So I wrote and launched a Bitcoin casino/poker site - started privately in 2008 and launched in BTC back in 2011, long before BTC was considered currency, but I

So I wrote and launched a Bitcoin casino/poker site - started privately in 2008 and launched in BTC back in 2011, long before BTC was considered currency, but I still blocked everyone from my home country (the US) out of a very conservative reading of federal and state laws around the definitions of "game of chance" and "thing of value". I figured it would be legalized one day but only for massive corporations that could buy enough government officials. I thought I could bootstrap my way into it. That wasn't my big eye-opener on this type of corruption, though. I used my little casino as a testbed for dozens of original card games, slot games, and multiplayer games, many of which had adjustable odds that could be set anywhere from pari-mutuel to a specific house rake over time. I spent a lot of time presenting videos and demos to Indian tribes and cruise lines and individual Vegas casinos with the idea of having the online casino work on their premises, i.e. in the hotel rooms. The issues in the way were many, and mostly regulatory. For instance, in Vegas, casino floor square footage is taxed and regulated in a certain way, and off-floor gaming isn't allowed. On the floor, wifi coverage for gaming-connected systems is charted by heat maps and any system connected to the monetized network has to go through extremely expensive ongoing code / hardware testing conducted by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB). Mostly at the casino's expense. So even though it was a novel concept at the time to let people join satellites of real poker tournaments on their phones while they were at the casino bar, the casinos figured they would hold off until a provider with deep pockets came along. So then I had the idea of just licensing my original slots and card games. I had all the statistical analyses worked out and playable versions that were already in use with tons of real world data. Sure, said the NGCB. That'll be $500,000 per review of each game variant before you can shop it to casinos. The cost of each review is nonrefundable if it doesn't pass, and the review process takes a year, and there's a 2-3 year backlog because Bally puts out tons of games we have to review. Not exactly possible for a lone coder making a modest sum from running a Bitcoin casino that has to lock out one country after another. It was clear to me that sooner or later, once they figured out a way to exclude tech-side competitors with a history of software gaming from the market, (Galewind, Microgaming, et al - not that any of them are very clean) the powers that be in the US would find a way to reward those lucrative contracts to their buddies and/or whoever paid top dollar under the table. I ran [edit] provably fair games and published every result. But I never encountered a gaming regulatory body from Isle of Man to Costa Rica to Nevada that wasn't crooked as all get-out. Then again, show me an economic field of supposedly questionable morality that hasn't developed a parasitic class of bureaucrats to grift off people's desire to access it.