House whale would be pretty noticable after investments start pouring in and the auto-cashout limit is higher.
Whales are detectable, but naturally occurring whales and house whales presumably look exactly the same.
Just seems like there is no reason to offer investments on a site like this. Both of these sites are already running fine without it
Moneypot isn't doing fine really. As I understand it Eric was running far too high a risk offering 2 BTC max profit per round. Even with his unofficial investors we were still risking far too much to be safe. When you bear in mind that the average house edge is 0.5%, and to be relatively safe you need to only be risking around half that percentage of your bankroll per round, in order to safely offer 2 BTC per round you need 2 BTC to be 0.25% of your bankroll. Or in other words you need a bankroll of 800 BTC. Eric told me he had around 70 BTC when he launched the site, and so it's clear he was playing a very risky game with his savings.
and doing so would essentially be sharing profits by the site owner. In the case of MoneyPot, didn't the site just sell for 100 btc? And now the rumor is the site will take investments, which will further delay the amount of time it takes for the new owner to recoup the cost he's already put into the site.
That's not necessarily the case. Taking investments means the site can offer bigger max profits, bringing in bigger players, more attention, and bigger profits. That's the idea anyway. It's quite possible that the profit pie grows enough that even though he's sharing it, he still gets more than he would if he had no investors. And the variance will be less too.
So any attempt to offer investments should be viewed with a very skeptical eye. We've all seen enough sites go down to question the motives of anyone offering to profit-share on their site at this point. It definitely won't be for me, but you all make up your own mind, and for the love of god, be careful. We've all learned by now there is no recourse when someone steals your coins: EveryDice, Dicebitco.in, and DiceNinja thieves all got away with it.
That's always worth bearing in mind, whenever you send your coins to a site.
I sent 20 BTC to bitdice.me a while back, turned it into 21.x and tried to withdraw it. 14 hours later I still didn't have my coins, and was starting to fear that yet another investment dice site had turned into a scam. I eventually got my coins, but it made me realise that when you're playing dice, you don't just have to beat the 1% house edge, you also have to beat the X% chance that the site refuses to return your balance when you ask them to. I haven't deposited to anywhere but moneypot since then, and even then it has only been relatively small amounts.