S.BBET, it's happening

The BitBet IPO starts in about one hour. At this time there's 811.12874571 BTC worth of bids in the book, for a total count of 3`332`872 shares and thus the IPO is about 10% oversubscribed. The average price offered per share works to 24`337 satoshi (0.00024337 BTC), which is both 20x larger than the ask of the first block and lower than the price of the last block. On financial terms I expect the IPO to work as intended.

BitBet itself has been doing ok these five days of beta so far : 75 propositions, of which 2 resolved and 1 pending. Total 315 BTC bet in 316 confirmed bets. The largest bet is 100 BTC, the smallest 0.01 BTC, the average 0.99683544 BTC.

There have been a number of changes and improvements released, as part of closing the beta and moving to gold :

• Advertising, which works on a rotating banner model. Anyone interested can contact us to purchase a slot. They cost whatever you want to pay (Minimum of 1 BTC) and last for 30 days. All banners are shown proportionally according to that payment, so if someone pays 1 BTC and there's a total of 25 BTC paid then that banner will be shown ~8% of the time (1 in 25 for each slot). The "Your Ad Here" banner currently has a fixed value of 1 BTC. The payment address is fixedⁱ so you can check there to see how much was paid in any interval and audit the banner frequency yourself.
• The maximum bet term has been extended to one year.
• A new weighing system is just about to be deployed. The Bet proposition will have a selectable weight end-point and a fixed start point of 100`000, so by selecting for instance 100`000 as the end point the time weight is effectively disabled for that bet.
• We've paid our first referral commissions. It wasn't much, a few thousandths of a Bitcoin, but I have high expectations from the BitBet referral system.

Site income from betting in these five days is 3.15 BTC. Site income from advertising is 22.00021882 BTC. Site outlay was 7.5 BTC for 75 bets, of which theoretically it should make back about half. Thus the site made 17.65021882 BTC these five days, which could be (probably meaninglessly) extrapolated to 1`288.46597386 BTC a year. On operational alone the site is making a 10% loss currently, but since most bets are open and few are closed this is likely also meaningless.

Re traffic figures,

mircea_popescu Send me some basic traffic data, like from Awstats.
kakobrekla Lol Awstats.

mircea_popescu W/E you use lol.
kakobrekla I don't run anything like that. U didn't say nothing!

mircea_popescu Haha, but you got the logs at least ?
kakobrekla I didn't put GA...

mircea_popescu No.
kakobrekla I know you don't want it. Thats why I didn't put it.

mircea_popescu Yeah.
kakobrekla Hm. What to do.

mircea_popescu Well, nothing lol. I'm just gonna say we don't even keep any traffic logs.
kakobrekla I can install that shit now if ya think.

mircea_popescu Nah. It was a sidepoint anyway.

I'm sorry... we don't track you. Thus no traffic figures. Go figure.

UPDATE, post hoc.

To pretty much everyone's surprise, 177 of the 300 blocks sold for about 1k BTC total. Price settled around 60k satoshi (0.0006 BTC). Here's some cubist machine-art to immortalize the moment :

1. 1CnqxD4NnRsukc1Ni2oZR3ERc2g2WVnqw [↩]