Wed Nov 11, 2015 8:53 pm





First of all thanks for running a great gambling site. I agree using bitcoin for gambling simply makes sense. And, as DiceSites.com owner, I can attest that you guys have been the biggest bitcoin gambling site for a long while now I got 3 questions: Hi,First of all thanks for running a great gambling site. I agree using bitcoin for gambling simply makes sense. And, as DiceSites.com owner, I can attest that you guys have been the biggest bitcoin gambling site for a long while nowI got 3 questions:

1. In my impression most bitcoin communities (reddit, bitcointalk, bitcoin.com, etc) are worldwide. However, Russia and China seem to be more independent and have their own communities in their own language. Once Stunna said In my impression most bitcoin communities (reddit, bitcointalk, bitcoin.com, etc) are worldwide. However, Russia and China seem to be more independent and have their own communities in their own language. Once Stunna said 53.56% of the visitors were Russian, so that's great. So I am wondering about China.. It's common to say "Bitcoin is big in China" and "Chinese people love to gamble". Do you guys try to target them too? If so, did you have any success with that? If not, any plans/thoughts about that?

2. Some people seem to think it's easy to start and operate a bitcoin gambling website, but obviously it can be difficult. What things do you think people mostly underestimate at starting and operating a site like that? Eg: what are some of the challenges you guys had in the last 2+ years? (I can guess 1 huge issue/setback, but still interested to hear more.)

3. As you said, you had to block PD for US and Australia. How does it make you personally feel that for the land of the free, the USA, you cannot provide a game? Do you think these laws/regulation will ever change in a more open/modern way?

Thanks. That's all for now. Also, looking forward for that new project/game

I'll be taking over and answering some questions throughout the day.Thanks for running such a great service, Ed and I extensively use your website to track competition.We've had zero success targeting China. We released a localized version of PD2 and it did not take off at all. We haven't been able to figure out how people in China are gambling bitcoin or if they are at all. A lot of the Chinese based services I've watched never managed to reach much popularity.The scale of the Chinese bitcoin market is a bit dubious with bitcoin investors hyping up China as the driving force behind all the pumps. I won't deny that a large amount of mining is taking place within China but from my perspective it doesn't seem that China has a large & diverse bitcoin community whatsoever even if it may have whale investors/miners. Since the launch of PD I'd argue that less than half a percent of our volume has been driven by China. Russia on the other hand has accounted for a large amount of users and volume without any marketing or attempt to target that market.The truth is chucking together a working bitcoin gambling site especially with all the leaked code out there is super easy. The real issue comes with being there to deal with the constant issues that arise and building a secure enough system that can ensure that you actually manage to turn a profit. Even when everything is working as it should you still can end up losing, when we launched PD1 we lost every bitcoin we owned to whales.In terms of issues, from day one we've had significant setbacks on a fairly regular basis, we've probably lost over 3000 coins to both dumb and preventable issues and more sophisticated exploits. When we launched PD originally, I was getting less sleep than I've ever gotten in my life and would frequently have to wake up at strange hours to deal with X catastrophic issue one after the other. The blessing and curse of all this was we never imagined PD would be this massive, we cut a lot of corners when developing each version of PD to try and push it out as fast as possible and that led to a variety of issues.We've since resolved all these issues and the site runs super smoothly and requires minimum work on mine or Ed's part. Our effort has been shifted to the development of our new website.My advice to anyone looking to enter this space, hire a very very skilled & trustworthy developer who isn't just going to build the site but partner with you and work with you to monitor it. When we settled for a 'good' developer it ended up costing us over $1M worth of bitcoin in exploits (hufflepuff etc) . Bugs are of course inevitable, but you need a developer who will work with you to detect and patch any issues before they lead to massive losses.Much like how we see marijuana legalization beginning to spread throughout the USA, I feel the next wave will be gambling but not for 5-10 years. NY state actually just banned Fanduel/Draftkings from accepting deposits today. As cryptocurrency gets bigger the USA is going to realize that people will still be playing but on less reputable websites that are willing to accept US residents and the money will continue to flow out of the US.Right now the Vegas casino lobby is too powerful, and there's also incentive for the new multi billion dollar fantasy sports websites to oppose legalization of online gambling. If given the opportunity, we would apply for a license to operate within the US rather than continue to block half our potential market who then go on to play on less reputable sites.Gambling regulation is an absolute lose-lose situation for both the US government and its citizens, the only people who benefit from them are billionaire casino magnates like Sheldon Adelson and the politicians who are shady or desperate enough to accept the legalized bribery that is campaign financing from such figures.It's a lot more impressive than Primedice or any online gambling offering I've seen, I'm extremely excited for it. It isn't coming out in the near future though.