If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I’m not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

If you don’t think that’s true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I’m “completely wrong” means nothing.

So help me out here, what am I missing?

You’re forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You’re just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

I’ll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

• You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
• The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino’s favor
• You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let’s see what the outcomes are:

• You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
• You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
• You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
• You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

So the expected outcome for you is:

$1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + … = -$0.1328…

So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can’t do this. That’s wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.

prageru is a known disinformation platform. That link is worthless.

The ongoing war in Gaza, is HAMAS against Israel.

And what about the Palestinian lands that are occupied and the Palestinians that were uprooted from there? What about the Palestinians that have been killed by Israel? The recent events might have been HAMAS, but historically this is a Palestine-Israel conflict. If you can’t be bothered to learn and understand the context, why comment at all?

They could make new updates to lemmy proprietary

Maybe not even that. Lemmy is released under the AGPL3. This means that modified versions of Lemmy have to also be released as free software under the AGPL3 or a compatible license. To release a derivative work under an incompatible license you would need to own the code or be given permission by each contributor to do so. For any contribution where you can’t make a deal with the author, you would have to rip it out of the codebase entirely. Note that this is true for lemmy devs as well. If there is no Contributor License Agreement that states otherwise, they cannot distribute the work of other contributors under an AGPL3-incompatible license.

It’s not about “accomplishing” something that couldn’t be done with a database. It’s about making these items tradeable on a platform that doesn’t belong to a single entity, which is often the original creator of the item you want to sell. As good as the Steam marketplace might be for some people, every single sale pays a tax to Valve, and the terms could change at any moment with no warning. The changes could be devastating for the value of your collectibles that you might have paid thousands of dollars for. This could not happen on any decentralized system. It could be something else that isn’t NFTs but it would absolutely have to be decentralized. Anything centralized that “accomplishes the same thing” doesn’t really accomplish the same thing.

It’s worth noting that this sort of market control would never be considered ok on any other market. Can you imagine a car manufacturer requiring every sale to go through them? Would you accept paying them a cut when you resell your car? Would you accept having to go through them even to transfer ownership of the car to a family member? If a car manufacturer tried to enforce such terms on a sale they would be called out for it and it would most likely be ruled to be unlawful. But nobody questions the implications of the same exact situation in a digital marketplace.

The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.

These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform’s profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.

I’m assuming this is a joke based on the Futurama references you used, but just to be clear for everyone: this won’t work because it simply moves the problem one step further. How do you prevent bots from upvoting other bots to build a reputation?

Ok, but what would the reputation score be based on that can’t be manipulated or faked?

I’m not sure federation is that important on sites that aren’t built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.