State of the receivership process
After working a few days on the BitBet receivership process I am pleased to present all interested parties with my first progress report. The work I have undertaken during these few days focused mainly on the identification and accounting of the theoretically available assets, as well as the listing of existing claims against BitBet.
As of today, I have received:
– from Matic Kočevar: the deedbot’d DB, codebase, and contents of the hot wallet amounting to 4.83337474 BTC [1, 2]
– from Mircea Popescu: the bitbet.us domain and the sum of 750.5 BTC.
Auctioneering of the source code, database and domain name
The source code, database, and domain will be auctioned as a single package during the next week, bids should be published directly in the comments, the highest bid at the end of Wednesday the 6th of April 2016 will be retained as buyer for the whole package.
After the completion of the auction I will publish a final list of assets, the list of certified claims (after resolving whatever bets can actually be resolved at that point in order to maximize the fee revenue). After that I shall give a few days for interested parties to comment and finally proceed to the actual transfers (Bitcoin and other assets).
State of the assets and liabilities
As of the today, the minimum value of the assets in my possession is ~755 BTC, while the maximum total amount for the liabilities, should all claims be certified, is ~981 BTC.
Assets:
- Cash: 954.78385211 BTC (of which 755.33337474 BTC is currently under my control):
(1) Outstanding bets: 942.81955914 BTC,
(2) Unpaid resolved bets: 8.75451297 BTC,
(3) Zeroconf bets on unhandled proposals: 1.99978000 BTC,
(4) Gracious donations: 1.21000000 BTC.
- Non-cash assets for which the value is to be determined during the auction:
- the 'bitbet.us' domain name,
- the BitBet database,
- the BitBet source code.
Liabilities: 981.54108013 BTC, detailed as:
- Mircea Popescu's bill: 17.94766149 BTC
- Receiver's fee: 13.37 BTC
- Bettor winnings: 331.69291390 BTC (335.04334737 BTC before 1% fee)
- Bettor refunds for unresolved bets: 616.53072474 BTC
- Bettor refunds for zeroconf bets on un-handled proposals: 1.99978000 BTC
Data used for this report
See the data files in plain text format, or in CSV format.
The lists of Bitcoin addresses to be used by BitBet, as transmitted by Matic Kočevar and clearsigned by Mircea Popescu [1, 2].
April 6th update: additional data as per my response to hanbot’s comment. It includes the outstanding bets as well as the resolved but unpaid ones. It also has the resolution timestamp included.
I bid 0.0001 BTC.
I bid 0.0002 BTC.
I bid 9. BTC.
hmm. i didn’t get it where are those 200btc missing?
David, could you please transfer some part of your 750 BTC to the person you really trust.
If something happens to you, we all are screwed…
Risk is like shit, spread it, it’s still shit.
Many bettors have meanwhile LOST their bets, eg in AI Alphago vs. Sedol.
Theis bet is still unresolved.
My question is : will the losers of still unresolved bets be refunded?
For those who have bet on Sedol would be a real present.
I guess it would be more appropriate to use the losers’ funds to fill gaps in layabilities, redistributing to winners their initial bets plus what is left.
Just my 2 cents thrown here.
Ask Santa for presents. See:
http://log.bitcoin-assets.com//?date=28-03-2016#1441337
The losing bets go to the winners of same bet; only the fee belongs to the company. The “confiscate at will, use loot to cover costs, and redistribute whatever’s left, so the losers lose everything and the winners lose their winnings”, however used you may be to that, has no place in Bitcoin. Spewing that braindamage publicly only erodes your layability.
What is your role in the ongoing auction?
Troll.
“use the losers’ funds to fill gaps in layabilities”. I completely agree. Actually, I don’t mind if David do it this way: bettor for AlphaGo receive 110% of their bets. Like compensation for the waiting and for broken expectations. We would still have ~ 60 BTC left and usable for redistribution
PS. My bets are related to BTC going up only.
Nothing that agreement and redistribution couldn’t fix. If you strongly agree to redistribute enough, everyone can get 110% on their money, and there’s still more money left, for another round of redistribution.
How could we run out of money if there’s still so much paper left?
Another thing. David and bettors, what do you think about this proposal. Make a list of bettors, who agree to receive a part of their bets. For example, I agree to receive 80% of my bets, if this is done ASAP. Payment process starts with those who agree to receive smallest part of their bets (and no further payment to them). List could look like this:
1) agree to receive just 50%
2) agree to receive 55%
..
100) agree to receive 75%
…
Regarding “gracious donations to shareholders”: it doesn’t look as if the receivership has been publicly notified on bitbet.us itself. Anonymous comments don’t count.
Cash: 954.78385211 BTC (of which 755.33378422 BTC is currently under my control) <– Right there is your missing 200 btc.
Hi Francois,
Thanks for the update, but I tend to agree with one of the poster above:
you list assets as cash: BTC 954 or so, yet only BTC 750 or so is under your
control. Are the missing BTC 200 still under someone else’s control ?
It is disingenuous to claim 954 BTC as an asset when in fact one only has possession of 754 BTC. Further, it seems peculiar to skip over the lacking ~199 BTC so nonchalantly. Why are these funds separate from the main 750 BTC when they’re both clearly outstanding bets from the site?
It would seem that the deficit for the time being is roughly 27 BTC + 199 BTC – revenue from auctions.
What happened to the 200 BTC David? BitBet was supposedly run with everything in reserve until the 17BTC donation. I hope you’ve asked this question?
I hold them ; the published lists are being checked. I expect to disburse the difference early next week.
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Hello,
I want to bid on BBET auction. What is the best way of doing it?
Two other questions:
1. Is the twitter account considered in the assets.
2. Is there an ongoing agreement with a hosting provider? If so, when will be discontinued?
I wrote to the email address of the site, but I had no replies. I’m this one:
http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=31-03-2016#1442737
Thanks,
Erik
1. I will ask, I think it should come with the other assets,
2. I don’t know when the agreement will be discontinued.
The questions: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=04-04-2016#1443213
You can place bids here in the comments directly.
A few questions/observations:
Why is it that bet id 14363 on bet 1152 shows a bet amount of 0.0701 in your report and on bitbet’s site, however blockchain.info reports only .07 was sent for this tx? Looks like a house bet, too.
Can you elaborate on item Q5? What is a “proposal id”? What do you mean the “donations” were “recorded by BitBet after the January report”? There aren’t any donations in the January or February reports of this year.
As to the state of assets and liabilities, why is ~331 BTC listed as “bettor winnings” under liabilities given the three unpaid but resolved bets in Q2 of the data total ~5 BTC? And why are bettor winnings + bettor refunds + the zeroconf item under liabilities (950.22341864) not equal to items 1, 2, and 3 (953.57385211) under assets?
You must look at the total sum per address per block to match what bitbet reports.
Instead of looking at tx/de3a677188b9d952187532d19b7ea14ae2a168ed62a008203c9f33ff822f52d7, look at address/1MKQWVvZHx3jMr3i4vWFVhJBhwwUfshJwB – it should be obvious what happened there.
Proposal ID in that table are actually bet ID for which the addresses were given out. These donations were made after the January statement. I always ran a script to account for donations for the period before I signed the statements and reported any findings to be included in the statement. Because the February statement was not to be signed, I did not run the script and therefore did not report the donations at that time. You can verify the claims in the following, trivial way:
1. Check the address in question matches the list signed by MP to be used by BB
2. Check the timestamp of the deposit made to respective address in blockchain
3. Check that they were not actually accounted to any bet
In short: the 3 payments in question are regarded as donations because, like others, it took them longer than 72 hrs to confirm and are therefore not assigned to any bet.
I calculated the ~335 BTC listed as “Bettor winnings before fee” as the sum of bets made on outstanding proposals (including the unpaid resolved bets) for which the resolution timestamp is earlier than, or equal to 1460325600 (end of April 10th). The actual BitBet liability then comes by substracting the 1% BitBet’s resolution fee.
I have attached another data extraction as an update to the report so you can check this.
In your sum, you need to take the ~335 BTC (bettor winnings before BitBet fee), not the value after BitBet takes its cut which is BitBet’s actual liability to the happy winrars.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 At this time of blockheight 405895, I bid 9.5 BTC on davout's BitBet auction, namely: - The source code for the bitbet website - Ownership of the bitbet.us domain name - The user and bet database - The twitter account Although this is not a requirement, and assuming he has kept a copy, I would also appreciate if Matic could, as a matter of courtesy, provide the complete logs for the site. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJXBAa8AAoJEP1aoqXiZgKwHEMQAJYOLwMgkLmqu+zVtIa0ZRxr 0GSNkzDU4t4kub1l228yNBVCzkd/Wz69OJiKcIk/1yWM1fJXkB79iREuR4vBw9RS LZZd8XTY4gYhu3ItfW86kvjTSG9TqokuIYWM4F0Nkf+2dFUTLWaRwSlZsFTh19AU 9dw6l5B3BmLjYH1hjvHNhM7N2GNZ1ggMX4MQuJ1/c/XU5s7Ozz+p4mTD6uanNc+F aiq7rikacGhwloOQFeMzqfjoqa/ppPRo8I5TqSZQF5JA+0H/5gsFI3RMdQMOzcPt 3j2/RrYyi0UqJeUxaCR1H7ffmw4rWBpGfpMI4MhSzw9zdGztzdETYzcmwHKc3tRV +Z5JY0dDwIhCTi4BF4qVS7nxNpPQU/5VSGMRmp7uBH937ge/mPMtfWqPVveHzURd PRNysnaSM4Bvk2sDSjo6PIQCf1ycmsWoE0uusxP0I5IjnjyLMaegQj0Ru9v6+Ncv g5GhuGSeuwkNPqNrKWYa9/qEPiRIaOv73Q8vbwXp5r/YU9ITnixC15qQNA9Fn9xu XfQS29piyz8oQUlFot4i1x7FdFl1TSdYbH2qhepvFlq3dtXtYMyD64Q8wSNqAVHE 4qSQvY0oX9SwJL3FCt5TfirE3XlFpHAZoQ/8f23z0WArBCvs7NoSFXuf2hKMYuxN ariv4k8/UiLZvR5caCD0 =hZ+I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----Checking this out, I see bet 1249 (alphago) marked with timestamp 14880346137, well after the 1460325600 cutoff stated, whereas its actual resolution time was pegged for March 16th, well before the April 10th cutoff. Was this bet included in the ~335 sum?
Also, as per kakobrekla’s comment, I checked the three items in Q5 and found that while their respective addresses do indeed appear in the signed address list, all three timestamp disparities between the attached data and blockchain are less than 72 hours (albeit the first two items being ~15 minutes short of it).
Address 13LEhpUgz7umZuBq6wV8ZTDwQto1mS2j4G was requested at 1455251616 epoch time, which translates to 2016-02-12T04:33:36+00:00 and the transaction in question was included in block 398504 at 2016-02-15 05:35:39 according to bc.info.
Address 13LfxuAXg9Q9vVLcSKhXE3otFpDQHxs4f7 was requested at 1455251644 epoch time, which translates to 2016-02-12T04:34:04+00:00 and the transaction in question was included in block 398504 at 2016-02-15 05:35:39 according to bc.info.
Address 146FNzLJyCxD64o7RVuPyxfJ37iMrGf9HF was requested at 1457469242 epoch time, which translates to 2016-03-08T20:34:02+00:00. The address was given out as deposit address for bet #1249, which was closing at 2016-03-09T00:00:00+00:00. The transaction in question was included in block 401776 at 2016-03-09 00:39:07 according to bc.info and has therefore missed the time window to be accepted as a legitimate bet.
I failed to realize that the what I used (MySQL’s FROM_UNIXTIME()) to convert timestamps, would yield localized date-times, and not GMT.
Since I’m in the GMT+1 time zone there is a 1 hour discrepancy.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 At this time of blockheight 406050, I bid 15.0 BTC on davout's BitBet auction, namely: - The source code for the bitbet website - Ownership of the bitbet.us domain name - The user and bet database - The twitter account Although this is not a requirement, and assuming he has kept a copy, I would also appreciate if Matic could, as a matter of courtesy, provide the complete logs for the site. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJXBVbYAAoJEP1aoqXiZgKwoeIP/REHq+lKYUNsBlzeU4rFVdGU E6ulHyhopEkWMnsbRaKHOH82irLUOXY0qPIgt5GK/1KgUOSUNGUF7KSV4udx+79h Z4nSDJiZeKAzoEReef0yTa+DJDoL6WP+T1Wk8Li13AyBQIsBgUWGqYXGgs5OLxMw GXtu+wySHbyujw2KzFUd4ikuKrSdi2rvg7bgDhxCZ9IPh2bdROD+i++METJPwkM3 HE/rfj+DLKO/Y8KX+pGiJ6M5VV2m0V1t8hjVyikyecrBbOLbvG7qx+edykBW0EYl ecwg837GBRKn1EM3FGcLc3gCuoOKyHjlk6Yjdq4FvWkeBhLff+WDBGoPYYhxOs8c K4vDjJGJJgCM1Nvi8Dqe4v15fH+fUTVw35nfRDozdCx/daau5EJhNccIFcNp8e+r AfJ/d4DMUC/I2aIi9LkaRYw7PygqMRhLhbU63wvY3ULAjLAvBR4nPrWw3NkmRJ3G vPlGq+xDA8QhkIW1oRRAj42ULiPaIf2XHKJcdiSse8kbVuo0n8SRIefubwB1mZE6 q877RY9sRLrVwTNs7vkqSOW4WMtN+3hfJGMWFG370SPBqGwTvI11lXHALwzu0/2y exbljmC+F1Lz5GuALu6/87vQMJmMSHTUxMplHTkYWcMEp6anPaQI5nGRT6jDV8vg LS+VhGKbWfsfccksmgKh =aQwe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----Now with correct date:
This is going to take a while …
And a third horse appeared.
If I could still use a half-decent site to do so, I’d wager this is going to drag into the wee morn
The point is that it would only prove one did bid *after* some point of time, the better approach would be to deedbot bids if one really wanted to prove the bid came *before* some point of time.
I don’t think it’s very important to prove that, if a bidder doesn’t follow up by shortly by paying up, the point is moot anyway.
Sorry for the last minute bid, no intent to create dram. RL got in the way
The internet runs on drama, thank you for your contribution 😉
OMFG don’t outbid me with 39 seconds to spare this time. Lol.
As discussed above, wasn’t the intent, but things came my way IRL
I must reluctantly cede. All the best.
@Pete : A valiant defense. If nothing else, I suspect the shareholders will be grateful.
I suppose there’s that eh.
For whatever it might be worth at this point, were we nearing the end of your rope or were we just scratching the surface ?
Cheers.
Will be happy to disclose this once deal is complete.
Much appreciated. Feel free to send a pgp-gram or drop by #trilema on IRC when you’re up and running.
With these bets there will be an excess of funds once all bets are paid out and pending bets refunded. Where do the excess funds go? Receiver keeps?
@Gord : IIUC, shareholders get the balance
@Davout: how do we proceed from here ?
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