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According to his first submits, he's in the online gambling (and maybe porn) industries.

Hence you're not likely to get a URL here.



Gaming, yes. Not porn. And most of the focus is on building a platform and creating new games that can be licensed to entrenched casinos, vs. trying to compete with them. We deployed it as a Bitcoin casino because it was a quick way to bootstrap. The site is StrikeSapphire.com. Be warned, we block the US and TOR nodes, though.


I hope you realize that since your site is in the .com TLD, the US government says they can still seize your domain, since Verisign administers the .com TLD, and Verisign is a US company.


Is jurisdiction the real reason you block proxies?


At the risk of getting too off topic here...

1. Jurisdictional questions are one reason; in truth, Bitcoin gaming itself probably doesn't violate any US laws to begin with, since Bitcoin isn't legal tender. But our business plan never called for opening in the US, and taking a cue from Linden's preemptive ban on gambling with their funny money, we decided it wasn't worth the risk. We go out of our way to avoid trouble. 2. P2P proxies are too slow to give a good gameplay experience anyway, and disconnects annoy other players in multiplayer games. 3. Providing a fair game for everybody is more important in this case than standing tall on the principles of crypto-anarchy, so we like to know something about our players, especially to prevent duplicate accounts, poker collusion, chip dumping, etc. We know Bitcoin users like their privacy, and respectfully try to strike a balance while maintaining our own security and view of what's happening on the floor.

I should add that this is a 24/7 business manned by 3 people, including me, and two lawyers who signed on for equity, and that I'm also the only coder. It's small, personal, just about right; I figured with 10-20 concurrent players we'd make a profit, which turned out to be accurate, but keeping it cozy, friendly and civilized is a part of the goal and the culture I've tried to imbue in it. Sometimes that rubs against anonymity a little bit.

To bring this full circle, the closest analogy I can give is to the all night coffeehouse I used to work at when I was a kid. It's a small business with a crowd of nice regulars. That's exactly what I pitched to investors, and they didn't get it. Aren't internet companies supposed to be huge and viral? But I mean, who's to say you can't run a very successful small business that doesn't ever go huge, or require seven figures to launch? Anyway, I'm resigned to growing it at the pace it's growing, and I probably wouldn't give away equity now for anything. Not that anyone's banging down my door, lol.


Cool, if you like to keep it low as you say, blocking anon is probably a good decision.

How do you block tor? If by blacklisting public nodes, someone can set up their own bridge relays if they really want to take the effort.




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