Bitcoin-based casinos are reporting pretty serious, six-figure profits on a series of games wherein players' apopheniac tendencies cause them to hallucinate non-randomness in the performance of a pseudorandom-number generator. The casinos claim that their financial numbers can be trusted because of BitCoin's shared logfile, which can be parsed to show their earnings.
SatoshiDice, which has servers based in Ireland, is a pseudo-random number generator game where players choose a number and then bet on the likelihood that a "rolled number" is greater than the one they've selected. If the rolled number is greater, then they win. The house has a 1.9 percent edge—which is where the profit comes in.
The online dice game has returned profits to the tune of ฿33,310 ($596,231) during 2012—an average actual profit of ฿135.96 ($2,416) per day from May through December 2012. During that period, players put down a total of 2,349,882 bets. That's still minuscule by Las Vegas standards, but respectable.
bitZino, by contrast, released its figures in early January and seems to be doing a decent pace of business too (bitZino's bookkeeping only measures June 9 to December 31, 2012). The online casino—hosted in the US, offering online poker, blackjack, craps, and roulette—did not publish a profit and loss statement. bitZino did say it had paid out ฿28,986 ($495,000)—and that 3.2 million wagers were made during H2 2012.
Bitcoin-based casino rakes in more than $500,000 profit in six months
