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All of the round data referenced below can be downloaded from here. The data is part of a project that downloads round data periodically and uploads the csv.
Crypto Scams
No significant action in crypto over the last week, which I'm happy about. I may be in the minority, but I'd prefer a steady price in crypto where we can all put our heads down and work on meaningful applications. A pump just brings in a lot of nefarious characters that don't care about long term viability. I'm in it for the long haul.
I came across this great and terrifying thread by someone working on a defi project.
For the past two weeks, I've been targeted in an extremely thorough social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH. I'm super lucky to have made it through unscathed. Here's the story 👇
— thomasg.eth (@thomasg_eth) February 13, 2022
The short version is that someone contacted the author pretending to be from another project and offered to work with them. The scammer built trust over time and gifted the author some NFTs that he could stake and earn interest on. It was a legit project but the scammer wasn't who they said they were and mirrored the legit app.
The author believed the scammer but luckily transferred the NFTs to a clean wallet before staking. The scammer then sent the author another NFT and insisted he stake from his main wallet. The author got suspicious and inspected the contract and found that it would transfer his wrapped eth to the scammer.
Wrapped tokens or shitcoins are particularly vulnerable since you could delegate a contract to spend it without explicitly seeing the transfer in MetaMask or your wallet. I think there's a lot of work to be done there, but if you have some wrapped token, it's possible I could just steal it by getting you to hit a contract and it wouldn't be completely obvious to you.
The lesson is that scammers are getting more sophisticated. If you read through the thread you'll see there were a lot of back and forths and actual time and effort invested by the scammer.
The author was smart to keep the contract with most of his funds isolated. But he does hold a lot of funds in a hot wallet that's exposed, making him a likely target.
The other trick the scammer did was acquire the .com domain for space falcon, which is hosted on .io. So the author assumed .com was the same thing as the .io address. With domain name proliferation, you'll see its easy for scammers to buy a similar domain. You see this with spam emails coming from "fbmail.com" or something related.
Another lesson is people don't normally do shit for you for no reason. I apply the same reasoning to people selling prediction strategies. Why would they give it out when they could use it to print money? Maybe they're selling it but if it worked I would be almost certain it's worth more using it to play than selling it. And once you have more people using that strategy, the odds change and make it useless.
Finally, create many accounts and keep everything separate. Most scams can be easily avoided if you create a separate account to interact w/ sketchier contracts. It's easy to create new linked accounts, so if you don't know how to do that make sure to google it.
Action
We had a pretty good week at the games. We had one paused markets on Tuesday, but other than that, the games went well. We saw pool sizes grow throughout the week. We were above 30 BNB round size for the most part which I see as a nice benchmark to watch.
We even had two 100+ round sizes on Friday (115 and 111) so that's exciting. We also saw a 7.3 and 6.27 payout, and a couple of 4s. Overall a solid week.
Winners and Losers
| Place | account | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x03fa3c74efa84bcc6d787439fa109b627f527068 | 151 | 44.24 | 25,080.0 | 11.14 | 1.99 |
| 2 | 0x32a7ca42d196289518b03fbb5ecfc4f5f3505bb9 | 273 | 36.92 | 21,090.0 | 11.17 | 3.33 |
| 3 | 0xe1ae92d32d2a3230773775500ab1bb89efc926d5 | 895 | 30.87 | 17,670.0 | 85.54 | 0.42 |
| 4 | 0x2881c61655658c76d3f19a8df187693ed8a057a6 | 2 | 29.78 | 17,100.0 | 1.42 | 25.0 |
| 5 | 0x0723a5f99edf7a4551ace7871b568d6a4dd42682 | 87 | 27.31 | 15,390.0 | 6.32 | 0.55 |
| 6 | 0x1c7f124b52cbcc5ff98f7f205955c93f88c52937 | 637 | 27.29 | 15,390.0 | 9.65 | 0.51 |
| 7 | 0xc9c91118f1690d8087fc0e25239661c86e19807b | 912 | 27.0 | 15,390.0 | 37.98 | 0.41 |
| 8 | 0x4a53a6eafe44acefde06ccc190ee467f3a3d133a | 557 | 26.51 | 15,390.0 | 66.82 | 0.4 |
| 9 | 0xa492dffa203b4a0bcef20721d0f2e3ee5981f656 | 146 | 25.45 | 14,250.0 | 8.09 | 2.89 |
| 10 | 0xad15528e72067b1c827c642b6f0b6c21cb888079 | 272 | 25.4 | 14,250.0 | 12.08 | 1.59 |
We had a surprisingly slow week with the winners. Nothing huge or too suspicious. Our top guy had a great run, but he's a veteran at this point, playing over 1,600 games. His bet sizes are a little high for my tastes but he is up 34 BNB over his life so can't knock him.
#4 is definitely sketch. 4 for 4 on round sizes that large is pretty rare. And if you look at the accounts history you'll see some other dodgy behavior I just don't have the time to research right now. Email me if you have a theory or analysis.
Let's look at the losers
| Place | from | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0xc8923536f8c1a348f15e87315740bb5933aeb4c9 | 61 | -269.86 | -153,900.0 | -22.61 | 10.75 |
| 2 | 0x58094ec238875955f1d862807db33b1fe9c143fc | 173 | -91.07 | -51,870.0 | -4.18 | 2.08 |
| 3 | 0x3f25846f0a8b373da450efabb3988581428209b8 | 540 | -47.67 | -27,360.0 | -25.51 | 0.24 |
| 4 | 0x5d83638d550fd72d75f44068f11a22fc6d62398d | 282 | -42.64 | -24,510.0 | -57.01 | 0.55 |
| 5 | 0x670410893e82f42b752cbc8cfd765306fe27284b | 78 | -39.67 | -22,800.0 | -12.76 | 3.64 |
| 6 | 0xb3be081eeeaea11ea8432c4b56e5988134b32cf3 | 107 | -36.38 | -20,520.0 | -28.83 | 1.29 |
| 7 | 0x3b6d6d1b7aa126e6b7aa35881b305c685817e9c6 | 522 | -34.57 | -19,950.0 | -16.03 | 2.26 |
| 8 | 0xfd1df8178927ac85344905f593fe3d85701f3404 | 2 | -34.0 | -19,380.0 | -2.0 | 17.0 |
| 9 | 0x79f66ad224e4391e9f19438575e70227e8ea3a53 | 126 | -33.47 | -18,810.0 | -10.53 | 1.46 |
| 10 | 0x3e5126c8dd68db20246e51bc31cb087a28003d2e | 138 | -32.49 | -18,240.0 | -6.76 | 1.28 |
Last week we saw a record loser of 320 BNB. This week we have an equally impressive loser, blowing 270 BNB in just 61 games.
Our #1 loser is a fan favorite. Just noting his last 2 appearances in the blog, he was our #1 loser on 2021-12-06 with losses of 260 BNB, lost another 190 BNB on 2022-01-31, and just now lost another 270 BNB, and a whole lot of losing in between. This week brought his total lifetime losses to -1,301.4 BNB or around half a million dollars.
At this point I don't know what to say. That's a hell of a loss, I just hope he's getting something out of playing. I think crypto is a great excuse to learn something about probability, programming and risk tolerance. But you can probably do that with smaller stakes. This is just extreme. But our #1 this week is still a loser and a big one at that, and as you know we love our losers, so a tip of the fedora to 0xc8923.
And that's all for this week. Hopefully this week I'll have some exciting new announcements. I also want to pick write part 2 of the prediction primer.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments or want my to highlight anything different on my weekly market recaps. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.
Good luck and bet responsibly!