Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

battlebase.co

40 pointsluweilu22 comments

@luweilu can you list the payout table/probabilities? Just curious if there's a consistent house edge, or if it decreases as more bombs go off? Any plans to add an "invest" feature like just-dice had?

Edit: Example of how "invest" worked on that site: "You can invest some of your balance with the site for other players to bet against. This both increases the maximum bets on the site, and you keep any profits made. You also 'keep' any losses...Let's break it down: Suppose the total bankroll is currently made of 90 BTC from a single investor, and you invest a further 10 BTC. You will have 10% of the new 'current bankroll', and the first investor's share will drop from 100% to 90%. Each bet that a player makes is played against the current bankroll. As players win and lose, your investment grows or shrinks by 10% of the overall house profit. When you withdraw your investment you get 10% of the current bankroll. You may withdraw your investment at any time. Other players' investments will affect the percentage of the current bankroll that your investment represents. If a 3rd investor then invests another 100 BTC, bringing the total bankroll to 200 BTC, the first investor's percentage drop from 90% to 45%, your percentage drops from 10% to 5%, and the new investor's percentage is 50%. Then if a player loses 20 BTC to the site, everyone's investment grows in proportion. Your 10 BTC investment is now 5% of the new bankroll (220 BTC) ie. 11 BTC...The site currently charges a 10% commission on net investment profits...Commission is charged when profits are divested, or at midnight (UTC) on Sunday each week, whichever happens sooner"

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section.

As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

Thanks! Will take that feedback on board.

If you scroll down under the "Fair" tab, there's actually a "Calculate" button that links you to a hash calculator, with the inputs being the client seed + seq. Although I would agree that this is difficult to communicate to your normal user.

This "provably fair" concept is quite common in the Bitcoin gaming world.

Not sure who was the first, probably https://satoshidice.com

Bitino.com has a nice page explaining the concept, including an example validation script in Python http://bitino.com/provably-fair-gaming/

I like to point out that this is only fair in the game theory sense of the word, not the economic sense of the word. There is nothing stopping the operator from waiting until the pot is large enough and then announcing: "Oops, crackers comprised my system and stole all the bitcoins. Sorry, guys. My bad."

In other words, every time you play you're losing to the house, even though the mathematical analysis doesn't show it.

I don't think this is right. I assume the odds favor the house anyway. They can make money without scamming anyone.

I assume the game is "fair" in that they decide where to bomb before you place your battleship, and that can be proven.

That sort of provable rng isn't novel. tenhou.net [1] (a site for playing riichi mahjong) has been using sha512 of rng values/seeds since at least 2009.

[1] http://tenhou.net/man/#LOG (in japanese)

Is this technically legal in the United States? The domain is registered at Alpine Domains, Inc., in Australia.

It's probably more likely to be technically legal in the US than Australia.

What makes you think that? The only thing blocking its legality is gambling, right? Gambling is extremely widespread in Australia whereas my understanding is that there are very few US states where it's legal.

Widespread maybe, but highly regulated, for online gambling like this you need a licence and to follow a large amount of guidelines (anti money laundering etc.)

So, no, I would say this is illegal under AU law

Source: I used to work for an online gambling site in AU

It's Bitcoin, though, which pushes it into another grey area.

It crashed my Firefox a few times, randomly, apparently. I managed to play a few rounds, but for no apparent reason it just crashed without any error being displayed. On FF 33 on Linux.

EDIT: it stopped crashing when I disabled sounds and other people's ships.

I didn't realize when I was supposed to place my boats at first.

You should have it say "Place your Boats Now" while it counts down during the first phase. I thought I was supposed to wait until the game starts

Cool concept. Worked a few times before it froze in "game ended". According to the chat, looks like it stopped for everybody.

Curious to know the post-mortem after its fixed. Out of bitcoin? Divide by zero? Too many players? :)

Too many players, fixed now.

This is actually pretty cool. Crashed my FF once, but otherwise good concept.

EDIT: Works /flawlessly/ with google chrome.

I don't think it's working any more...

Games seem to be stuck "in progress"

Sorry about that. Fixed now.

Really cool! I'd like to see a landing screen with a brief explanation.

The explosion sound is way too loud, my eardrums hate you now.

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