Description
In the early history of Bitcoin, one of the largest stress tests has been the emergence of so-called dice games with the first popular gambling game Satoshi Dice. Earlier, a player could send a handpicked amount of bitcoins to one of static addresses controlled by Satoshi Dice. The service instantly created another reciprocal transaction and returned the prize, if the dice roll was smaller than the player’s chosen number, or a very small output value to signal to the player his loss. Later, the service shifted to off-chain bets to handle higher traffics and reduce the risk of double spending zero-confirmation transactions.
Satoshi Dice and other gambling sites have emphasized the issues of scalability and double spending, which are in the focus of recent innovations and extensions to Bitcoin. The goal of this thesis is to study the mechanism of Satoshi Dice and user behavior by analyzing the available blockchain data. It should be examined how the emergence of this service influenced the total number and volume of Bitcoin transactions and how players’ betting behavior changed over time depending on win-lose outcomes.