Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, Yorkshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2020 Oct 28;15(10):e0240693. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240693. eCollection 2020.
Decentralised gambling applications are a new way for people to gamble online. Decentralised gambling applications are distinguished from traditional online casinos in that players use cryptocurrency as a stake. Also, rather than being stored on a single centralised server, decentralised gambling applications are stored on a cryptocurrency's blockchain. Previous work in the player behaviour tracking literature has examined the spending profiles of gamblers on traditional online casinos. However, similar work has not taken place in the decentralised gambling domain. The profile of gamblers on decentralised gambling applications are therefore unknown. This paper explores 2,232,741 transactions from 24,234 unique addresses to three such applications operating atop the Ethereum cryptocurrency network over 583 days. We present spending profiles across these applications, providing the first detailed summary of spending behaviours in this technologically advanced domain. We find that the typical player spends approximately $110 equivalent across a median of 6 bets in a single day, although heavily involved bettors spend approximately $100,000 equivalent over a median of 644 bets across 35 days. Our findings suggest that the average decentralised gambling application player spends less than in other online casinos overall, but that the most heavily involved players in this new domain spend substantially more. This study also demonstrates the use of these applications as a research platform, specifically for large scale longitudinal in-vivo data analysis.
去中心化赌博应用程序是人们在线赌博的一种新方式。去中心化赌博应用程序与传统的在线赌场不同，玩家使用加密货币作为赌注。此外，去中心化赌博应用程序不是存储在单个中心化服务器上，而是存储在加密货币的区块链上。以前在玩家行为跟踪文献中的研究已经研究了传统在线赌场中赌徒的消费情况。然而，在去中心化赌博领域没有类似的工作。因此，去中心化赌博应用程序的赌徒的特征尚不清楚。本文探索了三个在以太坊加密货币网络上运行的去中心化赌博应用程序中的 2,232,741 笔交易，涉及 24,234 个唯一地址，共 583 天。我们在这些应用程序中提供了消费概况，首次对这一技术先进领域的消费行为进行了详细总结。我们发现，典型的玩家每天在中位数为 6 次的投注中花费约 110 美元等价物，尽管重度参与者在中位数为 35 天的 644 次投注中花费约 100,000 美元等价物。我们的研究结果表明，与其他在线赌场相比，去中心化赌博应用程序的普通玩家总体上花费较少，但该领域重度参与者的花费要高得多。本研究还展示了这些应用程序作为研究平台的用途，特别是用于大规模的纵向体内数据分析。
