a short-lived return. If you noticed, the chances of each option is also a binomial coefficient. Now, we just need to model the median to determine what the most likely scenario is. For zero or one bet, the median is 1000 XBT. For two or three bets, it drops to 990 XBT. Because in theory betting with 1000 XBT is no different from betting with 990 XBT, we can now deduce that for every two bets, the median drops to 0.99× of what it was.

This means that starting with 1000 XBT, after 1000 bets, you should expect to be at ~6.57 XBT, effectively losing most of your money. So where did the "no house edge" go?

It turns out that this picture is not all bleak. The missing money is in the unlikely rewards. There is virtually no upper limit on the amount you can earn (the practical upper limit is that nobody will bet that high if you get lucky) if you win every game. But if you lose every game, you can lose at most 1000 XBT. This is where the lottery analogy comes in: you play a small amount, and you have the small chance to win a large amount.

There are, in fact, strategies that avoid this problem. Although they have far lower reward, the reward occurs often. However, when they are not rewarded, they can lose a significant amount of money; effectively reversing the lottery. Peerbet effectively lets you either play the lottery or run the lottery without a house edge, which is its greatest advantage. But you must educate yourself on probability theory before you take the plunge, or you will come up with an undesirable strategy.

When next Bitcoin block arrives and the raffle is drawn, you can open its page and will see timestamp when last ticket was sold (on the top right after "Status: Finished"), so you can be sure that raffle finished before Bitcoin block generated.

re: gambler's fallacy, I do realize that my bets could have all gone against me especially as I made only a few, I just wasn't 100% reassured that the house couldn't pick winning blocks unless it was me who bought the final tickets in a game, again no offense intended - I just don't understand it enough to be sure & will wait for the smart ppl here like Dooglas to audit it.

I apologize, as it's a new site I can't be sure & I'm sorry to say that, say though I left a bet & the house finished it maybe they could choose to wait for a winning hash block to post this as it isn't time stamped on the site when the bets get filled, again I'm no expert & am not accusing anything, I lost for now & that could be totally random luck - it's a new site so I'll wait for more informed feedback before I start playing for higher stakes, again no offense intended - I like the concept a lot!

Could you provide explanation for possible ways to breach security of the provably fair games?

You have gambler's fallacy IMHO.

Well in the last week of tying out this site I lost the 15 btc that I put in, I wasn't expecting it to be drained so fast but maybe that was because of the type of bets that I made, with no house rake I'd expected to be around, up & down, for longer - anyway as it's obviously not so lucky for me atm I shall leave it alone, if it's still around in a few months & getting good feedback then I may try some more - I like the concept a lot & all my bets were of the 'provably fair' type, but as yet I'm not totally confident re that, no offense intended.

I see, thank you for the report.

In the android app if you create a game then use it as a template to create another game and repeat you can create an deep stack of activities.  The only way to get back to the raffle list is to press back through all of the activities.  There should be a menu option to go back to the raffle list or limit activity depth to the create activity and the bet activity so the raffle list is never more than 2 presses of back away.

Another big raffle with 20 BTC prize waiting completion and expires tomorrow!
https://peerbet.org/raffle.php?id=743764

"Buy All" feature switched to the AJAX for more convenience. Press F5 to update client scripts if your browser show an error.

30 BTC raffle completed and hit our record! Congratulations to the winner!

If someone spams in the chat you can ignore him with the "/ignore username" command (without quotes, enter just this command and not anything else in the input at one time). On success you will see appropriate message.

That was me, just discovered your site & like it a lot!

I just bought another 3.33% worth of the 30 BTC raffle & also have made 3 games for 1BTC @ 50% (I bought 0.5 BTC on each) one of which has completed, all in the provably fair section.

Someone created 30 BTC raffle and bought 10% of the tickets. Try your luck and let's to hit Peerbet absolute record!
https://peerbet.org/raffle.php?id=696802

Great!
Thanks.

Alright, thanks for clarifying that. 

Minimun prize value (currently 0.0001 BTC) applies only to the API, you can still create smaller raffles from the site after entering CAPTCHA. This limit is necessary because some bots polluted raffle list with micro-games causing Android app slowdown, as well as overloading our server.

Hmm, why did you put in a restriction in the minimum prize value?  Were the micro-raffles too much of a strain to the server, or is it something else?

Just checked, it works fine. Seems CAPTCHA was too difficult, I made it more readable now.

Fixed. Now you can specify amounts in the mBTC or µBTC when creating new raffle and they will be converted automatically!