> Moreover, since the funds are held in escrow by the network and not by a specific person or group, your funds can't be stolen or seized by anyone.

But who adjudicates the event outcomes? In other words, who is the administrator that chooses the winning side of a bet when the event is over?

> XBet.IO uses a one of a kind intervention mechanism to ensure that only verified results are broadcasted to settle bets. After every match, the results are displayed for the users to review and file an appeal if they think the result is wrong. If a bet is reported, it would be manually verified by an admin before settling the bet.

And who are the admins? An admin could steal all the funds placed on a winning bet by simply placing a small bet on the losing outcome, then settling the bet on that wrong outcome (and denying the appeal).

Instead of the service administrator determining who wins or not it should be a number of named and trusted outsiders who would make this decision.

Take 10 reputable sports journalists/well known figures. Pay them part of the 1% profit. In exchange for the money they would agree to provide a proof of the result (signed with their key). Craft the transactions so that for example 4 out of 10 confirmations are needed for the transaction to go through.

The problem here is that "trusted" is not intrinsic to the character of some third-party. I might trust someone with $100, but does that mean I would trust them with $1,000,000?

The better solution is to not to rely on trust or semi-trust (i.e. trust multiple parties not to collude) at all. Instead, incentivize people to act in their own self-interest (the same game-theoretic assumption underlying the blockchain). This is how TruthCoin incentivizes voters to adjudicate decisions (voters are analogous to miners): https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin

Pointless to do for short events with small bets. You just kill the golden goose. Why not just a biz and accumulate ongoing revenue? Anyways, deposit risk is low. Sports games last just a few hours.

Some of the bets are not just single games, but the outcome of a whole tournament. And ongoing revenue is only 1%, which relative to the other 99%, won't be so enticing after customer growth has peaked. Eventually, the reward from a "retirement attack" becomes very enticing to an anonymous biz operator (and easily blamed on an admin account compromise).

Its quite dishonest to claim that "money cannot be stolen or seized by anyone" just because the bets/order books are decentralized. The outcome admin/judging is still centralized. Whoever controls the judging, effectively controls the funds.

The judge must not necessarily be one person, OP_CHECKMULTISIG allows setting the requirement to m of n parties which would have to conspire.

I use the betfair 'betting exchange' API +crude algos to place bets on the final results of soccer leagues. My main risk, I think, is betfair going bust with all my capital locked into season-long bets (I make many small bets on unrelated markets).

They charge 5% commission on net profits for a given event (would be reduced to 3% if I had very large volume). They are floated on the stock market, have a decent market cap and I think my funds are likely safe with them. That 5% is a lot, and really reduces my profit, BUT at least I am fairly sure my capital is safe. (Unlike e.g. intrade [0] who I really wanted to use (big arbs on US presidential election vs betfair) but did not trust (rightly so, as it turned out)).

The other positive thing is the market depth - many punters use betfair. This is self-reinforcing - people don't use eg betdaq because people don't use betdaq, even though their commission is currently 3%.

Another thing: I am happy having my capital tied up in bets because inflation and interest rates are low. That is not true of bitcoin. For bets on a given match, made and settled the same day, this might not be a big issue, but for longer-term bets ...

I'm interested to see how xbet does, good luck to them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrade

Oh, I didn't know betfair had an API, that's interesting. Do you know if there exists an open source implementation for any languages, or do you roll your own?

Maybe https://github.com/betfair/API-NG-sample-code is a good place to start?

Also: https://developer.betfair.com/ http://forum.bdp.betfair.com/

I was careful about using someone else's code for handling my money! So I used basic example code that I understood (I no longer remember where I got it, sorry), then extended it.

From various forums etc, there seems to be a big pool of people doing this sort of thing. Also, from the betting market dynamics, you can see there are other algo traders - watching the in-play betting on soccer matches is quite amazing - the bettors work with such small margins and big volumes, 'predicting' the game in real-time. Most impressive.

Thank you very much. This looks like an interesting market to experiment with :)

Intrade paid everyone back in full.

beware: this site's session cookie is scoped to "/", and can be hijacked by any malicious page on their domain that you nav to.

also there's no httponly flag on the session cookie

gotta love bitcoin sites

> gotta love bitcoin sites

A good reason there is a lot of work being done to separate the two offerings from each other. I'm supporting all sorts of features, but to pay, you gotta send Bitcoin with a client - not my site. Safest that way. Also, see Counterparty.

Edit: From the site in question: "Nowhere do we store or request any personal information." https://xbet.io/why_use_xbet

Another thing: It's not a forgone conclusion that Bitcoin technologies will get better over time, but there is a large amount of pressure to make that a reality. People like their money, above all.

XBet.io uses Counterparty, a protocol build on top of Bitcoin, to match and settle all bets: XBet never holds your funds (only you do).

Is XBet.io's commission programmed into Counterparty somehow?

Exactly. All bets are matched and all fees are handled by the Counterparty protocol. The only thing that XBet.io does is broadcast the results of the games (and provide a nice UI for making bets on those future broadcasts).

No BTC site is complete w/o the trollbox

If you're in the U.S. don't get your hopes up, it won't let you bet.

You can bet anonymously, no?

Also, have you ever heard of Tor?

offering poor odds on England beating Costa Rica right now. I can get better elsewhere.

Somehow I get the feeling that this is primarily targeting people who, for whatever reason, don't have easy access to those better odds.

One of the best use cases of Bitcoin: illegal gambling... in addition to online-enabling other vices.

It might be illegal in your shitty country but not mine.

But the point is that we don't need bitcoin to gamble. Only those in illiberal countries countries need bitcoin to gamble online.

That's not true. Online gambling is legal in Canada but my bank has taken it upon themselves to block deposits to Betfair.

Just like cash! Only bitcoin has a paper trail so it's actually not quite as anonymous or deniable as cash.