4 ms·

Naysayers are missing the point of this (admittedly very simple) proof of concept: a few developers wanted to make a game that allowed money pooling and tournam

Naysayers are missing the point of this (admittedly very simple) proof of concept: a few developers wanted to make a game that allowed money pooling and tournament payouts. So they made it. Without any work getting payment processing, banking, a gaming attorney, and so on. This is such a significant competitive advantage for a small team that it changes the landscape of the possible -- the typical costs in time and money of those parts of the game would vastly dominate the development costs of an asteroids remix. In this case, probably most of the work was put into the game itself, not the Solidity/ETH side.

pampa 10y ago
Without a gaming attorney, chances are high that you will need a criminal attorney later.
- usgovatgug 10y ago
  I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Taek 10y ago
Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed. "Oh, they made an investment platform without any of the hassle of traditional investment platforms". Then someone found a bug, and poof it's all up in smoke. The danger of ethereum right now is that it's really easy to get something incorrect and broken operating at full capacity on the network. It's really hard to write secure programs, and when money is on the line there's a juicy bounty for anyone who finds a mistake. It seems like a significant competitve advantage but I don't think any serious product, idea, etc should be developing on ethereum while compiler bugs are still regularly being discovered, and while best practices are still regularly being updated.
- jamespitts 10y ago
  Could the early web have been developed into what it became with a "wait for it to work risk-free" mentality? Yes, the DAO was a reliable repository for 100s of $M, until it turned out that it wasn't. This case isn't the first thing to go wrong in tech, and should not be an endless source of FUD for the platform. Pets.com and eToys and so many other web sites financially collapsed. Microsoft Windows was vulnerable. 1B Yahoo user accounts were hacked. A Tesla crashed, a SpaceX rocket blew up, and who knows, maybe some people will die in a hyperloop accident eventually. The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    > The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward. Just look at the success story of Sand Hill Exchange! https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-bucket-shop-kicks-bucket https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-b... As Matt Levine puts it: > Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries. Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they've learned -- no thanks to me! -- that, in finance, it's not so simple. The thing about finance is, there's been literally no scheme, no way to cut corners, that hasn't been tried and probably regulated against. And the SEC isn't there to harsh your mellow, they'd love you to do well. They're there because every regulation has an actual scam/disaster that caused it to be there. Bitcoin has frequently been noted to be an iterative exploration of why each and every financial regulation exists. There is only old ground to be broken here, and by crikey cryptos are going to break it. Again.
nerdponx 10y ago
How do taxes work here?
- wyager 10y ago
  I imagine they weren't very concerned about following gaming tax rules. That certainly wasn't near the top of the list for the people who made ethereum. Their whole point was to move away from traditional dispute resolution and governance mechanisms. No comment as to my feelings on the matter, but that's how it is.

pampa 10y ago

Without a gaming attorney, chances are high that you will need a criminal attorney later.

usgovatgug 10y ago
I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Taek 10y ago

Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed. "Oh, they made an investment platform without any of the hassle of traditional investment platforms". Then someone found a bug, and poof it's all up in smoke. The danger of ethereum right now is that it's really easy to get something incorrect and broken operating at full capacity on the network. It's really hard to write secure programs, and when money is on the line there's a juicy bounty for anyone who finds a mistake. It seems like a significant competitve advantage but I don't think any serious product, idea, etc should be developing on ethereum while compiler bugs are still regularly being discovered, and while best practices are still regularly being updated.

jamespitts 10y ago
Could the early web have been developed into what it became with a "wait for it to work risk-free" mentality? Yes, the DAO was a reliable repository for 100s of $M, until it turned out that it wasn't. This case isn't the first thing to go wrong in tech, and should not be an endless source of FUD for the platform. Pets.com and eToys and so many other web sites financially collapsed. Microsoft Windows was vulnerable. 1B Yahoo user accounts were hacked. A Tesla crashed, a SpaceX rocket blew up, and who knows, maybe some people will die in a hyperloop accident eventually. The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  > The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward. Just look at the success story of Sand Hill Exchange! https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-bucket-shop-kicks-bucket https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-b... As Matt Levine puts it: > Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries. Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they've learned -- no thanks to me! -- that, in finance, it's not so simple. The thing about finance is, there's been literally no scheme, no way to cut corners, that hasn't been tried and probably regulated against. And the SEC isn't there to harsh your mellow, they'd love you to do well. They're there because every regulation has an actual scam/disaster that caused it to be there. Bitcoin has frequently been noted to be an iterative exploration of why each and every financial regulation exists. There is only old ground to be broken here, and by crikey cryptos are going to break it. Again.

nerdponx 10y ago

How do taxes work here?

wyager 10y ago
I imagine they weren't very concerned about following gaming tax rules. That certainly wasn't near the top of the list for the people who made ethereum. Their whole point was to move away from traditional dispute resolution and governance mechanisms. No comment as to my feelings on the matter, but that's how it is.