I had long been wary of internet gambling as there is nothing stopping casinos from fabricating results that favor the house and stealing the players money, their games also have high house edges even when they are playing by the rules so up until recently I thought it best to save my money and stay away. I recently though discovered a website called Bustabit while browsing youtube and was throughly intrigued by the concept of the game as well as the concept of Provable Fairness.
For those of you who have never played this game before, there is a number in the top left of the screen that counts up from zero until it reaches a number that it "busts" on. If you cashed out your money before it busts then you get your bet multiplied by what ever you bet, so if you bet 5 dollars and the counter gets to five then you would win 20$ plus your original 5 dollars back.
Now some of you might be wondering about how this is different from normal casinos in the regard of them rigging the bets. Bustabit and many other bitcoin casinos utilize a system called Provably Fair in which all the number are predetermined far in advance of the game taking place and after each round everyone is given the game hash which when plugged into a website will give you back the game result to prove that the game was determined ahead of time and was not altered based on other factors like how much money was being bet or who was betting.
Another way that adds to the Fairness of this game is that everyone, around the world receives the same number at the same time. This allows you to skip a round or two and still get to see what the outcome would have been. The Game has a very low house edge of half a percent and your percent of winning any given round based on what you set your auto cashout to is shown clearly and transparently before each round.
At this point I thought, Why not? and I gave it a try, using bitcoins that I already had, I deposited $75 in bitcoin and just waited a while, watching the games go by, trying to get a sense for patterns. Eventually I placed my first bet of $10 and set the cashout to 3. I was lucky and won that bet and had just made $20 profit. I sat back, somewhat amazed that it had worked and just to prove that it was real I withdrew the money right then. A couple minutes later it got confirmed and showed up in my bitcoin wallet. I thought, how much money do they have available. Bustabit has a page where you can check the current state of the bankroll. Upon writing this, it's at about 6,400 bitcoins or over 30 million dollars.
Since then I have done a few bets a days waiting for a point where I fell confident of success. The trick is to not get greedy and keep going for more, but to have a plan and stick to it and you can make an absurd amount of money.
Some of the top players, who have won the most money often bet with over $100,000 like as in real money.
Keep in mind that those profits are shown in Bitcoin which are worth of $5,300 each.
Going Back to the point of this article, without bitcoin and things like the blockchain, this sort of open and Provable Fairness in gambling would likely not exist. Now it is up to traditional casinos to keep up with this new trend or be left in the dust.
If any of you are interested in checking this out you can start super quickly by using your STEEM that you have earned and converting it over to bitcoin for free on an exchange like Poloniex or Bittrex and then sending it over to Bustabit where you can try your luck or just get a feel for how the game works.