Two days ago Erik implemented a change which returns 0.5% on a losing bet. The significant benefit of this to Bitcoin is that unspendable bitdust utxo is nearly eliminated. Only bets of <=0.06 BTC create such outputs.
Do you have a reference for that? I must have missed it. I thought losing bets have always paid out half a percent. Here's what I think it probably my biggest ever losing SD bet: http://blockchain.info/tx-index/12114983
I bet 6 BTC and got 0.03 back - that's 0.5%.
Edit: my bad - I once lost 31 BTC and got 0.155 BTC back, but still it was 0.5%.
So I guess I don't know what has changed...
Thanks for keeping it up Dooglus, the charts and the level-headed responses. I sent a little bit your way again 
Thank you very much.
Interesting! My mistake then.
I took this at face value:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150493.msg1603935#msg1603935
because I kept seeing comments like this beforehand:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150405.msg1601927#msg1601927
There has been some SD change because those excellent violin plots show clearly that the min bet size increased 10x at the end of 2012.