Wasn't satoshidice like a 1.6% edge or something?
Why do people talk about it like it's dead? It's probably just pining for the fjords.
The edge at satoshidice is 1.9%.
I think evorhees once said that it wasn't possible to run a profitable site with a 1% edge, and so set the satoshidice edge to 2%, and dropped it to 1.9% in response to competition (from btcdice.com maybe?) offering a slightly lower edge. He said he had the resources to keep dropping the SD edge and kill any competition, but it didn't play out like that.
I think off block chain dice games seem to have clustered around 1% but I keep expecting to see .88% or .5% but I don't. I see the new PD3 is at .91% due to its jackpot feature.
For the longest time there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that 1% was the edge for offchain dice sites. I was curious when PD dropped their edge to 0.91% whether it would lead to a price war, resulting in a race to the bottom but apparently nobody cares. Dice players don't seem to care whether they are getting a 0.91% or 1% edge. Volume at PrimeDice's recently launched "PD3" site, with exciting new features (levels, achievements, player-vs-player, a faucet) has been matched very closely by that at dicebitco.in (no new features, 1% edge, no faucet), so I guess giving up almost 10% of expected profit is a losing move by PD that won't last too long.
Another issue preventing any credible competition from appearing with a lower edge is the need for a bankroll. It seems to be accepted knowledge that in order to offer bets with a 1% edge you need to have about 200 times the maximum win in your bankroll. The smaller the edge, the bigger that multiplier. To offer a 0.5% edge, you need 400 times the maximum win per bet in your bankroll. When the established sites are offering around 20 BTC wins per roll that means you need a 8000 BTC bankroll to offer 0.5% edge bets, and that's a lot of money. If you're trying to crowd-fund such a bankroll you're going to have a hard time - who wants to invest in a site with a low edge when you can just as easily invest in one with a full 1% edge...
And so we're left with 1% sites for the most part. We see sites like 999dice with a 0.1% edge, but that's hard to take seriously. When challenged to prove that they are bankrolled to offer such bets they refuse, and so can't really be taken seriously.