Tilia – regulation-compliant (but US-only) money transmitter for gaming | Hacker News Reader

Tilia – regulation-compliant (but US-only) money transmitter for gaming

tilia.io

50 pointscarabiner34 comments

As a meta-note: given the volatility of the regulatory environment here, how can any company claim to be "regulation complaint" in a meaningful sense?

This seems to be blockchain stuff under the hood; is there a specific reason to believe that whatever (if any) differences present here are relevant to regulators?

I'm particularly dubious that their scheme [1] could possibly be considered compliant in a jurisdiction which regulated or banned online gambling. The ruse of "we aren't gambling for money, we're just betting these worthless poker chips" is hardly new to the law, and I can't see how this is any different.

[1]: https://www.tilia.io/how-tilia-works

OT, but I always found it interesting that this ruse is legal IRL in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko

This is by the same company that runs Second Life, which has heavily regulated in-game gambling, even citing the "Reasoned Legal Opinion" of the "Attorney General of Alaska" for why the things they allow are legal in 38 states (and D.C.)[1]

So we know for certain that it is not legal for most forms of gambling, only for games that are at least 51% skill-based.

[1] https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Second_...

Money transmitter and payment service provider licenses have practically zero regulatory volatility. The last major regulation was PSD2 and that one essentially just mandated something that has been standard for years. There is not much potential for regulatory change for a license that grants you nothing but to be able to temporarily hold customer funds during payment processing.

The only regulations that are volatile are the ones relating to banking because for some stupid reason, regulators think it is a good idea to grant banks a kitchen sink license that lets them get away with anything, which in turn means that the regulators have started a cat and mouse game but that one is their own fault. If the kitchen sink licenses were separated so that non banking institutions could perform some of these tasks there wouldn't be so much trouble. A lot of the problems stem from the fact that banks aren't earning enough from their payment processing business and therefore to earn money off of providing basic accounts they need to go for investments with high risks to subsidize that part of the business which then jeopardize deposits and makes them vulnerable to being taken hostage and getting bailed out.

> A lot of the problems stem from the fact that banks aren't earning enough from their payment processing business

I don't buy this reasoning. If banks are making investments that are too risky, it's because they're mismanaged, and possibly under regulated, not because their hands were tied by a lack of ways to profit.

I do dont think money transfers will make gaming better. The while point with gaming is to have fun.

Nothing dampens fun like constant reminders that "hey it would be MORE fun if you just buy a booster/unlock/etc"

I have seen Roblox videos where the only punch line of the video was spending thousands of dollars. I can't comprehend this.

Payouts: not found

https://www.tilia.io/core-concepts/payouts

Seems to work here: https://www.tilia.io/docs/core-concepts/payouts/

> Paypal only

They can't transmit money to a bank account?

As if relying on Paypal by itself wasn't enough of a nightmare, imagine relying on Paypal directly linked to crypto stuff. Or is the value proposition here that Tilia somehow have a deal with Paypal to keep their users accounts open?

And it seems they require KYC only when you try to pay out funds? This sounds like a great way to make some money only to find out you can't actually get your hands on it later...

As far as I know, there's no "crypto stuff" here. Tilia is a spinoff from Second Life, which is all balances in databases.

Funny how this is posted after the post about Second Life. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I think Tilia is a sort of money processor for Second Life, which allows users to exchange their virtual currency for real world USD.

Tilia is a spin off from Linden Lab, makers of Second Life.

Fun fact: "Tilia" is the genus of the Linden tree.

Gaming companies sorta operate a merchant bank account to facilitate these transactions?

Wouldn't it be better to just use some payment gateway?

I think the tricky part is turning the in game currencies back into real world currency. Most online games have ways of generating currency from "nothing" - either by design or exploit.

But if you can bug out server code to increase your currency, how would blockchain help ? You could bug out a server into giving you a token instead...

That doesn't stop any bugs, just add complexity which adds bugs.

I think the idea is that they add out-of-game-world validation that the transferrable currencies have not been tampered with. Similar to how banks and financial institutions use multiple independent validation methods to prevent real world transactions from creating or destroying money.

transferred to where ? Vast majority of game's ecosystems are just "cash gets into the game, THE END" and then lives in game's database. Even if for some reason a company wants to share currency related stuff between their own games, "just building internal app for it that's just a front for a database" is far simpler solution than whatever blockchain thing this is.

It's a solution looking for a problem.

This was made by Linden for their game Second Life, which allows players to exchange in game currency for real money (dollars, not crypto). Many players use the game as an income source.

Linden had a problem, built a solution, and spun off it off into a company.

https://zebedee.io/ does the same, regulation-compliant too, not US-only, easier and cheaper.

How do they do cross border micro transactions ?

They don't. They are apparently US-only.

Thanks - I've put that in the title above.

they're also paypal only

Sooo the game developers somehow managed game ecosystems just fine for last dunno 10-15 years ?

What's is exactly point of this ?

What is a money transmitter for gaming?

> fully licensed, regulation compliant

... in the US. There appear to be no licenses from anywhere else in the world[1].

A small detail that you'd think might be worth mentioning on the homepage, but AFAICT, they don't.

[1] https://www.tilia.io/licenses

Ok, we'll put that info in the title above.

My point exactly. US =/= rest of the world. Shallow marketing claim

In Germany it would take 50 years to acquire that many licenses.

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