My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins | Hacker News Reader

My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins

blog.ice-dice.com

22 pointsicedicedavid12 comments

You're a casino, and you have the gall to describe users taking advantage of a promotion that you ran as "stealing"?

I mean, your entire business is based on interpreting your own rules in such a way as to give yourself a structural advantage. When a user plays by your rules and wins, I guess it's "theft".

Our casino is provably fair, which means all bets can be verified cryptographically to verify that we do not take advantage of our users. The house edge is clearly designed to be 2%, which means we return 98% of all the wager back to the players. Players clearly can choose their chance of winning with corresponding payout. Everything we do is transparent, including our profit, how much is in the bankroll. Our rule is our promo is for new users only, and this user created like 20 accounts in the last 3 hours trying. He is clearly not playing by the rules, how are we wrong for blocking his fraudulent behaviour?

all these account he made claimed our credit over and over again just earlier today:

@h7fVandermeulen

@Sfi_Stawski1010

@BQk_Mikadze4232

@8Rl_Moljevic505

@sotnd1996

@_VupEquis8648BY

@i9xHazlip4159EU

@gXtKudla4403HHC

@_uTjJugovic7828

@_wljPines1662BT

@DTt_Przybyszews

@_hogElyan9488GW

@_vdaTournaments

@_mijLyche6529MF

@_UqtNewlands354

@5ox_Ferencik217

To those unfamiliar, it's probably fair but only up to the point where you expect the site to be serving up the same code every time. It's a bit like JavaScript crypto; makes you feel good but has little bearing on anything in the real world.

The server sends the client a hash of a secret, the client sends a locally generated nonce back, and the server hashes the two and determines the outcome. The idea being that the server can't change the result because the secret has already been verified as the same as before they rolled by the client via the previously exposed hash. Still relies on the code being served to not be changed on every load, which is a false assumption to make.

I work in a casino, too, and I also kick out fools who try to game the system.

In my slot casino, the rules are that if you play, then you get free soda, ice cream, whatnot. So then there come a lot of people, just put in 2 euros, demand their ice and soda, and as soon as they eat the ice, they vanish.

After seeing this for a couple of days, our boss decided to kick those fools out... and well, it was successful.

It appears that you're not a native english speaker - I'd like to give you some feedback to make your sentences sound more natural. This isn't meant as criticism of you, at all - I only speak one language!

Typically we use two-word nouns (in your case 'ice cream') as a whole - they would not be shortened.

Also, generally a sentence like that would be constructed with the continuing tense - 'putting' versus 'put', since you're describing a continuing trend.

So I'd reconstruct your sentence as:

> So then in come a lot of people, just putting in 2 euros, demanding their ice cream and soda, and as soon as they finish eating the ice cream, they vanish.

:) Have a good day!

I downvoted this comment because found the parent's comment more natural/conversational, and I believe you improved neither the sentence construction nor the comment thread.

I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful. My friends who speak English as a second language have solicited my help in the past, so I've generalized that. Usually get good reactions from people since English is difficult.

The GP post definitely didn't scan cleanly for me, and I had to think about what the intended meaning was for a minute before I understood it, so I was trying to help avoid confusion.

I don't doubt your intentions, but the original really is better, stylistically. Try restoring the conversational deletion[1]:

So then there come a lot of people, [who] just put in 2 euros, demand their ice and soda, and as soon as they eat the ice, they vanish.

Now you don't have to wallow in all those awkward participles, which are almost without exception weaker than direct constructions. (You might want to omit the second 'they', but conversationally it adds a nice flavor, and certainly isn't wrong.)

1. http://english.stackexchange.com/a/66994

I just don't know anyone who would actually speak that way, nor have I ever seen writing deliberately like that save possibly as a stylistic thing. Omitting the cream from ice cream is completely strange. Ice is more of a modifying element there - it's iced coffee, you'd just say coffee, not 'iced' by itself. I often see 'icecream' as a single word, in fact.

I didn't mean to get into a long aside though, I just wanted to help someone out. I should have known that here I would get overanalysis instead of people just ignoring it if they didn't appreciate it.

Casinos can generally be highly profitable whilst being completely scrupulous and honest about their dealing and their percentage take. That said, it's also not difficult for a completely unregulated casino to be unscrupulous.

Actually, operating a casino is genuinely the smartest BTC-based business model I can think of. Minimal overheads and BTC is vastly more attractive because players consider it to be "real money", but regulators and international money transfer laws don't

As far as taking advantage of promotions goes, I made a lot more than a dollar per account in hard currency with casino introductory bonuses in my student days...

A bit of context at the beginning of the post would be useful. The "How I fight with users who try to steal…"[1] post has a good introduction. Basically, they're running a promotion that allows users to get free 0.01 or 0.005 bitcoin if they are a new user and tweet about it. But there's a lot of fraudulent new sign ups. It's a lot more interesting with that in mind.

[1]. http://blog.ice-dice.com/post/65390305396/heres-how-i-fight-...

and for those of us who almost never use our twitter account and have less than 30 followers, are sol. I guess I could get some followers but that seems like too much work to try a casino game that I'm probably just going to lose the .005 btc in.

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