You're a fricking genius.
I'm surprised by HN sometimes.
His solution was a clever hack because he worked around the law without apparently breaking it directly - clever.
That said gambling systems are specifically one class of software I refuse to work on.
Incidentally both gambling AND fintech (including crypto) are on the list of industries I refuse to do work with. So I guess BTC gambling would have been off the table for two reasons.
I mean, I have mad respect for the hustle with the former MP etc. I agree with what you say in that you did not actually break the law - because you found a loophole (made a loophole? hustled it? again, I'm impressed). You ran a gambling site from IoM though :-)
It added a nice little feature too, which was that every spin and deck could be stored on a separate server that would show them all at the end of the day. This was a little before "proven randomness" took off in btc casinos, but I made the RNG reports available daily for analysis (without explaining the whole infrastructure, obviously).
[edit] I just want to say that yes, you're obviously right, and yeah, I ran a casino from the IoM... without anyone knowing if that was okay or not... and it was just a moment in my life. of which I'm proud, I guess. I was living illegally in a small apartment in Alhama de Granada after violating my EU visa. hah. It was a great, great piece of software and I don't know if I'll ever write anything that good again. But it didn't really change my life or anything.
What a story.
"where the random chance takes place" could easily be interpreted as where the random number is _used_ and not where it has been created. Creating random numbers is not "chance" per se (in this context). Using random numbers to e.g. determining a winner would be the chance in my opinion.
>>> where the random number is _used_
This was my main concern, and it was exactly what I needed a lawyer to sign off on before I set up a rig there. I was told that the gambling laws applied to where the chance took place, not where the money is distributed... after all, the whole thing with the IoM and the reason it's allowed to be a tax haven is that lots of people need to move money around without a lot of questions. But they defined gambling in this specific way and if only the money moved but the dice roll didn't take place on their shores, then it wasn't gambling under their jurisdiction. What you bring up was the conversation I had before locating there.
HN has a silly but effective piece of anti-flamewar UX which is that it hides the reply link in certain cases (some function of thread depth + amount of comments by you i think). However you can still reply by opening the comment on question (click on the timestamp, ie the "1 hour ago" link). Maybe you hit that.
Around here (and probably elsewhere) bars aren't allowed to make wine stronger by adding spirit.
So if you mix a drink from wine (or similar) and spirit in that order you might lose your license.
Put the spirit in the glass first and all is ok.
I guess at this point it is just a shibboleth that inspectors use to see if the bar has read the rules at all, kind of like the no brown m&ms.
Point is though: rules matter, you can lose your license over it.
This isn't a court of law. I can understand trying to avoid language that makes it sound like you may have been in violation of the law to a judge or jury, but you literally described that what you did was intended to keep operating a service that had been banned by using an absurd technicality in the definition of the ban.
I'm honestly surprised it worked (though having a former MP of the tiny nation you were operating in as a lawyer might have helped) considering that your service still facilitated online gambling directly and was advertised as such, despite the randomness source being on a remote server rather than local.
In other words, using a non-local randomness source (like a remote server you cURL into or a webcam pointed at a bunch of lava lamps) is functionally indistinguishable from a local dice roll or other source of entropy. This "hack" is so flimsy it likely wouldn't hold up in court in a nation that is actually interested in pursuing such violations that has a population larger than a small city.
When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was getting arrested if/when I stepped back on American soil. There was redundancy so I could run the whole thing in Costa Rica if I had to cold shutdown the IoM servers. And the coin was in private wallets, mostly on my laptop. But I was very concerned about breaking any laws, anywhere. I was the only one to implement ID verification and fully block American players.
Call it a hack or whatever, they wanted my business and I needed their servers, and I split up my code so it would be legal according to their laws. Not too different from what a lot of companies do.
I'm not arguing that you violated any laws. You made it very clear that you went to great lengths to avoid doing anything that could have resulted in consequences to yourself.
EDIT: Since HN's rate limiting won't let me reply for a few hours, I'll just address the replies inline:
I'm not jealous. I'm sure noduerme made a sizable chunk of money with the whole operation at the time but their profile says they're now working as a taxi driver and sold all their bitcoin before the peak. They probably have a lot of other interesting stories to tell and that's nice. But dismissing any hostility or criticism as jealousy is thought terminating and frankly below even HN's standards.
Based on their backstory in the replies, I can see where their attitude comes from, but they severely underestimate how big of a problem gambling addiction is and how much of the profit of the gambling industry relies on it.
It's nice if the casino their parents worked at turned away obvious addicts but the word "obvious" is doing a lot of work here and there are also clear business reasons you don't want obvious addicts in your establishment the same way bars will be happy to have repeat customers buying drinks for five hours every day but will turn them away if they get blackout drunk or unsightly. "Not doing it for the money" may give you a clean conscience but it doesn't change the consequences of your actions.
It's also important to point out that online gambling is by its nature functionally anonymous for the gambler (even if you record IDs for legal reasons). The online casino isn't going to turn away the addict until they can no longer pay or have to resort to fraud to keep up the habit. And even if the casino implements limits, the proliferation of online casinos makes it considerably easier to go hopping than if you have to physically drive somewhere.
Gambling addiction not only ruins the lives of the addict but also impacts their friends and family, not just financially. It's true that not every person who gambles is an addict but the line between an expensive hobby and a managed addiction is hard to draw until you undeniably cross it.
But if you need a comment on HN to explain to you why gambling and especially online gambling is bad, a comment on HN isn't going to be enough to convince you.
Total profit from 2 years running the site? About $50k. It was a hobby. I never quit my job. I also turned away 95% of the hits because they were coming from America.
[edit] I should add that I strongly advised other BTC site owners, especially casino owners, to follow certain guidelines, and watched one of them who I had told to be careful launch, make about $1M with one game on a crappy website, and get jailed within a year. That wasn't the trajectory I was interested in.
Hah! This made me laugh. Ok so not FOMO..(trust me, wasn't worth it except for the thrills).. why hostile? I was born in a Vegas family. My uncles all worked as blackjack dealers and pit bosses. When I was 7 they used to leave me in a corner of the casino for hours and tell me to stand there while my parents went and gambled. I taught myself to code there on a TRS-80 Model 100 in basic and practically the first thing I wrote was a slot machine. My view is that adults want to go gamble and that's their decision. I never took a dime from anyone I saw with a gambling problem... I would ban them from my site if they seemed addicted. I like to gamble myself. I count cards. Like everyone on my site... because my decks were single shuffle. So don't be so judgmental. I didn't do it for the money. I did it because I love the games.
The same jealousy that's called "opinionated" in software development, but really means "Doing things differently than how I do them threatens me, because my sense of superiority is rooted in how I do things."
I'm equally hostile to corporations doing that. I don't recall the HN comment threats about Google doing the kind of things you describe being full of replies congratulating their ingenuity.
Big corporation doing bad thing is bad doesn't mean much smaller corporation doing bad thing is okay, it means we should work on preventing that bad thing and if we seemingly can't we should reconsider the underlying systemic conditions that enable it.
No, not really. It shows that you went to great lengths to find ways to exploit a loophole where, even though you are clearly breaking the spirit of the law, you argue that it doesn't break the letter of the law.
I get it that you have a vested interest in keeping up the plausible deniability thing, but you know it and everyone knows it that you went through great lengths to put up a tech infrastructure which meets absolutely no requirement other than exploiting a loophole.
I mean, you explicitly expressed your personal concerns in this very discussion regarding what you personally chose to describe as testing "legally grey areas". Who do you expect to fool?
Come on. Cut the bullshit.
> Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it apart as necessary.
You are clearly and unequivocally stating that you set to exploit all the legal loopholes once your "grey area" was made black and white in Costa Rica.
Please, spare the thread from all that nonsense. You're not fooling anyone.
I didn't exploit anything. I worked within the legal options that were available. In any case, I don't understand the accusation.
My only regret is that I didn't have the capital to buy a full license in the IoM or Malta outright. But the truth is, I wrote the whole thing from scratch and I was determined to launch it. You're free to your opinions, but you ought to avoid judging people's intentions while misreading their words.
There is no "The law", just a bunch of different jurisdictions with different laws. He didn't break Switzerland law. Does Switzerland's law not matter for some reason?
Morally dubious? For sure.
Just because OP isn't in jail doesn't mean they didn't break the law. Laws are broken all the time.
Generous to assume that all that break laws go to jail.
Obviously he did not break the law, finding holes like that is the number one job of a tax-lawyer.
First, he did comply with all applicable law. No laws were broken.
Second, he did not break the spirit of the law. The law clearly allows gambling from the Isle of Man.
Third, he did not conflate the law with morality. What is the morality of a 400,000 GBP 'licensing' fee? Laws around licensing are weird. Another poster mentioned that pouring wine than liquor into a glass is illegal, but liquor then wine is fine. Not much moral sense in that reg.