I'm the owner of StrikeSapphire.
First of all, we denominate our accounts in USD because our software is built to handle multiple deposit methods. We don't hedge one currency against the other or take any trading positions with customer deposits. Once a customer's deposit is in, we convert it to USD and store it as USD -- the same amount you see in your account. What you see is what you get. When we opened in July 2011, BTC dropped from $30 to $2 in the span of a month, but we took no losses, and all of the players with USD in our system were completely unaffected by that.
It's been my belief from the beginning that BTC is, for now, better treated as a payment method than a store of value for us, because we already gamble once with very low- or no-house-edge games. We don't need to gamble with currency volatility on top of that.
We do not make a profit on our BTC<>USD rate. Our deposits and withdrawals are handled at the live rates from Bitstamp.
We have never failed to pay out quickly, and we maintain at least 5x the total customer deposits on hand in USD for immediate withdrawal. We do not have a client-side hashing algorithm built into our site, because most of our games are multiplayer. However every single shoe of cards we've ever dealt is available for public analysis, as well as our daily RTP figures for every game, at
https://strikesapphire.com/reports . If you believe there is something unfair about our RNG, you are free to run a statistical analysis on it. If you've played at our site, then any cards you've been dealt can be found in there if you know the hand ID numbers.
I don't know if you're one of our players. If you are, I hope neither myself, FragileJD or Mike has been rude to you. If someone has, please let us know. We do our best to provide quick, excellent service. I know that I have had a reputation for being a hardass from time to time -- particularly in the case of Dooglus. And I have to say I really appreciate Doog for taking the high road here, since I know he doesn't care for me much personally. That does not make us a scam.
We've been in business for almost 2 full years, longer than any other Bitcoin casino currently standing, and have never once failed our customers or had a dispute which resulted in players not getting paid out. I think our record speaks for itself, and I'd appreciate being removed from this list.