Not really. Everyone knows Blackjack is gambling. All over the internet people were telling others via referrals that this company paid out 2 times what you "invested". It was being advertised by users as a sure thing.
An example from twitter:
"#CryptoDouble lets you double the number of #BTC you have in just 100 hrs. Invest your coins here: (ref link) "
So you can't compare people trying to get others (who don't know it's
not 100%) to not "invest" in a ponzi to knocking over a table of blackjack that everyone is fully aware is gambling.
And trying to discuss those who know better, then they knew it was always a risk (and they shouldn't have risked more than they could) as you said they "had a good idea of when the site would fold" not 100% sure on when though. Those calculations of when it would fold
should have counted when social pressure might make it fold too.
Only the retarded didn't know this was gambling.
I stuck in $25 worth of BTC, and would have taken the $25 back after the first double. Had the site stayed up for another month and a half, I could have been pulling $100 a day out of it, playing entirely with their money.
The "social pressure" caused the site to go offline about 5 hours before I would have been paid. Since I only invested lunch money, against a mathematical expectation that was much higher, I don't have a big loss, but it is certainly annoying that a non-participant whining to Cloudflare and the ISP perturbed the mathematics of the thing, and gave them an excuse to stop paying long before they would have, based on the numbers.
I think CryptoDouble was one of the more interesting things to happen to Bitcoin in the past 12 months. It demonstrated a sweet spot in terms of return and payback time where people were willing, in large numbers, to play a Ponzi for entertainment. Note that almost all of the copycat sites that have sprung up spin it as a game, and openly announce that earlier investors are paid out of the funds from later ones.
Contrast this with your typical HYIP where you don't know if you've been screwed for several hundred days.
There are certainly a lot of games on the Internet where a small number of people get something of value paid for by many people making a small investment, like Penny Auctions, and chains of people doing offers for prizes.
I think the merger of such entertainment with Bitcoin is an interesting market niche, and I expect to see far more polished and better managed sites than CryptoDouble spring up around this notion in the near future.
As for "interstellar", I'd strap him to a waterboard, and send him to visit Dick Cheney for an hour, just to cure him of the notion that he has been somehow appointed to censor other peoples fun.