To those who don't know me or my bot, check out the bottom of this post for more details.
The beginning:
A long long time ago (about 3 years at the time of writing) in a mining pool for away (seriously, it was hosted in Germany, that's miles away from South-Africa!), there was a naive little miner with a single GPU mining Litecoin. That was me. I was stupid back then (I probably still am). This little (sadly now non-existent) mining pool used to have a pretty nice forum and group chat that I would frequent.
Shortly after I started mining at this pool, I came upon satoshidice, at that time, one of the few bitcoin dice games available. It was still on-chain only and took forever to play properly. At the time, I had about 0.6Btc mined using a 7970 dedicated to mining, my own CPU and a gtx 560TI when I wasn't using my computer for something else. At the time, I had around 0.6Btc saved up. I started playing at satoshidice, just sending minimum amounts to random payouts to figure out how the game worked. After a while, I remembered a story a classmate of mine told me about this magical system that will never lose you coins. I later came to know this as martingale. I was able to work up my 0.6 bitcoin to over 2.4 bitcoin before I lost almost everything and waled away with just about half of what I started with.
I just figured what most people do when just being introduced to martingale: My bankroll is too low for my starting bet, if I can just get to 8 losses in a row, I'll be invincible. I immediately saw that I'll probably never have enough bitcoin to achieve that with satoshidices' large 0.01 starting bet, so I shelved it.
In the chat of the mining pool, I met a character nicknamed crash777 as well as a few others. They were good folk. Anyway, crash introduced me to a bitcoin casino that he played on frequently, PrimeDice (vers 1). Immediately I remembered my almost success with satoshidice and tried again, this time with a much smaller starting bet. My "problem" back then was boredom. I'd get bored of doing the same double, double, double reset, double, double reset thing over and over again. So I started doing variations of martingale. I'd start betting at 25% (x4) instead of 49.5% (x2) and doubled on a loss until I got 4 losses in a row, then I'd switch to 49.5% until I'd win and then start over again. There were many variations of martingale I'd try, obviously this didn't work very well and I quickly lost everything I deposited to the site. I reduced my starting bet even further and it kept a bit longer, and then I'd bust in the end again and again.
This lead me to believe that humans are the problem. We get greedy and bored and stray from the system, and this is what's causing us to lose. And thus, DiceBot was born.
Version 1
Version 1 of DiceBot was little more than a macro script, available only to a select group of chatters at the mining pool. Me, crash777 and a few others were trying our luck on primedice and constantly failing, as one does with any casino. The process of this version was rudimentary and now that I look back on it, funny.
After opening the bot, you needed to calibrate it, by clicking on your balance in the site, then by clicking on the bet amount input box, then by clicking on the bet button. The bot would store these locations and once you started it, it would move your pointer to your balance, select it, copy it into clipboard, fetch the value from the clipboard, convert it to a number and store it. It would then move your mouse to the bet amount input, selected all text in it, enter a new value to replace the old value, then move the mouse to the bet button and initiate a click. Then it would poll the balance for a change by selecting it, copying it and retrieving it from the clipboard. Once it changed, it would process whether it was a win or a loss and repeat the process above to place a new bet.
Because of this rudimentary "calibration" system, It was easy to add just-dice to the bot as well, you just clicked on different positions of the screen.
Initially, the bot could only do plain martingale, but soon, myself, crash and the others all figured we needed to add steps to make it more advanced and see some numbers to make decisions with. Thus things like the max multiplier, variable modes and the stats window were born, with most things adding a new step to the calibration phase.
This went on for a few weeks and the bot grew in popularity at the mining pool. I eventually even made a forum thread for it at their forums and it was kept as one of the most popular threads for a bit, but it was still only available to this small community. While I didn't make any money from gambling (because I busted every time), I was getting some donations and that spurred me on to keep working on it. I was still oblivious to the hopelessness of martingale and other betting systems. It quickly became apparent that the macro wasn't going to do the trick though, because of obvious limitations. The largest being the fact that it basically locked down your computer for normal use while running. I started looking for alternative routes. Thus was the start of version 2.
The life of version 2 and 3 will be covered in my next post to keep this one from becoming too long and boring.
I'm Seuntjie. I'm a software developer in the little country called South-Africa. I work for a undisclosed company to develop in house systems. I have a B.Sc IT degree and in my free time, I work. I wrote a gambling bot called Seuntjies DiceBot that is quite popular, widely trusted and used and supports many bitcoin casinos. You can check it out by clicking HERE
I also wrote a chat bot that is currently running on PrimeDice but used to run at 3 other casinos as well. Both of these projects are open source and available for free on my github profile.