.. The operator could easily invest their own money into the ponzi from various addresses, knowing that they would have the money returned to them even if they have to payout to other investors. If they do not receive enough money then they simply run away with their own money plus the money of their other investors.
The idea with ponzi games is that the operator does not play. Its PvP players gamble against each other and the operator gets a little bonus for providing the service. Youd have to prove this for a ponzi to be provably fair. So you have to prove that a certain person and their friends are not playing. Proving a negative is considered impossible.
tl;dr: A provably fair ponzi would have to prove either that the operators are not playing or make sure that everyone is a player.....
This ^^^^.
Until you can solve that conundrum,
there is no way that any ponzi game can be considered legit or fair.Agreed, but a dice site could be designed so that the operator can always place winning bets and he is the only one that can do that. That could even be done with the standard provable code provided you don't share all the code of the system. How is that any different than the Ponzi game problem?
It gets back to one thing. You have to have trust in the operator. If the operator is dishonest, it doesn't matter what the game is. I'm baffled by how naïve people are.
EDIT: I have no idea why the operator would want to do that, unless is was a backdoor to scam the site.