Quote from: enjolras on February 14, 2016, 07:45:22 PM

Hi all,

I've been researching the transactions a bit and I've found some weird things. Let's take a look to the last 2 payed bets:

Second to last payment was to address 177uEkAc7WJjretMPUcAwkTBFnYQ7CENyQ. Looking at that transaction, we find that the funds came from addresses:

1Nine9uy8vZjZGoDZcKmFD71X77A2rSxuQ (deposit address)
1F6Tp1YTuMPzHQivhWgdhsxs5XPDUYx3tV ("change" address from a previous transaction)

and the outputs went to:

177uEkAc7WJjretMPUcAwkTBFnYQ7CENyQ (sender address)
1N9Fee2pbrXArtapVJERjkDG1jJtzxbAz6 (site fee address)
...and...
12AumNDSqaV8SgooN7HBb2aph3itP98q3n ("change" address for the remaining coins)

Now, if we look at the last payed bet, to address 1Jv5FPjpYag3eyPsUurr2i42iEFrzCVoYA, the transaction shows that the inputs are:

12AumNDSqaV8SgooN7HBb2aph3itP98q3n (the same "change" address of the previous payment)
17SfVoQyFASqdmsVyJq1NVhEhX8hpozFUD (probably another "change" address)

and the outputs to:

1Jv5FPjpYag3eyPsUurr2i42iEFrzCVoYA (sender address)
1N9Fee2pbrXArtapVJERjkDG1jJtzxbAz6 (site fee address)
...and...
1NzCZn2VVCSqVUXwsVzgn719WwMFn49SP2 (a new "change" address)

If then we look at the balance of that last "change" address, we find that, as of now, it is of 0.01692978 BTC, which means that there is enough balance to pay for any bet under that amount (counting the fee and so), yet lots of "payable" bets have expired.

I suspect that the site only keeps account of the balance available in the deposit address to compute the payments, but everytime a transaction is made, the remaining coins are going, by bitcoin's design, to "change" addresses belonging to the same wallet, and that coins are not being used to pay for the bets, which IMHO opinion is quite unfair and, in any case, not included in the game terms.

Thoughts?

This is due to two factors:

1. Dev funds added to a change address during testing phases will be used when
the game pays out although obviously will not be tracked by the main address,
although will still be used by the system to payout, this sometimes means the main
address will have more than is stated on the website although if you manually added
all of the values you would see the balance displayed on Nine9.ninja is the correct value.

2. Miner fees, the default tx miner fee is set to 0.00005 on the bitcoin wallet although
the game has a default set tx miner fee of 0.0001 (double), you may now think this is
unfair as the game will likely have more left over BTC due to the system using half the
actual game stated tx fee. This is incorrect as the majority of deposits to the system
are very low therefore when larger deposits are to be paid out the fees get very high
as the transactions are full of very low (dust) style inputs so the game has to have a
higher fee to protect itself from being unable to pay due to a too high miner fee.

An example of the above is the payment of 1.25 BTC:
https://blockchain.info/tx/eaeaf632874cc2cd62aa7b0bc492d878b402b3032057971d2189423d265ff8c2

Note the fee is: 0.00032545 BTC
This is 3*+ the game set 0.001 fee although because most outputs are 0.00005 the
game managed to accumulate enough to fund this higher fee rate.

Another 2 examples:
https://blockchain.info/tx/7623cfdb5f439d22493865571bacd87b2e0f37994270ed8401bba84cebbccfea
https://blockchain.info/tx/b9dcc7fb5eb5fa3fd0395413c79f1b783170894b38341ea060c7b8cc528e5c3d

Therefore the balance shown on the Nine9.ninja website is accurate and is the one
players should follow if they want to keep track of the balance.

I will be correcting some of the dynamic scaling stall issues shortly.

Thanks for playing!