Bustabit is a betting game where you try to guess the largest possible magic number in each contest.

Sounds kinda dull, but there’s a catch: this number is a Bitcoin multiplier! So, there’s actual money involved. Lots of money.

If you guess a multiplier before the game crashes, you earn that much more Bitcoin than you bet. Which means that, if you play Bustabit right, in theory it’s possible to multiply your Bitcoin stash several times over in very little time.

If the game crashes before your guessed number is reached, you lose your entire bet. As you can imagine, you can also lose all your Bitcoin rather quickly, especially if you enter a losing streak and let emotions get the best of you.

Disclaimer

Before we proceed, please read this important notice:

As with most gambling, in bustabit the higher you bet, the bigger the risk. Bustabit is gambling. The odds are in favor of the house, therefore against you. Keep in mind that by playing Bustabit, you are risking 100% of your holdings. It’s an all or nothing game. If the house didn’t make any money, they wouldn’t run the game to begin with. So keep in mind that the odds of losing at Bustabit are higher than winning. That’s what makes it profitable for the house. Only gamble what you can afford to lose. Nothing in this article constitutes investment or gambling advice of any kind. This article offered for informational purposes only.

Bustabit Rules

Bustabit is a very simple game, with very few rules.

In every contest, the system begins counting up a fractional amount, starting from 1. You must hit a stop button before the counter collapses to zero (Bust!). Contests are very quick, often lasting just a few seconds, sometimes even under a second.

The fractional amount that gets frozen when you hit the stop button is your multiplier.

Just as I edited this post, a 7.3x multiplier was drawn.

According to the Bustabit system, someone made 68.53 BTC profit in this session.

If you let the counter collapse to zero before you hit stop, your stake is lost (because it’s multiplied by zero).

Otherwise any multiplier above 1 will be profitable and you’ll end up with more than you staked.

You don’t have to stake your entire account balance in each contest.

In fact it’s recommended you balance risk x reward by betting smaller amounts and by not getting greedy on the stop button. Which leads us to the risk management topic.

Bustabit Risk Management

Bustabit is an all or nothing betting game. You either win or lose your entire stake in each in contest.

Very quick contests often lead players to take poor risk management decisions. Especially after a winning streak when overconfidence takes over.

The key to Bustabit success is being a good risk manager.

If you get greedy you will eventually be zeroed out and lose your entire stake.

There are two variables you can adjust to manage your risk: the amount of time you wait before hitting stop and how much you bet in each contest.

If you get greedy and begin waiting too long to hit stop, chances are you’ll get zeroed out.

Also if you get greedy and bet your entire stash at once, you might lose everything in one mistake.

By choosing appropriate fractions of your stash and how long you wait before hitting stop you might be able to stay in the game a long time without getting busted.

Gameplay

First you should enter the play window.

In this window you’ll find a chat room where you can interact with other players as well as the betting commands and the list of players who joined in the current bet.

The players in red failed to cash out before Bustabit crashed. They lost their entire bet in this contest.

Those in green got out and profited the amount on the right column. Take, for instance, green user number 6. He/she bet 11,100 bits and got out at 2x. That is, they got out when the game was 22,200 so they earned 100% (11,100 x 2).

You should probably focus on gameplay rather than hang out at the chat room. When you’re done and want to chat, then go for it. The chat will usually distract you, so don’t pay attention to all the noise while you’re betting.

The Best Bustabit Strategy

First of all, keep in mind that any multiplier above 1x means you earn more than you bet. The central idea behind a successful Bustabit strategy is to play a high number of contests betting very little, often stopping right when the counter begins to grow.

(At the end of this section we’ll reverse engineer Bustabit’s top earner’s strategy to show you how they made over 400 BTC. )

tl;dr; The best strategy, with the lowest risk, is to cash out right after 1x consistently in every bet. Discipline is key here!

If you get too greedy and go for a higher multiple you might hit jackpot a few times but you’ll very likely lose your entire stake in one go.

Compound Profits

If you consistently make “just” 1.10 that’s a 10% profit in every bet. No investment will ever pay that much anywhere else!

Bustabit rarely crashes before high 1x’s so if you go for something in the low 1.x’s the likelihood of multiplying your money is exponentially larger than if you try to hit large jackpots.

Let’s take a look at a random sample of Bustabit games from moments ago:

Recent Bustabit game Bust multipliers.

As you can see on the above game results, Bustabit crashed twice at 1.09 multiplier. This is a 9% multiplier. Imagine being able to consistently make 9% on each trade. If you systematically exited before 1.09x in this example, you’d be much more profitable than most traders.

Reverse Engineering the #1 Winning Strategy

A quick look at the top earners in the Bustabit leaderboard yields some interesting insights.

Bustabit leaderboard

As you can see, the top earners each placed several thousand bets. First and third place placed 49 and 57 thousand bets respectively. That’s a lot of games! (There’s likely a robot involved here somewhere.) So the first lesson is to play lots betting very little each time.

The #1 Bustabit player has made 469 BTC by placing 49,071 bets. So, their average earning has been 0.00956 BTC per game with an average bet size of 0.112 BTC.

If we divide the average earning by the average bet size, we get where the player usually hits the stop button! So, 0.00956 divided by 0.112 yields 0.088536. Which means 0.08856 is the average profit made from an average 0.112 wagered. Add 1 to this number and we get our multiplier = 1.088536.

The #1 Bustabit player has therefore stopped out at 1.08536 on average. (Notice how close this is to the 1.09x we estimated above.)

How did we reverse engineer the #1 average winning bet? Let’s recap.

Find the average profit (AP) by dividing the total profit by number of contests.

Find the average bet size (ABS) by dividing the total wagered by the number of contests.

Divide AP by ABS to find the average multiplier. M = AP / ABS

Multiplier M is where the #1 leaderboard player exits the game to avoid geting Busted!

There you have it. By looking into some publicly available numbers, we’ve been able to reverse engineer the #1 winning player’s strategy:

Play lots of games. Tens of thousands, in fact.

Make very little profit in each game. (e.g. Stay under 1.09x multiplier.)

One more important fact: notice how even the #1 winner has made some heavy losses in the process. In order to make 469 BTC, this player lost 21.55 BTC in the process. That’s a 4.59% loss compared to profits. Take this into consideration when you enter Bustabit. The average winning multiplier is just under 9% and the losses are 4,5% of the 9% (the fact that 4,5 is half of 9 is just a coincidence here, or is it?).

(One more disclaimer, just in case: Please do your own research and keep in mind that Bustabit is a high risk gambling activity. Remember, you can lose 100% of your Bitcoin very quickly. Nothing in this article configures investment or gambling advice.)

Bustabit Hack

Don’t send large amounts of BTC to Bustabit at once. This same advice applies to any new Bitcoin address, not just Bustabit. For example, when you make your first deposit at an exchange you’re not familiar with, always send a small amount first.

Since Bustabit has been hacked in the past, you should take the same precautions you would anywhere else.

Remember the first law of cryptocurrency: If you don’t own the keys, then you don’t own the coins.

To be safe, you should periodically withdraw your Bustabit profits and keep the BTC in your own local wallet, especially if you don’t plan on betting for a while.

Bustabit Script

Bustabit scripts are based on basic gambling theory such as finding and exploiting some bias in the game.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Bustabit scripts. Here we take a look at a few of those.

Most gambling involves more psychology than solid mathematical theory. If the house doesn’t make a consistent profit, then gambling wouldn’t be a business. Keep in mind, then, that the odds of successful gambling are always against you. Script or no script.

Here’s one example. A Bustabit script was advertised at Bitcointalk. It sells for 0.005 BTC per license and claims to make 0.05 BTC every 24 hours. Let that sink in for a moment. If the script made you 10x return every 24 hours, wouldn’t the script owner run it for their own benefit? Why are they selling the script for 0.05 if it’d make them 10x as much in just 24 hours? The time it takes them to sell one copy of the script would be enough to cover its cost. Fortunately, Bitcointalk users were quick to respond.

As previously stated, most gambling “theory” revolves around psychological bias rather than math. Check out this particular Bustabit script, for example. It’s based on a psychological gambling fallacy called Oscar’s Grind. This fallacy states that you’re more likely to win after a long losing streak. That’s obviously wrong. Most gamblers leave casinos completely broke. There is no consolation winning streak after heavy losses. What this Bustabit script does is keep track of your previous attempts to try and predict future outcomes. Needless to say this doesn’t work against a truly random process.

If you’re not convinced yet, here’s one last point about why there isn’t such a thing as a winning Bustabit script. Bustabit contests are independent from each other. Most algorithms for Bustabit are based on the false assumption that there’s some causation effect between sequences of draws. Something like: if the first 7 contests collapsed at a high multiplier, than the 8th is likely to be a low multiplier. This is absolutely false! The odds of it being a high multiplier on the 8th, 9th and 10th draw are exactly the same as in the first draw.

If you actually read the more advanced Bustabit scripts that are being sold out there, most of them use stock market indicators. For example, if a large volume of Bitcoin was made in the low multiplier range, then odds are these gamblers will bet at higher multipliers next. This is a natural psychological effect after winning streaks, gamblers have more chips and grow more confident. But stocks aren’t completely random, there are company fundamentals and other predictable data involved (supply chain, observations of their business operations and so on). Bustabit, on the other hand, is completely random. Each draw does not carry anything into the next nor does it borrow anything from the previous draws.

Bustabit Simulator

Since Bustabit is a browser-based game, there are several software projects out there who’ve borrowed and adapted some of its Javascript code in order to make some similar looking interfaces.

Here are a few Bustabit simulator scripts :

These can be fun to mess with and you could even create your own version of Bustabit. But you’re probably here to learn how to win actual Bitcoin on real Bustabit, so I’m sorry to let you down once more.

Here’s why these simulators don’t work for training your scripts to win at the real game.

The main reason why a Bustabit simulator can’t simulate the actual game is due to randomness. You may have noticed we mention randomness a lot, well it’s because the entire Bustabit system depends on true randomness. Just like Bitcoin block hashes are completely random, Bustabit multipliers are absolutely unpredictable (see next section) as well.

There are some very bright mathematicians out there. If Bustabit games could be predicted, some very smart person would write a script to predict game outcomes with high degree of confidence, defeating the house and making a large Bitcoin stash.

Bustabit Predictor

As we mentioned in the Bustabit script section, Bustabit contests are completely random.

There is no such a thing as a predictor for a completely random event.

Important: Bustabit crash predictors are not a thing!

Some fallacies only require basic reasoning to be debunked. This is one such case. The entire game is based on the fact that you can’t predict the next draw.

If you could predict Bustabit outcomes, then the house would go broke!

Finally, if there was such a thing as a Bustabit predictor, then many top players would guess the same or similar multiplier on a large number of games. It’d become obvious to the other players that some algorithm was being used and even more players would either buy or develop their own. Or it’d turn skeptical gamers away, either way it’d be a lose/lose situation for the house.

These arguments, of course, do not prove that there isn’t some bias that certain players exploit in Bustabit. If you saw a group of users consistently winning using very similar multipliers, you’d begin to wonder whether there is some working script.

Conclusion

Well I’ve covered more than I’d like to about Bustabit. Gambling isn’t my favorite topic but Bustabit has become so popular recently, I thought I’d share some of my own gambling and investing experience with you.

Bustabit is a completely random game. There is no way to predict it or write algorithmic solutions for it. Unlike stocks and crypto trading, volume and price data do not shape the next outcomes. So, writing scripts to try and predict future game outcomes based on previous results is an exercize in futility.

Having said all this, Bustabit can be fun and addictive. It deals with real money, so all the appropriate disclaimers apply. I guess I’ve made it clear throughout the text that Bustabit is 100% pure gambling. So there isn’t just one winning strategy.

The only consistent way to protect yourself and try to win at Bustabit is to keep your multipliers very low. If you always exit near the low 1.x multipliers, you’ll cut your risk immensely. Keep in mind it’s still possible to lose your entire stash by using this (or any other) strategy.

Links

Bustabit Reddit

Bustabit – The original crash game

Bitcointalk Announcement Thread

Bustabit Scam or Hack? Bitcointalk Thread

Clustering Bustabit Gambling Behavior

Bitcointalk: Need bustabit advice