What options has Lichess considered to quell the bot players?

The last obvious high elo engine cheater were all fresh 1 day accounts. So it's obviously a problem and we exclude probably most of them with the features post #10 has mentioned.

Sometimes always someone is going to slip through but it will be less.

I'm with BitChess on this one. At the end of the day, no one is expecting to eliminate cheating completely. Whatever motivates someone to cheat on internet chess even when there is no money involved, well who knows. They probably lead lonely lives and the 'recognition' feeds whatever is empty inside.

But fresh cheater accounts are a low hanging fruit we could easily pick with least effort.

BitChess, may I ask a couple of questions?

First, do you get any say oe influence in what happens at lichess as a result of putting on these money tournaments? If so, please make your suggestion (above) happen!!!

Will you be putting on any other tournament STYLES? For example, a league - as has been requested by so many people for so long - or similar?

What do you get out of giving away cash? I mean, what's in it for you?

Thanks :)

Toutatis:
It's obvious from his name. BitChess. He promotes BitCoins! Lichess is very popular. Lots of people play here. Some might start buying BitCoins with actual money, increasing their value. If he has lots of BitCoins, all this is actually a great idea.
Now I have a question too. Have you ever won any BitCoins at BitChess tournaments? If you haven't, you don't need to worry about this.

I won't argue that this may be partially influenced by promotion of bitcoin. However, I think you overestimate it's importance. Last week, the Steam network started to accept bitcoin as a form of payment. Looking at the markets, one can note that this adoption of bitcoin as a payment method on Steam, coincided with a $10 increase in value for bitcoin. Here's the kicker: There are approximately 65 million users on the steam network.

I don't think BitChess is hedging their bets on another bitcoin boom by handing out 3 prizes of bitcoin to Lichess users every couple weeks.

There is a distinct difference between promoting bitcoins and causing a bitcoin boom. The second is rather amusing, and if causing a bitcoin boom is that easy, I would be rich.

I'm not rich.

To Unihedron #26: Read this article:
www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home
Its title is: "Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they're now worth $886k"
Rich is a relative term. For some people $886k is pocket change.

We work for several bitcoin related start ups.
We earn money in bitcoin.
Chess is our hobby.
We invest one part of our earned money in our hobby.

It's not even much, we invest like 2000$ each month here ( in a hobby ). Since we are 2 people it's like 1000$ each person a month.

If you want to go more personal:

We don't drink alcohol, do drugs or smoke ever. -> So we save tons of money here already.

If we already have everything we *need* which you can buy with money, why not invest in something meaningful like improve the chess experience while also keep improving the awareness of bitcoin which is basically our job.

And it doesn't matter if the bitcoin is dropping in value or increasing, this is a fun project.

There is no backdoor plan on getting rich with "online chess", we already put more in then we could ever get out of this hobby.

People keep assuming we have some big "master plan" to rip everyone off but everyone fails to explain the how ?

This is just a fact there is no money in chess. Chess24 / Chess.com / Chessbase probably doing good but they are here since 10-30 years already. Online-Chess isn't a serious business, it's a *very* small niche.

If you want to improve online chess you need free volunteers like lichess.

Lichess is already worth at least 1 milion dollar and you won't see any ads or premium accounts, it's all free for everyone + opensource.
Thibault could capitalize on that but he doesn't. We keep this as motivation to do our part and bring in our own money to organize tournament on lichess since we know it's never happening on its own because everything is free.

People asking us to payout in other currencies like USD or EUR but you can exchange it from bitcoin to any relevant currency. We don't have paypal / bank accounts ourselves since we live 100% off bitcoin.

We wouldn't do this on any other chess platform, it's lichess only and this is not gonna change.
Perhaps we even motivate further companies / individuals with some spare money to host some tournament, you never know.

As an entrepreneur myself, BitChess, I know that the word "invest" implies there will be a return. So... where is the return on your lichess "investment"?

If two of you are putting in $1000 per month and you call it an investment, there must be some way you are also gaining.

It isn't a "problem" for someone to gain - but it would be nice for there to be openness about HOW :)

Toutatis:

There is no return, maybe "invest" was the wrong word here. There is just nothing. Today we had 4 hours tournaments with some of the best zh player world wide, so that is something.

We do it for fun, that's it. No tricks.