Bitcoin Forum

I'm selling the Bitcoin Gem, a popular chain game at www.bitcoingem.com.
People love to play this game. If you want proof, just go to the site, click on "List of previous owners" and you'll see hundreds of plays.

Why I'm selling
As some of you know, the bitcoin gem started as a weekend project. Version 1 (http://bitcoingem.com/v1.php) of the game received quite a lot of attention (see here (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17b8kd/the_bitcoin_gem_is_worth_034_bitcoins/), here (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17dq96/bitcoin_gem_was_at_034_btc_yesterday_right_now/) and here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=138749.0)) and version 2 quickly became a popular game.
Of course I'm happy that the site grew so fast and I even have some ideas on how I could take it to the next level. But to be honest – the gambling scene is not really where I feel at home. I currently have another (non gambling related) bitcoin project I want to focus on, so I'm looking to find a new owner for the game.

What's included
This is what the buyer will receive:
- The domain bitcoingem.com
- The website graphics
- The website code
- Twitter account
- Gmail account
- Transfer to your web host and initial setup
- 1 week of technical support after the transfer

Price & Profit
I have no urge to sell but if the price is right, I'm happy to hand over the site. My profits for the last 30 days were more than 15 bitcoins, so you should be willing to invest at least 50 BTC. You can check profits by having a look at the "List of previous owners" section, all numbers are public.
Serious buyers, please PM your offer or send an email to bitcoingem@gmail.com. I will only deal with persons I can trust and we will have to use some kind of escrow service, preferably by some trusted member from the forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108716.0).

Traffic
According to Google Analytics, traffic for last 30 days was as follows:
32,517 Pageviews
5,092 Visits
2,277 Unique Visitors

Technical stuff
The site is completely self-contained, you are not dependent on any third-party services. It is using its own bitcoind server, currently running on an Amazon EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) instance (m1.small, Ubuntu). I can help you transfer the site to your own host and/or set up a new EC2 instance for you.

Running the site requires almost no work, everything is automated. The only thing to do manually is to refund double payments that occur once in a while.
Although you don't need to have any technical knowledge to run the site, I strongly recommend you have some trusted person who knows PHP / MySQL.

If there's any questions, please let me know.

Some questions I got:

I'd like to pay in Dollar / Euro, is that possible?
No, I'm only accepting BTC as payment.

Can I pay 5 BTC now and the rest once I've made some profits?
Sorry, but I'd need full payment.

What is your minimum price?
50 BTC

What were the profits and traffic results from the month of February?

Profits for 1-28 february were ~13.5 bitcoins.

Traffic was:
Pageviews: 32,853
Visits: 6,659
Unique visits: 2,894

What if I give you....

$ 6.60

OK, OK, how about  $7.01?

Closer, but still...

I see you're already beginning to fit right in...

I think you have an auction for this where every bet has a 1.5625% chance of being reset to zero. ::)

In all seriousness, this is a good offer. Good luck with the sale!

I think posting some example PHP code would help your auction price, to make sure its good, clean code. I'll watch this thread anyway, I like the concept :)

From my description:
So, 50 BTC is the lower limit.

I'm not sure what I could be posting without revealing too much.
But I guess the coding is not too bad since there haven't been any problems and the site is smoothly running on autopilot.

I saw there is a turnkey version of this, is this the first/oldest bitcoin gem style game out there? Just wondering which one was first to market.

Yes, the bitcoin gem was the very first chain game, and it's the most successful one.
Code and design are uniquely done by myself.

Thanks for that, an important question:

Has the site got a history of DDOS attacks towards it? Has this been a major expense? When you said profits of 15 BTC last month, you mean discounting all the cost of running it as servers and bandwidth?

There's hasn't been a DDOS attack yet so I can't tell you anything about that.


I'm paying the server in dollars and don't wanna mix up BTC profits with dollar expenses.
But I can give you some numbers. I just looked up the exact server costs for last month:
$44.64 M1 Standard Small (m1.small) instance
$14.93 Data transfer out

So all in all, it's $60/month for the EC2 server. But it seems this server is really oversized, have a look at last weeks CPU load:
https://i.imgur.com/iHQlkPJ.jpg

I guess a smaller instance would be sufficient too.

With Max's permission, I've decided this may be an interesting thing to crowdfund if a 50BTC gamble is too much for you. Here is a link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169663.0

Are you selling exclusive rights to the code, a license to use the code or the software copyright? Will there be any agreement that you can not resell your code to others or reuse it yourself? Will allow others with serous offers to audit your code prior to purchase? To be honest, the website very simple and the idea isn't unique.

- I'm selling exclusive rights to the code
- Yes, I will sign any non-compete clause
- I won't allow to inspect the code but I will make sure that everything is tidy and well commented

This sale is not only about the code but also about the traffic and the reputation of the website. After all, the site makes 15 BTCs / month.

Update: There are currently 2 seriously interested buyers whom I talked to via skype and I might close the deal with one of them soon.
Should there be any other prospective buyers who did not contact me yet, please do so via PM. Thanks.

50 BTC is a lot for:


Any competent web developer should be able to match that in 2-3 months and reputations are built and lost very quickly in bitcoin right now. Good luck...

Everybody's free to build their own website that rakes in 15 BTC / month – or buy one for 50 BTC.

The site is sold. Topic closed.