Be Excellent To Each Other

Someone is trying to convince me that Madbid is amazing and wonderful and I'm trying to dish out a lesson in maths. THis will probably turn into a blog entry at some point.

Can someone point out the flaw in my maths here?

Madbid is one of those barely legal "penny auctions". You buy "bids" at £1 a pop and "bid" on items. A clock is constantly running. If the clock reaches zero, and noone else has bid, you win the "auction". Otherwise, the price goes up by a penny and the clock is reset. Your pound is lost forever.

"But you can get a Mini for a couple of hundred quid!"

They are currently running an "auction" for a Mini. The clock is set to 45 seconds.

Last night, at 10.13pm, the price for the Mini was £414.16.

Today, at 10.49am, the price was £423.29.

This means it has received 913 bids in 12 hours, 36 minutes.

The clock is meant to reset after 45 seconds maximum. This means if ever bidder took the slowest possible time to bid, it would be 913 x 45 seconds = 41,085 seconds.

41,085 seconds is 684.75 minutes.

684.75 minutes is 11 hours, 24 minutes, 40 seconds.

If you add that time on to 10.13pm, you get 9.37am.

Therefore if it received 913 bids in the slowest possible time, the "auction" should have finished slightly over an hour before I took the second reading at 10.49am.

Am I right?

Yes, unless it was frozen or offline for most of the night.

It's guaranteed to be rigged though, only idiots need send in money.

I've screenshotted this morning and will come back to it in about 12 hours (fuck it, snowed in, nowt better to do of a Saturday night) and will run the calculation against the three items are the top.

I can't find any fault there, assuming the original data is accurate, of course.

So they've so far made 42 grand for mini that's worth, what, 12?
If it exists..

Ah... they shut the auctions down between 12.30am until 9am.

Because, you know, all that automatic bidding software and the SMS bidding don't work overnight. Obviously.

I'm watching the MacBook Pro one and gathering data.

There should have been a "winner" at 11.28am.

I doubt these places are cheating. I was going to suggest that they shutdown over night, probably because otherwise the number of bids would slack off and the auctions would choose.

I doubt they're cheating because they are already exceedingly scummy (and therefore come under close scrutiny from sceptics) and they make plenty of money without rigging the system. So why run the risk of cheating?

did a thing about this a while ago for a different site but basically the same "scam"

here's his thread :

http://s2.zetaboards.com/worldofstuart/topic/817920/1/

Interesting that the name changed but the links he posted still work

I agree with you - they aren't cheating because they don't have to.

I'd like to see an explanation for some of the inconsistencies though. I suspect their software showing the list of last bids is deliberately dropping bidders to give the impression that there are fewer people bidding than there actually are. But they can't reset the price every time they bid because it would simply go through the roof incredibly quickly.

Does the auction time in the screenshot not mean it has to go 1 minute without a bid before a winner is found?

Think so.

So if I place a bid at 11.27.59, then the next bid must come in before 11.28.59.

Yeah, and it shows a gap of 11:27 to 11:29. But I suspect it comes down to rounding and system processing time. It'd be worth emailing them about that though to see them squirm.

If they are cheating, the only thing I would guess they would do is insert phantom bids to extend the auction when it looks like it's going to timeout. That would be very hard to detect.

Good job the whole doesn't rely on accurate timing... oh.

You could explain it away by saying 30 seconds and below rounds down, and 31 and above rounds up, but if that was the case it would happen much more often.

It's likely that the history they show on the site is deliberately rounded to the nearest minute to prevent anyone doing this kind of analysis (or even just timing how long it takes for their bid to get through).

Also, yes, I'd almost guarantee that the software inserts fake bids if it's about to time out until it's raised a suitable amount of cash that they can let the item go.

Surely that's got to be against the rules? It's actually deliberately stopping the win condition from happening.

Well... Yes.

I mean, it's not the national lottery, is it...

hey everyone you guys should check out this site. i've won many items from this site, its totally legiate and there is 24/7 live support

PENNY AUCTIONS

Wow thanks! If only i could find a site where i could bid on bacon!!............mmmmmmm dead pig

It's totally legiate

doesn't legiate mean it is of or belonging to the legion?

Madbacon.com is what we're really after, right?

Or should that be madbidcon? Hmm. Not sure.