Bitcoin gambling: How SatoshiDice picked up where Satoshi left off

The post Bitcoin gambling: How SatoshiDice picked up where Satoshi left off appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. To be clear, Satoshi never actually coded a poker game into the Bitcoin client.  Bitcoin’s creator did, however, include the graphic user interface for a poker lobby in the first version. Satoshi removed the code in the very next commit. Erik Voorhees made up for it and then some with SatoshiDice. The service launched around this time in 2012 as a provably fair Bitcoin betting game that mostly ran onchain. Players would directly send bitcoin to one of many “1dice” vanity addresses, each with their own special properties designated by the platform. Deposit between 0.001 BTC and ~20 BTC to 1dice7fUk, for example, and you’d have 24.4% odds of instantly quadrupling your coins. Otherwise, sending up to 0.0025 BTC to 1dice1e6p… would net a 0.0015% chance of boosting your original bet by 65,000x.  The original SatoshiDice is defunct, so do your own research before interacting with any modern sites with similar names. SatoshiDice bets won or lost depending on their transaction hash. The site would run the bet’s hash through a secondary function and use the first four bytes of that hash as the so-called lucky number.  If that number fell below a preset threshold for the associated odds, the bet was considered a winner and was paid out immediately. Losers would instead receive a single satoshi in return.  SatoshiDice later published the secrets used to hash the transaction IDs, so that players could reverse-engineer the process to confirm the game wasn’t rigged. This method was the precursor to the Provably Fair system utilized by many modern crypto gambling sites. “SatoshiDice is a subroutine of an advanced artificial intelligence, which arose spontaneously as one of the less-harmful consequences of the United States’ quantitative easing monetary program,”…