Show HN: A Bitcoin casino with 23 games. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Bitcoin casino with 23 games.

strikesapphire.com

147 pointsnoduerme72 comments

I would guess most bitcoiners are mathematically inclined people, and not super into pure gambling. That said, I think poker might take off, especially here in the US where things have gotten super murkey. This has the potential ro revitalize the bitcoin debate amongst naysayers. I wish there were more "obviously legitimate" services that use bitcoin out there.

If this takes off at all, there is no way that a lone programmer can provide adequate security for a project like this. You will get hacked, there's just so many potential attack vectors.

"That said, I think poker might take off, especially here in the US where things have gotten super murkey."

I know the IRS isn't fooled by "it's not dollars, it's just these things that can be freely converted back and forth between dollars on the open market", where "these things" is a category well beyond merely "BitCoin" or even currencies. If you set up a local-ish economy that solely trades in cows, literal, actual cows, expect the IRS to continue to enforce its relevant laws based on the market value of cows. I seriously doubt that the laws against online gambling will be fooled, and even if a few of them are, it's very easily corrected. BitCoin doesn't add much to the murkiness at all; if it's illegal to do it with dollars it's almost certainly (and certainly eventually) illegal to do it with BitCoins.

Things aren't murky with the IRS. That's perfectly straightforward: you must report net gambling income.

Things are murky with the legality of transferring money via credit card to online casinos, and if the individual gambler is actually breaking the law by participating. Bitcoin resolves that murkiness.

I use the IRS as an example, not the totality of Federal law. To the extent it is illegal to transfer dollars to an online casino, it either is or will be illegal to transfer anything else with market value. BitCoin won't resolve the murkiness one bit.

Something I think you may need to understand is that this isn't a remotely new idea. BitCoin may not have existed before, but casino chips, again, literal physical casino chips, to use just one example from a richly populated field, have been around forever, and Federal law does not watch someone trading around chips and just shrug its shoulders and go "Well, golly, I guess those aren't dollars, I'll just walk away I guess." It does something more like "Well, golly, I guess we'll just slap some money laundering charges on too."

First, individual gamblers are not the target of any sort of federal online gambling regulation.

The regulations on online gambling revolve around the accepting and disbursing of funds by online gambling sites. Bitcoins do, and don't address this issue. It does address the issue in so far as it makes transactions between parties opaque, but it also doesn't address the issue if an FBI agent can just sign up for an account and demonstrate the system working for transferring BTC.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

If you're thinking about playing poker for profit in the US, you should do it in a casino licensed to accept your bets, and you should report your income. We're dealing in bitcoin, but that doesn't mean we are ignorant of or unyielding to local law. Taking bets from the US is just not a winning strategy these days, and we have no intention of doing so.

I'd put money on it: The potential customer base for a prediction market would have a huge overlap with bitcoin miners. They're valuable for research and possibly even policy[1], but seem to be on shaky legal ground in most places.

[1]http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html

> I would guess most bitcoiners are mathematically inclined people, and not super into pure gambling.

Heh, ahh, maybe this will disabuse you of that notion:

> "I'd say my IQ has jumped at least 10 points for having learned about and joined the bitcoin community."

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?action=printpage;topic=1...

> I would guess most bitcoiners are mathematically inclined people, and not super into pure gambling.

Being mathematically inclined doesn't prevent someone from being into gambling. They are just less likely to treat gambling as a method of financial planning rather than a game.

The risk involved in gambling gives the game more emotional impact. This makes it fun, and (to some people) worth paying for as a form of entertainment.

I agree there's a high risk potential for that. At the end of the day, no money is withdrawn without a manual check on it. The other vectors, like injection and no money's stored on the live servers. There are constant backups and mirrors to servers around the world, so at worst, the site could suffer a couple hours of downtime and we'd have to comp a few people. I'm limiting signups to 50 per month, at first, until I can afford to hire more help; right now I've got floor managers, and yes, I have lawyers, and yes, the guy who posted about finding an attorney is a fed who I think just tried to sign up with a fake IP address. But we control the throttle and this will only do what it's supposed to do; I won't put players at risk of losing if we get hacked, but if we do there are backups and people on standby to clean up the mess.

You're probably already aware of the Betcoin (1st Bitcoin online poker site) hacking incident, but just in case, see http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=840.msg93927#msg93927.

Who cares? IRS can't trace bitcoins to real people.

They can't trace dollar bills to real people either, hasn't stopped 'em so far.

You should add a warning for users without flash. I'm just looking at a large, black browser window.

hm. yeah, probably.

Some ideas for the bitcoin inclined entrepreneur:

    - bitpal : just like paypal, send bitcoins to friends
    - bitcard: like mastercard, online purchases with bitcoins
    - bitbank: a bank for your bitcoins, with interest
    - bitshop: like amazon, buy stuff online
    - bitbay : like ebay, auctions and more

Plenty of stuff to do and strike gold if bitcoin really takes off. Of all, casino and porn are the real winners, as usual.

Why would you need bitpal? I thought the transfer of bitcoins is already part of the design. And a bitbank with interest won't work due to the (eventual) fixed money supply. A bank will go broke.

PayPal does more than just send money - it can hold a balance for you securely, which given all of the hacking incidents (MtGox, BetCoin), is a pretty important thing for the BitCoin community to get right. Sending someone money without having to worry about the security is a pretty important service.

Who knows how you make money off it, though.

I'd be rather wary of using any small time online casino. Apart from people simply skimming the numbers, there's tonnes of issues behind reliable random number generation and shuffling. Real casinos & lotteries screw this up all the time (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1) with people who (in theory) should be good at this.

An excellent (if a bit dated) example of this is discussed in depth in this article:

http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...

Excellent read, thanks for the link.

Out of curiosity, where do you live/host? I've been thinking about creating a bitcoin poker game but it would probably be foolish from the US

I live outside the US and hosting is done in various other countries according to law. I spent about $15k and 5% of the company's equity in legal fees to insure that everything that would transpire here would be fully legal -- that part was a lot harder than coding it, if you want to know the truth, and some day I'll write a book on it or something, but... yeah. The reason no one's done this is because it's an extremely daunting legal and political landscape, so to take it on, just make sure you've kind of gamed out what happens under each scenario. On the other hand, if you don't care it's pretty easy to launch a poker script for bitcoin...just get outta the US before you do it, I'm sure you'll make some bank ;)

https://betco.in/

Ya that and the security challenges were what impressed me when I saw this. Best of luck

Are you happy with your web host (whom I will not name) in Panama? I've been looking for decent overseas hosting.

I expect moving to bitcoin will become very popular within the gambling community soon.

"Your computer or another computer on your network is compromised with a virus. This allows online criminals to use it as part of a botnet to send spam and attack websites." Very disturbing message. The details says that my IP Address is associated with a Zombie computer and sends spam. The only suggestion is the run the Anti Virus. Very unhelpful since there are no Windows PCs on my home network.

Thats CloudFlare, which this site uses

I get the same notice...

I think I've just loosened the restriction that was stopping you, but I'm not sure. Try again now...

We're running some very strict stuff to filter out any questionable traffic, and probably have a fair amount of false positives. Email me your IP address at help@strikesapphire.com and I can whitelist it. Having said that, if it's telling you that you should probably contact your ISP.

Well I just wanted to check the website. So it's no bother.

However contacting the ISP again is a bad advice. They allocate dynamic IP addresses and can't do much if an IP address used by a spammer was one day allocated to me. Checking the IP address to determine whether the computer is part of a botnet is a flawed approach. It's not as simple as that.

An interesting combo, even just as a thought experiment: bitcoin + mental poker. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker)

Wonder if there's a way to distribute a pot that doesn't require trusting a central server?

bitcoin casino is a tautology

mayyybe. It's definitely a gamble with my earnings. The basic thing here is that while I'm not 100% sold on Bitcoin, it provides the chance to enter an otherwise locked-down market. It's like a one-time chance to go back to 1995 and open an online casino. Nobody knows if this is going to work, because nobody knows if Bitcoin will make it or not...and I might wind up holding a ton of useless Bitcoins for all I know. But it's like buying land in Alaska, y'know? Who knows what's under there.

I admire the spirit and dedication to execute in a new derivative domain. By the looks of the product, you've executed initially well, now just a matter of making it sustainable.

I couldn't enter the site. HEre is what i get:

Your request was blocked by BlockScript based on the policies of the strikesapphire.com website.

BlockScript is security software which protects websites and empowers webmasters to stop unwanted traffic. BlockScript detects and blocks requests from all types of proxy servers and anonymity networks (such as web-based proxies, open proxies, Tor, VPN servers, etc.), hosting networks, undesirable robots and spiders, and even entire countries. For more information, see: www.blockscript.com

I was blocked too, and I'm not using any proxies or tor.

Are you using a proxy or tor?

You said you don't take bets from italians, so why does the website appear to me totally in italian (with many mistakes)?

Because my friend who picked up street Italian from her boyfriend in Rome helped me do the first translation right before Italy passed the law. She probably screwed up a little, but she gets an A for effort =)

Your software appears to be broken. I input my email address and it said you already had it. Then I got an email with a verification link, so I clicked on the link, tried to log in, and the page said I needed to verify.

Please try again. I see what happened, I had just done a testrun of cloudflare on the game server, and it wasn't talking to the playerservers anymore because the new DNS hadn't propagated yet. The system is distributed on a few continents. If it still doesn't work, give it about 5 minutes. I know it's a funny time to test that out, when this is ranking on the front page of HN, but it's actually less stress than when I start having a lot of real bets riding. I haven't announced this elsewhere, yet.

Why would anyone engage in any "programmed" gambling game? It would seem trivial to give the user the appearance of winning but ultimately have it programmed that the house comes out on top.

This is funny, because a brick-and-mortar casino is also "programmed" so the house comes out on top.

Brick and mortar casinos are heavily regulated and inspected to ensure that they are fair. While all the games have a house edge, they are ultimately probabilistic. The concern with an online casino is that its blackjack game won't just rely on the house X% edge, but will fix the deals so that the house always comes out ahead after some set number of deals.

Jurisdictions that regulate online gambling take a fairly dim view of that, to the extent that they inspect your hardware and source code from time to time.

When you are in a brick and mortar casino you know what jurisdiction it is in. When on a website, you don't know if it is in the UK (good) or Somalia (bad).

How about a bitcoin bank instead? BTW, how much are you spending on lobbying?

How would a BitCoin bank work?

I'd prioritize design and initial load time - my two cents.

I only see a hectic video on that site.

this is insanely illegal in the U.S. -- it can get you in trouble and it can get Bitcoin in trouble

There is no "Bitcoin" to get in trouble. That's the whole point. There's nobody to go after.

Huh? There's the person running the illegal gambling site to go after.

Are you confused? As was quite clear from my wording, I was speaking about Bitcoin, only. My point, once again, was that "Bitcoin" can't get in trouble from this, because there is no central Bitcoin entity to go after. It's obvious that the site operator could possibly get in trouble, though. However, you don't know with certainty that this site is "illegal" in any way, so I don't see why you are opining about that.

But no CEO of Bitcoin PLC.

again -- we are NOT an illegal gambling site. We aren't taking players from countries where it's illegal, and we're complying with all laws in countries where it is.

BitCoin already is already targeted by officials. I think the spread of Bitcoin to a potentially gigantic market helps the project much more than a minuscule additional illegal usage harms Bitcoin.

It seems to be based out of the UK and New Zealand. (The phone number is UK, but the domain is registered in NZ).

StrikeSapphire SA is incorporated in Costa Rica, and complies with all relevant gaming laws there and elsewhere.

Edit: Again, the site is NOT taking bets from the US. American players can sign up for playcash, but that's it, and you'll have a very hard time going further from that toward depositing or withdrawing. There's a warning on the signup page that says we can't take cash from US players, and I mean it.

If you do have a company blog (or personal), or feel like writing a reply here. I'd be curious to know what the difficulty level of setting up a gaming company in Costa Rica was?

It's relatively easy, but the phrase "skating on thin ice" comes to mind. The laws in this space are so fluid that it's a full-time job keeping up with them. Put another way, if you want a hack job you can get it done for a relative pittance. If you want some ineffable peace-of-mind, it doesn't happen through normal channels. There or anywhere else. And I'm still relatively new to this, but someone's gotta push the industry forward because it's dead-stagnant and everybody knows it. I should probably back this up by saying, this isn't my full-time job, and if anything I see the software licensing being much more lucrative than the casino itself, which is ephemeral to the ideal of building the best games ever™

Bitcoin is for the distrustful (for those who are more trusting, credit cards are sufficient.) Casinos require trust. How to reconcile the two?

Why is Bitcoin "for the distrustful"?

And if you don't see why Bitcoin is necessary in this scenario, try starting an online casino that takes payments from credit cards, and see what happens.

hahaha yup. +1 for nailing it. if you're a silicon valley boy w/o any links to the mob, you're pretty much screwed. Bitcoin to the rescue? Who knows =)

You're also probably in violation of some rather serious laws. Talk to an attorney.

It's decidedly uninteresting and unhelpful to read a comment about how something is "probably" violating laws. It either is, or it isn't. If you don't know, don't post about it. Let someone with an actual legal background post.

It's not like speculating about this isn't blindingly obvious; everyone knows that online casinos can get into legal grey areas.

The company is based in Costa Rica.

Like what? No bets taken from US, French or Italian players.

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