Topic: The Bitcoin Lottery - page 2. (Read 8169 times)

sorry for delay in response, yes i did

huh? ~~84% was being paid back. The rest minus your cut went to the jackpot.

We had to reduce the 50% winning chance to 40% because it was not possible to cover the winning payout in the long term. I was hoping it would work, but in normal playing operation, it is not possible.

The statistics page is on the way!

Kind regards!

One roll system integrated and ready.

Next turn: statistics

I hope I can finish a one roll playing system tonight.

There was a guy in the german thread who known how to calculate the probabilitys. I hope he can help me to optimize my percentual payouts.

If there is a 50% chance of winning and the bank account is not possible to cover the long run, I need to reduce the winning  chance or payout percentage.

I'll keep you informed!

But it's great to see the project developed!!!

Having an accessible record of the outcome of all rolls and their associated transfers could go a long way towards having people trust that the odds they are presented with are actually their odds.

Thanks. I was just curious. You seem like an honest guy.

Oh my, so many postings.

I will try to explain my thoughts and system. If there is a better way I will change it, no problem.

First version of the game:

• 1 account for bank and jackpot
• initial setup: 20 btc added
• one roll 1-100

The jackpot was won 1 time by gordon with about 3,6 btc

The Problem:

I used only one account for playing and jackpot. So if some people win the bank balance gets lower and so the jackpot does. Because it is the same account.
With that system and the winning percentages of 180 and 270% there was no chance to raise the jackpot and make the game interesting. The win/loss percentage was round about the 50%. There was an alert message integrated that will stopp the game if the bank account value gets under 5 btc. Because at that stage the system could not guarantee that all payouts can be processed. In fact the bank balance varies between +/- 30 percent. I would call that well balanced.

I got some feedback and ideas from players and decided to change it.


Version 2

• seperate account for bank and jackpot
• two rolls: one for normal playing, using the bank account. one for the jackpot.
• adjustment of the rates: 154% and 224%

Benefits:

In each round, a fixed percentage can be added to the jackpot. The jackpot will increase steadily and is therefore independent from the normal game.

Problems of version 2:

The fees were deducted from the win. it was also stated on the website. The calculation of the charge transfer was not exact.

There was again some feedback and it was time for the next version.


Version 2.5

• fees are lowered from 3% to 1%, because of the new server version


Version 3, current

• seperate account for bank and jackpot
• two rolls: one for normal playing, using the bank account. one for the jackpot.
• fees were removed, and all fees are paid by bank account
• adjustment of the rates: 155% and 225%


Why two rolls:

The idea was that people who lost their playing round still have a chance at the jackpot.

Rolling system:

playing round: you roll 0-99 (in fact you can roll a 0! and a 99!)

if you rolled:
• 0-49 = no win
• 50-89 = win class 1 (155%)
• 89-99 = win class 2 (225%)

So there are 100 possible rolls.

The jackpot roll:

• 1-100

If you roll the 100 you will receive a 90% jackpot payout.


Winning system example with 2 rolls:

Jackpot value: 0.5 btc

If you bet 1 btc and roll a 60 in the regular round, you will receive 155% of your bet -> 1.55 btc.
If you jackpot roll a 100 in the same round, you will receive the profit from regular round plus the jackpots 90%.

Total payout: 1.55 + 0.495 = 2.045 btc


Winning system example with 1 roll:

If you roll a 60 you will receive 155% payout and you have not a second chance to get the jackpot in this round.


But if I think it's really better to roll only once ;-) It may helps to increase the jackpot.


What happend to the bet values:

Your bet = 100% to bank account.

to Jackpot: 10% will be moved to the Jackpot account
System fee: 5% will be moved to the system fee account (thats my cut: 0.005 btc per 0.1 btc bet)
The rest of 85% remains on the bank account.

The bitcoins on the bank account will be used to pay all transfer fees and winning payouts. If the bank account was less than 10 btc there will be a red warning display that maximum bets of 1 btc are probably not covered. The same message appears for 0.1 btc bets if the bank account is less 2 btc.

That was my approach and the current system. I hope I could clarify some processes. If there are further ideas, corrections etc. -> let me know.


@Auspician:
Extrapolations do not easily perform, as the system and the percentage of shares through user feedback have changed 3-4 times since its release last week.

Until now, the Jackpot was won 3 times. 1st Gordon, 2nd Hyper, 3rd Valdez.

@bitlotto:
I think there is no demonstration the the jackot can't be rigged to go to me. Bitcoin is so anonymous

As long as Bitcoin is anonymous and the transactions are not traceable and there is no unique user IDs, I think it is not possible to deliver a unique proof. If someone can verify the identities of users and transactions the Bitcoin project failed. But personally I would like to have a little bit more informations about transactions. To create a unique account for every user to verify who send/receive a transactoin is not very useful.

At this stage I like to use a modified quotation from slush:

In theory, as the service operator, I could keep the jackpot for myself. I'm not going to do this, but I completely accept that people do not trust the service operator. It is their freedom of choice, and Bitcoin is about freedom.

It is important to me that you understand that my interest is not the jackpot. My interest is that the site is used a lot and people play a lot. My cut are 5% per round, thats my interest.

Of course I have to look that the bank account is balanced. If the account falls too quickly, I either have to reduce the profit rates or say goodbye to the 50%. If it rises slowly, one could raise the profits, or increase the maximum bet value.


The possible next Version

• one roll for winning & jackpot
• a first statistic page

The thing with the hash I have in my mind, but so far had no time to occupy myself so thoroughly.

Kind Regards.

I'm curious about if you have any way of demonstrating that the jackpots can't be rigged to go to you when you the owner plays? Don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing, I'm just curious if you do.

Oh it +EV to play far before this point. It is seriously plus EV to play right now. But not if the second roll can never hit 100 lol.

Well the chances of not rolling a 100 in 500 rolls would be less than .6% -- unlikely but not impossible
The chances of not rolling a 100 in 1000 rolls would be essentially 0 (like .004% chance) -- statistically impossible

Even assuming there were a few "whales" that bet big somewhere along the way, I am thinking that things got screwed up with the addition of the 'second roll" as I have watched hundreds of rolls go by today multiple times.

second roll makes no sense anyway -- have 50-89 be first payout 90-99 be second payout and 100 be jackpot payout -- adding a dice roll doesn't "do" anything to increase your chances of winning

I am guessing that you are right that the same roll mechanism is used for both and it can go 0-99.

In this case I would recommend going back through the database and paying out jackpots to everyone that rolled a 99 at whatever equivalent the jackpot would have been. It will take some manual calculation to get people their correct amounts, but it shouldn't be very difficult at all.

According to my calculations.  At this moment in time, if the site is not rigged in any way the EV of each .1 BTC bet is above .1BTC because of the jackpot size.  Smart money would be to play like crazy if you trust the lottery.

Of course my calculations don't take in to account my 2 semesters of failed statistics courses.

Oh I agree absolutely, we are quite a few standard deviations away from normal at this point. I definitely support either code releaseor data auditing for all gambling games that want to be "respectable" // I don't care if the games are fixed, I just want to be able to calculate correct odds.

Yes, but the OP has made changes to the code and payout structure a couple of times since.  There is always the possibility an error was introduced.  There was a recent opensource application that had an inadvertent space introduced to its source code which resulted in entire /usr directories being wiped out on accident.

Typos and rounding errors happen all the time.  Without being able to examine the source for OP's rolling function nobody can state if it is fair or not.

Yes you can lol

18. Jun 2011 21:53 h   flower      
Bet: 0.1 btc   Rolls -> Win: 0 • Jackpot: 9   

But jackpot has been won once at least.

I have been trying to write down the numbers as they scroll by but it is too hard to keep track of only 40 rolls at a time.

I would not play this anymore without a full paper trail for outcome auditing. It is just too easy to hide things without it. No disrespect to the coder, who prob has great intentions, but stuff like this needs to either be released with code or with outcome stats available.

You can roll a 0 in the first round, I believe that is why it is 50-99 for payout.

With the number of rolls between jackpots approaching improbable for a fair game my best guess is he is doing his random function incorrectly.  Some programming languages will interpret random(100) and give you a number between 0-99 only.

If my thinking is correct, the jackpot will never be hit without a change in the programming.

edit:

hmmm, that is not outside the bounds of possibility, but is getting up there. But I have to check the math on jackpot addition. This is why we need full stats available.

Actually you have 40% odds to get 1.55x your original bet and 10% odds to get .225x your original bet.  90-99 is 10 total numbers.  1-49 is only 49 total numbers, and the winning starts at 50.  So it seems that if you have 50% winning odds a roll of 100 on the first number is simply a loss.

That said, I've done the math and this game seems rigged.  Based upon my calculations, aside from the jackpot 84.5% of the bets are paid out as smaller wins.  This leaves 15.5% of the transactions to go into the jackpot, before the owner's fees. 

Based upon the common bid of .1 BTC, this means that on average .0155 of every bet goes into the jackpot.  After the last jackpot won by Hyper, there was 1.045 BTCs left in the pot.  The current pot at the time of this message is 15.8522 BTCs.  This means 14.8072 BTCs have been added to the pot through bids.

Since we already know that almost all bids are for .1BTCs, and that the jackpot increases by .0155 BTCs on average per transaction, that means that the jackpot has not been won over the course of the last 955+ bids.

Sounds a little sketchy to me that with 1 : 100 odds won't find a winner after 955 tries.

Hi DaMan:

If you don't want to release your code, it would be the best way to prove a fair roll by allowing people to audit the outcomes and make sure over long periods of time that they are within statistical norms. Of course you will get unlucky gmblers cryiung about normal variance, but within a while we should have a large enough sample set to run basic tests on.

Thanks for the game!

yes I am not sure why it is two rolls. doesn't really matter for jackpot odds, except you only get 9% to get 2.55x your bet back rather than 10% on your first roll