Uh, excuse me, but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws, no matter how large or small the jurisdiction. Had I been willing to bend laws, I'd surely be a lot richer today.
Come on, cURL'ing to a foreign server to get a random number and not just reading /dev/urandom is logically identical. It's a hack, just like calling into GPL'ed code over HTTP is a hack to avoid "linking" the GPL'ed code. It doesn't really suddenly turn a site from gambling site into a non-gambling site.
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 :-)
What's so funny is - I was in a peer group of early btc founders who were starting random Bitcoin hustles and didn't care at all about laws. No one at that time had even approached the IoM about whether BTC was currency - nor would they have, because trying to find legal haven was the furthest thing from their minds. And so not surprisingly, the IoM didn't have a ready answer when I asked them whether gambling with Bitcoin was actually gambling. But the letter of the law was that gambling occurs _in the jurisdiction where_ the random chance takes place. So it really was different from hitting a local RNG, legally.
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.
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.
> @kapep don't know why I can't respond directly..
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.
Fwiw I think this is a great response and I'm happy you did not feel attacked by my comment because that was not my intent. Thanks for sharing & all the best!
> But the letter of the law was that gambling occurs _in the jurisdiction where_ the random chance takes place
"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.
I used to be. I got a web design job in San Francisco when I was 18 out of high school but I burned out and quit when I was 21. Drove a taxi so I could write and play music. Did it for a couple years. It was a good education. I feel old. Taxis don't even exist anymore.
> Come on, cURL'ing to a foreign server to get a random number and not just reading /dev/urandom is logically identical. It's a hack, just like calling into GPL'ed code over HTTP is a hack to avoid "linking" the GPL'ed code. It doesn't really suddenly turn a site from gambling site into a non-gambling site.
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.
> (...) but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws,
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?
I just really wanted to launch my software. 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. I never even meant to take Bitcoin, let alone make it the only currency in the casino. It was just the only option if I wanted to launch. I had very little money and had written a giant gaming platform. I wanted it to see the light of day.
> 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.
What you say I stated "unequivocally" is precisely the opposite of what I stated. I was quite clear - what I said was that I didn't want to pursue the business into a legal gray area. Therefore, I did what I had to do to keep it legal, including turning away 95% of the hits, retaining lawyers, and not violating any local laws. Moreover, it would have been perfectly legal to run the whole thing from Costa Rican servers at any point in time. I just didn't see a future in it, because they didn't offer full licensing, and the credit card companies pulled out while the software was in alpha. The IoM paper was intended as a step on the road to licensing.
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.
Sure, you're not breaking any laws, just intentionally violating the spirit of the law for personal gain.
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.
I suspect your anger derives from the fact that this would not be possible to get away with now, in any way shape or form, only ten years later. And truly the world is way more locked down now than it was then when people were like, "Bitcoin? What's that? you want to pay me to write a legal brief?" so, yeah. I feel sorry for kids ten years younger than me.
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.
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.
I'm not angry, I'm hostile. That you think the only possible position from which to take issue with what you did is FOMO speaks volumes.
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.
Ok, I respectfully understand where you're coming from, and I've struggled with gambling addiction myself. I personally do not think it's immoral to offer games of chance to people, as long as they understand the odds and you're not cheating them. And believe me, running a small online casino mostly by myself with my own bankroll was literally setting alarms all night waking me up when someone was killing the tables and potentially going to bankrupt me. I got to know my big players (most of whom went on to become Bitcoin millionaires, since the early adopters were the only ones gambling on Bitcoin casinos in 2011)... but beyond that, I really don't think offering gambling is immoral as long as everyone knows what they're signing up for. I've dealt cards for a living, too. I don't drive a taxi anymore. But I've seen all sides of life. I don't think you can judge so easily. Yeah, big corporations suck and they screw people into debt, and gambling addiction does ruin peoples' lives, but I knew my players, and I don't think what I did personally hurt anybody. They came together to enjoy games, and yeah it was for real money, but it was also a community and they were there for fun - they could have gambled for a lot more money on other sites. One player built a puzzle in his escape room in Amsterdam in honor of / based on a game I designed. Like a bar, this is something people do for enjoyment, and you don't need to stand out there with a sign saying we're all going to hell. But I do get it and I'm not a fan of the companies that take advantage of human weakness and shake the dimes out of people's pockets. I was just trying to have a good time and give other people a good time.
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.
Also I want to add... I had a feature on the site from day one that would let players set their own deposit limits through any date they chose. Once set, the limits could not be raised or revoked through that date, and any coin they sent beyond the limit would automatically be sent back. This was prominently displayed on the website along with an entire section of problem gambling resources. Some users did use it. Others I would put into the system involuntarily. The average rake on my non-poker games was about 2.5%, and some of the puzzle games I designed had a theoretical >100% payout if you could, e.g., solve a randomly spun Rubik's cube consistently in under 60 seconds. (No one ever hit over 100% on that one over time, though. If I had ever come across anything like that I would have written a bot to solve it... and I was waiting for a player to do so, so I could make them a partner).
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."
Corporations do not so dissimilar things with teams of accountants and lawyers. Via tax planning, international subsidiaries and all other sorts of loopholes.
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.
