Bet anonymously with Bitcoin on Bitbet.us

http://bitbet.us

by orkaa • 14 years ago

28 24 14 years ago

bitbet.us

Anyone can anonymously place a bet - no account needed.

Beat-O• 14 years ago

Awesome idea! I'd like a bit better browsing by categories and specific areas of betting. Hope it picks up!

Murkin• 14 years ago

Who resovles bets ?

orkaa• 14 years ago

Bets are resolved by moderators.

rshm• 14 years ago

interesting to see .us domain name, given online betting is illegal in us.

jany3• 14 years ago

Im sure they have failbacks in place.

pfisch• 14 years ago

Why are you sure of that? Do you know who it is that is running this market? Have they somehow earned your trust in the past?

morsch• 14 years ago

Well, they're not betting with real money, are they?

mikeash• 14 years ago

Doubt it matters. Any commodity that has value ought to be covered, and value is simply determined by people's willingness to pay, so bitcoins clearly have value. You can't get around gambling laws by gambling with chickens rather than dollars, so why would bitcoins be any different?

DanBC2• 14 years ago

You might want to change a couple of words on the FAQ. Anything that mentions POTUS and death threats is taken seriously.

There's nothing to say where you're based, or if you're obeying their laws. Where are you based? Are you obeying their laws? What have you done to protect yourself from vigorous US law enforcement attempts?

EDIT: For the silent downvoters - which part is controversial?

People who say 'bomb' in an airport are dragged off. People who mention, even jokingly, death threats to POTUS attract extra investigation.

This website is doing several things which are not legal in the US. Betting on sports games; financial transactions for off-shore gambling; etc.

This website has a domain registered in the US for US residents only.

mootothemax• 14 years ago

I think that that's an attempt to try and prove that they're not an assassination market:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money, and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately...

It has been argued that the feasibility of an assassination market precludes the acceptance by governments of any form of anonymous electronic money.

Cthulhu_• 14 years ago

Well, that kinda depends on whether Bitcoin is recognised by the US government (or whichever) as legal tender; if not, it's virtual money, and you can do whatever you want with it (like ISK in Eve Online, for example).

Which is also the main problem with Bitcoins; you get the 'open source' money, but without the existing banking system and its securities, or the governments and their laws behind it. Your Bitcoin exchange gets hacked and you lose your coins? Your problem. You bet money in a dodgy bitcoin betting site and lose it? If the 'owning' government doesn't recognise it as legal tender, your problem.

fastball• 14 years ago

Has this been done before, but without BTC?

Evbn• 14 years ago

Since when is bitcoin anonymous?

wtn• 14 years ago

Why would they register that domain? From Wikipedia:

Under .US nexus requirements .US domains may be registered only by the following qualified entities:

• Any United States citizen or resident,

• Any United States entity, such as organizations or corporations,

• Any foreign entity or organization with a bona fide presence in the United States

To ensure that these requirements are met, NeuStar frequently conducts "spot checks" on registrant information.

sakopov• 14 years ago

It's a neat idea and I'm glad bitcoin is moving forward, but to me this is really dirty business to be in.

xanados2• 14 years ago

This betting site has a really stupid betting system. It appears that the amount of money you receive isn't based on a pricing of the bet, as is done on all real prediction markets, but based on a simple payout of all the bets received on the other side of the bet by the end of the bet date. This system has two practical consequences: 1. You can't determine the markets current probability estimates from the current state of the market, as you can with priced markets. 2. You should never bet until the last second so you can know the odds for the bet. In fact, it would make sense to create a sniping bot that would programmatically calculate the odds, compare them to your probability estimate, and only make the bet if it is favorable. There is another site called Bets of Bitcoin (http://betsofbitco.in/) that has similarly dumb rules.

Edit: It appears that they actually tilt the payouts of bets based on an arbitrary weighting factor towards earlier bettors (arbitrary in that it doesn't at all take into account changing risk circumstances or likely levels of risk decay as a real market would), in some undisclosed fashion. I recommend that no one bet on this highly flawed system.

kirian• 14 years ago

I have to agree, I was trying to work out how the odds are calculated and it makes no sense. Why not copy what Betfair or Intrade or something like that do.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Isn't this just parimutuel betting? What's the difference?

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting)

jany3• 14 years ago

http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/i-would-like-to-address-tha...

ellyagg• 14 years ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/frm/prediction_sources/7yr0

xanados2• 14 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of vitriol. I didn't mean to upset him so much, but I apologize to him for the offense. I understand that this is his baby so any criticism feels very personal. I could have been nicer.

That said, I must disagree with some of the substantive points he made in this post.

> No, you clueless douche, it doesn’t have that consequence. It has the exact opposite consequence : that in this system you can determine actual current market valuations of risk. This unlike the systems you cite, which are nothing but glorified scams, and which specifically prevent you from gauging the market sentiment precisely because they’re not market priced.

BitBet, for the bet of Houston Texans to win the Super Bowl, has .07 against and .08 for (an implied probability of approximately 50%). The reality is that if I place a bet today, I won't know the odds that I'm betting against until the last day of the betting. It's true that there are economic results showing that the pricing in parimutuel betting will settle to the market expected value in equilibrium, but this example shows that these markets require much greater liquidity to provide anything resembling real-life probability estimates. You simply can't open a contract on a prediction market for 50:50 that the Texans will win the Super Bowl and have anyone take the other side of your trade.

> This idiocy is based on the presumption that you can import the “real odds” from somewhere. This is not what BitBet is doing, importing the “real odds” from somewhere else. BitBet establishes the actual odds.

In a priced market, informed market participants look at the probability represented by market prices and make their bets taking into account the information that they have. This action causes all of the information to be revealed in aggregate. His statement above implies that the "real odds" are being set by the market, not by reality, which is an inversion of cause and effect. The real odds are always imported from elsewhere, namely reality itself, as estimated through private and public information and analysis.

In order to profit in parimutuel games, you have to have both an accurate understanding of the reality, and an accurate estimate of public sentiment (and knowledge of the actual payout algorithm, of course). For priced markets to converge upon truthful values only requires that informed market participants bet based on their private information and best estimates, which is a much lower bar.

Not all parimutuel markets are created equally of course. Dynamic parimutuel markets[1] have some advantages over traditional markets (they don't suffer from a lack of buy liquidity, for example, but still don't allow traders to know their payouts at the time of the bet), but this doesn't seem to be one.

All that said, I intend no offense to the creators of this project, and wish them all the best in all of their journeys. Three cheers! I wish the world had more prediction markets.

1: http://dpennock.com/papers/pennock-ec-2004-dynamic-parimutue...

haakon• 14 years ago

> Turns out that what I wrote was wrong. You know, just like I’m wrong in general and just like my dumbass parents were wrong not to get that abortion.

Whoa, this man does not know how to take criticism.

joelthelion• 14 years ago

If only one of these fifty bitcoin betting site developers created a prediction market instead, he'd have my money.

Bet anonymously with Bitcoin on Bitbet.us

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