Site Review: SatoshiDice

You set up your digital wallet. You earned your first free bitcoins. You joined a mining pool and got some freshly-generated coins. Now it is time for you to venture into the most developed Bitcoin industry: Gambling! And for that, what better place than the most popular Bitcoin betting game in the universe? Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves because it is very addictive! Beware, ludopaths! I present you... SatoshiDice!

http://satoshidice.com/

How It Works:

• SatoshiDice is a very simple betting game: imagine a die with 65536 faces. You decide a threshold. For example, 12000. The die is thrown. You win if the number it shows stays under the threshold you chose. You lose otherwise.
• The lower the probability to obtain a number under the threshold, the higher your reward will be if you win.
• You can place bets by sending bitcoins to one of the bitcoin addresses shown at the homepage of SatoshiDice. Each one of those addresses is assigned a threshold. So, if you send 1฿ to the address 1dice97ECuByXAvqXpaYzSaQuPVvrtmz6, which is the one for a threshold of 32768, you are betting that the number shown by the die will be under 32768. If this happens, you'll win 1,957 times 1฿, or 1,957฿, minus 1,9% that keeps the house, minus bitcoin network transaction fees (in case they are applied). If the number is over the threshold, you lose and to add insult to injury SatoshiDice sends you a satoshi (which is 0,00000001฿).
• Being the most popular Bitcoin betting game, there's a lot of conversation about it among bitcoin users. Check this thread. And this one too.

Here I sent 0,01BTC for a threshold of 32768...

Transaction sent (with a hefty 1500µ฿ fee...)! Now my luck is on Satoshi's hands!

Best Strategy:

• Send at least 0,01฿ to one SatoshiDice address and pray. That's it. Good luck!
• There's a lot written about how to bet at SatoshiDice, but the truth is that, in case it's a fair game, which it seems to be, in the long run you'll lose at least 1,9% of your investment.
• It's typical to see between the recent games that are continually posted at the website people who bet 0,01฿ for a threshold of 32000. In case they lose, they double the bet. Now they bet 0,02฿ for the same threshold. They lose and double the bet. And so on... Until they win (or run out of money). It's not probable that you lose a lot of times one after the other, is it?... Well, this is true, but remember, assuming you bet for this threshold of 32000, for every 1023 people who do not lose ten times in a row, there's one who does and pays the bill for the rest. And that could be you (this is an approximated calculation, since you don't get a perfect 2.000x reward in case you win when you bet for lessthan32000).

A few seconds later this message pops up!

I WIN!!!   YEEAAAAH!!!

Site Review:

• Expected profit: 2/5. You could get rich or lose all your money. The latter is a little bit more likely.
• Convenience: 5/5. The website is beautifully designed, comprehensive, understandable and has plenty of information to explain how it works. You only need to send some bitcoins to one of its betting addresses.
• Payment speed: 5/5. You bet. You blink. You receive the results of your bet.
• Risk: 3/5. You choose how risky you want your bet to be. It could be 1/5 if you bet for a threshold of 64000. Or 6/5 5/5 if you bet for a threshold of 1.
• Final Score: 9/10. SatoshiDice is the king of Bitcoin betting games. It's simple, fast, elegant and doesn't try to scam you or hide information from you. Somehow, it makes you feel lucky. And then, you send 0,01฿ to one of their addresses. When the House Percent drops to 1% or less I'll give it a 10/10.

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