What stops a legitimate online casino from running away with players' money? Incorporation, licensing, paying taxes in a proper jurisdiction, and a sufficient long-term investment of time and money. All of that spells a legitimate business. Good rule of thumb (and this is true for non-Bitcoin, Costa Rican casinos that take US players, who we won't do business with either): If a company's willfully breaking the law, or encouraging their players to break the law, or haven't researched the law or don't give a damn about the law, if they're not incorporated where they're doing business, aren't licensed, and have a website that took about a week to build, then those are all great reasons to think that they don't give a **** about stealing your money. Look on Casinomeister.com at the "Rogues" section, and you'll see it's a common problem all over the industry, not just in the 0.001% constituted by the Bitcoin market. But Bitcoin's a completely new market, and it's empowered a lot of undercapitalized sites that would never otherwise have been able to open as casinos. Including ours. To this point, almost all of the Bitcoin sites out there match the textbook description of rogues. They're slapped up overnight with no-name software that looks 10 years out of date, have no legal standing, have no contact information, and few reasons
not to disappear in an instant with your money. I'm just telling it like it is.
We're working on incorporation and transparency. But yes, the main problem is the DOJ. We've made sure the site's wallet is FARR from their grasps.
Weaver, I give BTCOnTilt credit, in spite of you saying that you've gotta be our adversaries, because I think BTCOnTilt is one of the only Bitcoin sites that's, at least from what I've seen, made a good-faith effort to run an honest, transparent poker business, come clean with players in all circumstances, and get on the right track to becoming a legit business as opposed to a fly-by-nighter. I'm assuming you've at least developed a legal argument for why poker in BTC doesn't violate UIGEA...and if you're willing to go to court, and it holds water, you'll be the American poker heroes of the decade. There's no doubt there's a huge market for what you're doing. Believe me, we've been tempted to take US players. But taking the shortcut of accepting them could turn into a longcut if the DOJ gets interested -- and given their interest in Bitcoins already, it's not a huge leap to imagine why they would. You're a lawyer, right? So maybe the point is to get this in front of a district court and make your bones. Our lawyers have less than zero interest in testing that. But it does mean that players have a right to be concerned about what happens if some grand jury hands down an indictment, regardless of where the wallet is. IMHO you should get outta the US market and physically outta the States as soon as possible.
OUR players have a right to be concerned about our standing as a Costa Rican casino. I'm the first to admit CR ain't the most rigorous jurisdiction, which is why we publish and hold to our own standards. But obviously after putting 10,000+ hours into software development and legal work, the main object for us is to license our code to other casinos for $50-70k/month, not to blow all our work by stealing a few bucks from Bitcoin players. The best insurance we can give our players is that the software and the legal status cost us 500-1000x the amount of player cash we're holding in our system; and we'll be making that back over the next few years by keeping them coming and playing, and keeping our 5%...and by proving how stable and reliable we are, so we can license our software to the big guys.