Topic: [CryptoStocks] Satoshi Poker IPO - page 2. (Read 8459 times)

Indeed this was one of their major attractions to casual players

Also the full tilt "Play with the pros" marketing campaign before black friday was huge. It was everywhere and anywhere.

Anyone considering this should start by looking at some of the following websites

http://www.pokerscout.com/  (industry std website for measuring leading poekrsites and active number of players - satoshi pokers     7 day average is 1 player, the 5th largest poker site has an average of 2050)

http://diamondflushpoker.com/ (independent poker news site with in-depth coverage of Black Friday and the relevant American laws regarding online poker)

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/satoshipoker-co-bitcoin-poker-room-official-support-thread-1358099/

This is Satoshi Pokers own thread on the most popular online poker community forum please read through and evaluate for yourself what players who actually use the site are saying about player numbers and available games.


While this list is by no means exhaustive it should provide you with some insight into what Satoshi poker is up against. Online poker is one of the most fiercely competitive industries online with Rational Group holding the lions share of the market generating billions in rake per annum.

It's like me coming up with a new brand of coke and thinking I can take on Coca-Cola and win - it is beyond ridiculous. I am not denying you can possibly run a profitable site but investors will never see a return on this IPO valuation and you have provided no data to suggest otherwise.

You do realise that offering your services to fenced countries such as Spain Italy etc would be expressly illegal without applying for the appropriate licenses right? Bitcoin does not give you a free pass on circumventing the law.

While playing online poker is not illegal in America, the transfer of funds is. It doesn't matter if it's in U.S. $$$, German Deutschmarks, British pounds or bitcoin the transfer of funds as a result of gambling is still illegal. If by some minor miracle you ever did acheive top 5 poker site I again would happily bet a large sum of money that the DoJ will be knocking down your door - using bitcoin is not a way around servicing the U.S.

Pokerstars doesn't have rakeback but does have industry leading VIP program which for all intensive purposes is equivalent to rakeback.

Offering the lowest rake in the industry has so far garnered you virtually no players despite heavy publicity on 2+2 and Pokerfuse two of the leading poker community websites.

Full tilt did not become second in the industry due to allowing bots - I have no idea where you got that from but it's ridiculous - they got to be second biggest player because they stayed in the U.S. post UIGEA and had and still continue to have the greatest online poker software ever created. Built by a team of more than ten of the most highly paid software developers in the industry.

Your IPO is overvalued by at least an order of magnitude and I strongly advise anyone considering investing in this to do some independent research.

Please post your deposit address validating your rake per day claims.
Please post some graps/docs of player volume

About the costs, you are saying you paid 90k for a software that by your own words does not meet the "minimal industry standards" 5-6months later. Then you now want to buy the source of this "outdated" software for 100k, for then to pay another x amount for the new software (additions?) that will be done in December. Sounds like a great plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpnxd31y0Fo

Hi TaT,

I can't recon having ever insulted you and if I did, i offer you my sincere apologies. Indeed the plan was to get listed on bitfunder and if you look at the asset list on bitfunder, you will see that we are already listed there. Considering the situation bitfunder is in right now, all the shares plumiting and US investors being forced to leave the site, me and the other investors decided in cooperation with Ukyo to not get listed on Bitfunder. If you have followed our progress you might have seen that we did have a beta of a browser based (html5) client but that it has so many bugs that we chose to further improve our desktop client and wait for the development of their new native clients.

Lovely, all these 8 posts accounts to come over here

Everybody who plays at our site is aware that we bought our software from Enterra Poker. We are not Enterra itself, just their customers. For the new client I dont only wish to purchase the license but also the source code so we can do the modifications ourselves. Total license fee is $90k and the source an additional $100k. Their software will be ready in december as they have been working on it for months, since their current platform is no longer meeting the minimal industry standards. If you think that you can buy that package and just throw together a template and get a pokersite running, then I strongly advice you stay far away from the poker business. As you're not interested in aquiring any shares in my company, I wish you good luck finding another company to invest in.

Your valuation, at this stage, is nuts. I told you that months ago, and very little has changed.

Furthermore, you conducted yourselves very unprofessionally, including insults when I declined your previous solicitations. I personally don't care about being insulted, but it does speak to your management style.

The problems you had while fund-raising before are still there. There is much more risk of NOT growing to be a 20,000 bitcoin company than you are accounting for.

The fact is, that if you had a fair offer, good reputation, and track record of being motivated and demonstrating, there is plenty of private money out there to back a bitcoin startup.

You already purchased software that was to be your saving feature, now you want something else?
Have you created a web-based version yet?
Wasn't BitFunder supposed to list you?

Yes, I still remember that you helped me to set up a GPG code in the past, Mircea. Thing was that I didn't have the time to find out how all these systems worked and with the first investor requesting specificly to be listed on bitfunder, I chose not to go through the hassle and get listed there instead of on mpex. I will always listen to founded criticism and there are indeed some valid questions in this post, which is why I take time to answer them. Thanks for your starters guide. You know who some of the investors behind Satoshi Poker are, so if you don't mind I'll pass on reading it completely.

Good luck with mpex!

You guys are unreal, I usually just lurk but this hit a nerve.

The fact that not all the tables have bad-beat-jackpot does not explain why the generated number is just 1.4 bitcoins, we are talking about months and you stated to your potential investors that you generate 2.5 to 4 btc in rake each day.

That number is so absurd, I'ts an obvious lie.

Just imagine, that amount of rake each day, what volume of deposits you would have to get.. Take the most generous number ever, around 10btc. PLEASE POST YOUR WALLET ADDRESS so everyone can see and validate themselves if your words hold up.

And as "addi" correctly pointed out, the amount of active tables running would be an considerable amount.. please post some graphs or documentation from your cms system (if there is one)

And you write above:

" It will give us the time for the preparation to the new software client and get our tech team together to work on it, before it's released in December."

while in your own forum thread you wrote just a few hours ago that the plan is to buy the software from a company called Enterra.. so Which is it? Or perhaps you are Enterra? and how on earth will this new software be ready by December, its a couple months..

It just doesn't hold up, even the amounts you are asking, for a fraction, if anyone wanted they could probably buy a software license themselves, buy a .org domain and throw together a template webpage with stock images and probably do a better job at it...

You guys should be banned

Excellent criticism in here. OP, listen to these people. And see here.

Yes we have taken out some investments in the past and now in cooperation with these investors we have now set up this IPO. The IPO is real and this is is a cashout of equity to make the neccesary investments to take my company further. I have been working on this project since april, investing over 20h/day and $100K+ in the site. If you don't believe in my company, then so be it. The company is listed under my own name in Holland and even carries my name. I show full transparancy, as I have no intention of dropping my dream company, hence the reason there were investors who believed in the product and paid a 0.00008 share price on these investments. If have any signs we would drop it like a hot turd, then please elaborate on that statement, because as far as I see, you are just hating

this IPO is bs, dudes are sleazy

these guys have been here like 2 or 3 times lookin for money

this is a cash-out plain and simple

they built this thing, n now they wanna cash out on its "potential", then drop it like a hot turd

dont waste ur money

That is actually my quote. We are growing on weekly basis in number of traffic. Aquiring the software is part of the marketing strategy as now we can only market to players with a windows machine; no mac or mobile support. Having the new multiplatform client will increase our market (as we can market mac and mobile) and besides increases the time our current players can spend on the site. Traffic brings traffic.

Thanks for the link. I will read it later.

We can't yet compete on prizepools but we are able to market in fenced markets as the US, China, Italia, Spain and so on. Pokerstars can't legally service some of the countries and in other countries it needs to cooperate with governments to make sure its players pay taxes over their winnings. Players who play a lot will look at what is losing them the most money. As satoshi-poker grows, the prizepools will grow. And if ipoker network would ban the bots you will see that it is pretty much a ghost town as well. They choose to make artificial traffic just as Full Tilt did back in the days which got them to 2nd place in traffic and diving down after banning them. We believe we actually have an advantage over other sites being able to market in markets where they can't move to.

I believe we can compete on software, which is why i want to purchase this software package and get dedicated coders on board to lift it up even more.

You are right that we can't compete on rakeback, but does it matter? World's leading site Pokersite doesn't offer its players rakeback. Do players stay away for this? I believe not. Besides that, we do offer rakeback and offer currently the lowest rake in the industry (except for the rake-free btcontilt) on our cash game tables. I believe that our rake structure is competitive enough to be able to win that battle.

If bitcoin poker ever takes off in a big way then big sites will simply start adapting bitcoins? That would still not allow them to move into the specified markets, unless they start refusing fiat currency. Even if Stars would accept bitcoins they couldn't move to the US market

Below is a quote from you or one of your co-workers on 2+2 - can you please explain how you are going to acquire critical mass when you can't even acquire players charging zero rake on HU games and only 1% on normal games? What is your marketing strategy because as you yourself point out undercutting all of your competition in price didn't have any impact on player numbers at all.

Rake
We had a lot of complaints from affiliates about lowering the rake to 1%. It didn't bring any extra players in but cut their affiliate income in half. Also the rake free heads up games didn't attract any attention or didn't get any more tables started.

The rake system is now installed as follows and will not be changed in the near future:

Base rake: 2%
Rake cap: 100 chips (0.01 btc)

If you wish to use the math, then please apply it correctly before accusing me of lying. The bad beat jackpot only accounts for the table which have the tag [jackpot] on cash game holdem tables of NL20 and higher. Omaha, O8, Stud, Stud hi/lo, holdem cashgames of NL10 and lower and tables without the tag [jackpot] are not contributing to the bad beat jackpot.

Also the tournament fees are not contributing to this pot. You use a figure as measurement which can't give you any certain statistic at all. Since 2012 there are various 'big poker projects' about to launch. We chose to do this IPO now as we believe now is the right time to do it. It will give us the time for the preparation to the new software client and get our tech team together to work on it, before it's released in December. I wish to combine this with my vision to create the first community owned pokersite ever and I would need at least a month to get all the software in place, plus a talented coder.

The 2.5 - 5 BTC in Rake per day, to me, definitely needs some further insight. I follow you guys passively and you seem to have a big challenge getting traffic, and if there is action it's 99% freerolls.
With the 2% rake that would mean you have a minimum of 125 BTC worth of rake-able pots/mtt-fees per day. To be honest I have a very hard time seeing how you would come anywhere near that amount?

I also feel 4000 BTC is an awful lot of bitcoins (and an even crazier valuation) to ask for just a "brand". As I see it you don't have any significant traction & you don't have a product. Or at least you don't have a product that you feel is valuable to carry the business forward seeing you require the bitcoin to acquire new software.
How much does Enterra asks for the software anyway?

Before you start asking for 4000 BTC, you'll need to (1) expand a bit on your current assets, revenue, growth, .. (2) convince people why you feel 20K is fair, cause that's one hell of a valuation

Actually, your math is kinda off here. Me and previous investors together owned 100% and we choose to sell 20% of the shares to the public. This is pretty standard IPO procedure, especially considering that most assets only sell 5% of their shares at IPO. I understand you are not interested in this investment, so I wish you good luck finding an investment opportunity that grasps your interest.