1) Running balance of the wallet is not public (though I could make it such). It's held in a handful of online (hot) wallets and offline cold storage. The balance is thus the sum of these accounts... as of this second, it stands at 7,302 BTC
2) SatoshiDICE cannot go bust. It's algorithms change the max bet sizes in real time so that in a world where the site lost every bet forever, the cash reserves just fall toward zero asymptotically. It can lose all the money in cash reserves, but never go into debt.
3) Dividends paid out come from new profits, and don't reduce cash reserve below the level it was at in the prior month. Betting limits rise and fall constantly based on statistical variance. Betting limits are very high right now, and I do not intend to raise them further - though if I wished to, I can at any time put in more capital for this purpose.
4) Are there a lot of unanswered questions? I think I've been quite good about answering them all, no? And yes, due diligence is extremely important. I'm hoping people at least read the full prospectus before posting here, because lots of questions are likely answered in that document.
Okay, this is more like it! What will happen when there's a string of bad luck (and there will be) which brings the cash reserves close to zero? How long will it take to recover to the previous point? Because the monthly dividends will be reduced in this scenario.
What is the plan for raising the betting limits? You said you do not intend to raise them further. Does this mean forever? If you do raise the limits will this always be done using new capital and not profits? If the limits are raised with profits, it would reduce the payout for that month. Although we would expect future months payouts to be larger on average.
I read the whole prospectus and nothing in there seems to address these. I feel that to properly evaluate S.DICE offering we need to understand the risks. There are two kinds:
Internal Risks- Running low on cash reserves
- Taking a long time to rebuild cash reserves (small dividends during this period)
- Server hacked and private keys compromised
External Risks- Domain name is seized
- Owner is seized
- Servers are confiscated
- MPEx disappears and there's no market for the equities
- Obstacles to trading the equities makes them illiquid
- Copycats with better advertising budget and larger payout, larger bets
- More mining pools start excluding SatoshiDICE transactions