Update: Since the beginning of the authorship of this article, DiceBitco.in owners manl and gerry have stopped responding to users on Bitcointalk and a player, going by the name mateo, has continually placed bets with a near perfect win ratio, emptying the site and stealing the entireity of investor funds. Many suspect that mateo is or is working for the owners manl and gerry, but that is unconfirmed at this point. Currently, the site's profits, that sat in the hundreds of Bitcoins at the start of this event now sits hundreds of Bitcoins in the negative. We are still awaiting comment from DiceBitco.in but a response seems unlikely at this point. The original article, written as the situation was evolving, remains intact below. Some users received refunds on their losses before mateo cleaned out the site, but additional refunds seem unlikely at this point.
DiceBitco.in has been seeing a huge growth in size and profits. Not unusual for a casino, but winning thirty six times in a row on a 50/50 game is a string of luck even Jimmy the Greek would have struggled to recreate.
Seemingly impossible streaks like that caused some members to begin keeping closer track of DiceBitco.in's rolls, verifying their rolls and checking it against the result. DiceBitco.in's algorithm allegedly skiped some roll instances, worse than that, it only appears to skip winning rolls. Diceco.in has admitted to having malicious code that was skipping wins for certain users and claims that a recently hired programmer added the code without their knowledge.
DiceBitco.in remains operational, although they have taken down the troll box. The owner says to “its [sic] just creates havoc and non stop spam” although accusations that it is to stop the news from reaching users of the site have been voiced.
Most reputable Bitcoin casinos are provably fair. The way it is supposed to work is that the casino will publish the hash to the house's hand before drawing the result. The client's result, represented in its seed, is then sent to the site, and compared to the operator's seed and the game is paid out to either the casino or the user. The user can use the hash to check the casino's seed to verify it wasn't changed after the client sent their seed.Image courtesy of dooglus.
Each bet instance is numbered and called a nonce, each of these are numbered in sequential order. Some users who noticed an extremely unfavorable win percentage decided to verify their bets, and noticed that certain nonces would skip a number (jumping from 46 to 48 for an example) indicating that nonces were being skipped. The users that were affected had loss rates far too high for a game supposedly set to win 49.5 % of the time. Since the code was set to skip a nonce a maximum one time in a row and would therefore payout winnings from a second consecutive winning nonce, Dicebitco.in's game allegedly had a win percentage of less than 25 % although, perhaps due to a string of bad luck compounded by the malicious code, many users had win percentages under 10 %.
Diceco.in claims to have removed the malicious code, but many questions remain. The owners are refusing to out the developer allegedly responsible for the theft. The reason for this, they say, is because the programmer knows their real life identity, something they feel has to stay anonymous.
The owners, who go by the names “manel” and “gerry” have begun refunding users' losses, but have so far refused to refund any positive accounts, only accounts that currently sit in the negative. Since the nonces that skipped were all wins, it shouldn't be difficult to determine how much a player should have won, had they received the right result. The owners counter that different results may have resulted in different play, but that doesn't change the fact that users made bets and any reputable casino will pay those bets regardless of how they suspect the player may have acted in different circumstances.
Not only does the policy seem unfair, it allows Dicebitco.in to theoretically profit from the scam, since many users in negative may not be aware of the scam and thus will not ask for their money back. Only paying back accounts in the negative seems to be causing more outrage.
It should be noted that DiceBitco.in allows users to invest bitcoin and play as “The House” the owners have stated that paying players back will not affect investments as the site will pay back losses from their own pocket.
Additionally, many are calling into question Dicebitco.in's security practices. Their official story is that the rogue employee added the code and manel pushed the code without double checking it. They say that employee had been in contact with the site for three months but just started coding for them as recently as ten days ago. There are significant concerns that, if the story is true, Dicebitco.in is being extremely careless with its code.
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