This PoS also crossposted into my original StrikeSapphire thread which has been dead since 2012.

Scum.

Our concern is that we cannot take American players. If you are not in the USA then in general you don't have to worry about this. However, we do reserve the right to ask for ID in some circumstances. If our system flags you for an ID check it would usually be before you would even be able to join a freeroll, let alone make a deposit. In any case, you do not have to deposit to play in a freeroll.

We do not freeze player deposits. However, if you are physically located in the US and try to play through a VPN, then you should expect to be asked for ID and if it doesn't check out, then yes, you can expect to have your winnings nullified.

As long as you're not coming from the US, you're fine. Hope that clears it up.

Exactly.

And there's nothing wrong with saying a lot if it works for you.

Being an adult means making your own decisions for yourself. You don't ask the internet to tell you if something is right or wrong. You try things, you overcome your fears, you make your mistakes, hopefully you learn something and get better at living your life, and then you teach that to your kids.

No one alive knows the right answer, and if they tell you they know everything, they're lying. You already know what's right or wrong for you - it is in your heart. But you have no idea how other people feel so it's stupid to ask what's right or wrong for them. Stop concerning yourself with other people's problems. And don't listen to a book or a "holy man". Listen to your conscience, and learn from what you experience for yourself. TRY EVERYTHING and condemn no one. Right now, you are condemning things you have never tried.

There's a phrase in English: "He keeps his own counsel". Meaning he is his own keeper. He controls his own emotions and makes his own decisions. He listens to others, but in the end he's deciding for himself. Based on his conscience and his own reasons.

This is a concept that doesn't exist much in Eastern culture, and especially doesn't exist in Islam. It's also the reason those countries are not a good place to live, and half the population is trying to invade western europe at the moment. If people in those countries kept their own counsel, then those countries could be a paradise, not a wasteland.

So instead of worrying about what is right or wrong, try to worry about what is right or wrong for you. You will appreciate the world much more when you realize that everyone has a different perspective.

The only true wrong in the world is harming someone else. Whatever you do to yourself is simply educational.

And ... we all have to learn our own lessons for ourselves -- we learn from our mistakes and that's how we become better people. That's what it's called to be a man.

You wouldn't understand if everything you believe comes from your imam or your priest - some old man who pretends he knows more than you. You would never learn anything about life if you did that.

-Son of a rotten gambler (my favorite version).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIzX84po4LU

And by the way - I enjoy gambling. And I don't always stop in time. I have NO moral authority over anyone.

But I dislike seeing some uneducated bible- or quran-thumping moralist "pondering" what's right and wrong for other people. He opens a topic about "is it wrong" -- because this is a cheap way to claim moral high ground for a barely-literal whatever he is in a village in some third world hell hole.

It's better for him to ask if it's right that his water supply is full of human feces, or why both his wives should be humiliated and treated like slaves, or who invented that phone or computer he typed that message on (certainly wasn't him -- it was the evil gamblers).

No, he's worried whether it's "wrong" that other people, with lives he can't even dream of or imagine, might be gambling their money.

And my answer to that is, it's none of your business what's right or wrong for others, because you aren't competent to make even basic moral choices if you're asking this question on a Bitcoin gambling forum, and you're not entitled to judge anyone in any event, so learn some humility.

Well, it's a little thing called self control. If you don't have it yourself, you should work on it. But you don't have any right telling other people what to do by spouting bullshit about "right" and "wrong", or what God says or anything.

If you can't control yourself at a blackjack table, you definitely have no moral authority over anyone.

Yeah. Thank you for adding that.

I think it's a bit better than what Nitrogen is offering at the moment, considering there are very few players active on our site. But we're not trying to take players away from them, just bring some people home to enjoy the rest of what we have to offer. It's been a long time since we've hosted a friendly poker game. So let's have some fun

OP: I grew up in Las Vegas. I also own a casino. And I like to gamble.

So there are three questions here.
(1). Is it wrong to gamble your own money? Of course not. But it's stupid to gamble if you can't afford to lose what you started with. If you don't care about losing $100, then go and gamble it. If you win $1000, you'll be happy. If you lose the original money, you won't care.

My advice in this situation is that if you double or triple whatever you were comfortable starting with, you should leave the casino immediately.

(2). Is it wrong to gamble with your family's money? Yes.

(3). Is it wrong to operate a casino? No - as long as you are ethical about whose money you take. I would take the $100 from the player in example #1, because I am risking much more than that. I would NOT take $100 from player #2 because I don't have any interest in taking money from someone's family.

There is another question. What is your definition of "wrong"? If you are not able to think for yourself and you just do whatever the bible or the quran tells you, then almost everything is "wrong". If you consider what is good for you and what is good for your family, you should be able to make decisions for yourself like a big boy.

So if you want to put on your big boy pants, you should be able to decide from one situation to another what is right or wrong for you.

Stop trying to judge other people and their actions. You don't even know what you want for yourself and you are in no position to decide if something which may be wrong for you is right for others. You don't know anything. You are not better than anyone. Just decide what you want to do. And when you make stupid mistakes, learn from those mistakes, but don't imagine that you are better than other people just because you learned something.

StrikeSapphire.com announces: New hourly and nightly NL Holdem freerolls!

Yeah, we're the same StrikeSapphire who founded your first Bitcoin casino in 2011.

We've never gone offline. But we did stop promoting poker for a long time, while we waited for the market to figure itself out.

Anyway, we're back. As before, no US players, and no VPNs. Everyone else is invited to join. If you've never tried our platform before, you're in for a nice surprise 
 
Don't neglect to check out all our original slots and multiplayer blackjack / roulette / craps while you're there! And good luck to tonight's poker champions!!!!

* Non-US only *

tl;dr - This weekend only, through 15/6/2014, we're offering a 200% instant bonus on deposits of up to $50 in either Bitcoin or Blackcoin. Use the code multimadness when you deposit.

Only at StrikeSapphire!


Additionally, we offer an increasing amount of cash back up to 19% if you lose your balance before you can withdraw, nullifying any house edge for our most loyal players. (Percentage is dependent on play-throughs prior to loss and total player points accumulated).

If you've never tried us out, now's the time. StrikeSapphire has the most unique games in the Bitcoin world. We've been in business since June, 2011. Six-deck blackjack shoes, with all shuffles and stats made publicly available on our daily reports page for your review. We have 25 very original games and allow up to six different games at one time in the same window (Flash required). Check out our multitable madness below. And come join today!

-- Bonus has 30% WR on payment+bonus total. Bonus is released on a rolling basis. Player may withdraw winnings plus cleared balance at any time should player choose to void the uncleared portion of the balance. Blackjack, 5-hand video poker, roulette and craps bets qualify at 20% of normal clearance. --

Hey Mike, check us out (https://strikesapphire.com). We've been around since 2011, and were the first full Bitcoin casino. 25 original games and you can open up to six at a time in one window. We're not open to the US, though.
If you're in the States and just want to take a look around without betting, PM me.

Gotta say, I'm proud to see this kind of performance. I had a great feeling about this coin!  

I understand why no one's playing blackjack with it at the moment, but that seems rather logical  

I take exception with this. It's obviously of value to BlackCoin to have merchants and gaming sites start accepting it.  I never said I was doing anyone a favor, obviously we're in business to make money. We didn't start taking BC because we're doing charity work, we started because we've been looking to diversify out of Bitcoin for some time, and think that BC has the best combination of qualities to make it a viable long-term bet for us as a new market and store of value.

As far as our Alexa rank, sure we are relatively low traffic compared with the BTC casinos that accept American players, and players in other countries where online gambling is illegal. We block anywhere up to 85% of our hits. We don't think it's worth the risk. But isn't it better to have a casino in BC that's acting legally as opposed to some site that's violating US and other laws? I think it's clearly a benefit to the community in that it adds legitimacy and gives people something to do with their coins besides just trade them back and forth for BTC.

In any event, likewise, best of luck with your project. If you succeed, I'll be the first in line to get one of those cards. I really will.

^^ +1000 

This isn't an opinion, really - it's just an observation that the same thing was tried about a year ago by the founder of BitInstant which was already turning large profits and had good connections, and when it fell apart the reason was that mastercard had said they wouldn't do it.

I remember this from semi-private chats at the time, because our casino was super excited about being on board with the project.

If you think I'm talking out of my ass about something, feel free to call me on it. What I am saying though is that you should research the difficult end of the business you're proposing -- credit card integration -- before you make sweeping announcements here that would lead people to think it might actually happen. You can be defensive and angry at me if you want, but in all honesty, YOU should be the one making the disclaimers and warnings to people that I'm making. No my negativity will not stop you if you really have the power to pull it off, and no your positivity will not actually help you. So let's cut the crap. This has been tried and does not work, and your next move is probably to start pre-selling them to people.

Just go ahead and do it, and when it's done, let us know.

FWIW you might have noticed that when we moved into BlackCoin we gave zero prior warning, on this forum or anywhere else. We just did what we wanted to do, opened it, then announced. It's one thing to "get the community's opinion" but it's another to use it as a pumping strategy and a leadup to a scam. So now you know the community is interested. If/when you actually have these cards, give a shout.

I'm not familiar w/ bitplastic. I couldn't say if it's a scam or not. But it must be set up as a fiat type of prepaid card... meaning you'd need to send your BTC somewhere to preload it in dollars or euros. Basically a private buyers service that then loads your card with fiat. This is a runaround (in some sense) but there is no way they're doing it as an on-the-fly conversion, and it probably means sending your BTC to a questionable anonymous account first. Personally I'd rather just sell BTC on a legitimate exchange when I want to.

The Bitcoin ATMs operate by doing BTC<>USD conversion on an exchange before they spit out the money and they are NOT using Visa/MC or any other fiat payment gateways to run the transactions. The whole reason they are "bitcoin atms" is because they are stand-alone machines, like a soda machine, operated by a private owner, who chooses to release BTC for a certain price against the inbound transaction.

There is no way that cirrus or visa or other networks will allow a card that withdraws a crypto directly to fiat.

I'm not trying to shoot down your idea, but I remember when Charlie and a lot of people were really optimistic about it. They started the project when we were at about $30 and they got rejected by MC sometime around the $200 level (for Bitcoin). Because technically, there's nothing illegal or wrong about this. Trust me, it will not fly. Do the research first with V & MC so you don't waste a lot of money before you find out they won't let you do this.

Also Charlie is under house arrest now. In theory that doesn't have anything to do with this but in practice it's probably just not something you want to lean on real hard.

RE: BlackCoin virtual/real Visa and Mastercard

tl;dr this will never happen.

Preface: I'm not saying this to hurt BlackCoin. I believe in it, am invested in it, and put my company into it.

Content: That said, there's a lot of naivete going around here, from buyers who haven't been around the crypto community very long, and I think it needs to be set right. There is no point in people getting their expectations up about this.

This card will never exist. There have been a couple attempts since 2011 to do this with Bitcoin. The closest anyone got I'm pretty sure was Charlie Shrem. Visa/MC declined to give him permission after rounds of legal back and forth. At the time that was not V/MC policy because they had no policy on it. Now it is.

Visa and Mastercard have the ultimate say over whether a certain card will be issued, and they have a lot to lose from virtual currencies. They are not going to allow a direct route for withdrawal from crypto to fiat through an ATM. It's not going to happen.

I'm not saying this to burst anyone's bubble, I'm saying it so that a bubble will not form around this idea. Because those of us who've been transacting in crypto/fiat for a long time now understand that this is completely blocked by the card companies and is not going to get off the ground.

I completely appreciate what the OP is trying to do here and applaud his enthusiasm, but prior to a conversation with the card companies this is nothing.

It's interesting that over the last couple days, we've seen the BlackCoin market go from dropping along with the Bitcoin dip, to seeing it start to trend back up and almost hedge BTC. Although we have no direct route between fiat and BC, are we actually witnessing some investors shorting Bitcoin by going to BlackCoin? It's not a bad idea if you believe in the fundamentals of this currency (it's what we've done -- over the last couple days we've moved almost all our Bitcoin into cheap BlackCoin). I'm wondering if this is actually the case or what...

When markets were controlled by a relative few who had almost all the hard currency -- e.g. in the 1890s -- large-scale capital investment was impossible for up-and-comers. Thus Ma Bell, Standard Oil et al. couldn't be challenged by people with better ideas. The end result was a loss of efficiency in the system as a whole, until the government broke them up.

The loaf-of-bread issue is that economic output is not linear. Really, over time you get more and more output; more grain can be grown from one acre of land. Chicken costs 1/6th what it did at the start of the 20th century in real terms. Things get cheaper as we (as an industrial society) get better at producing them. And so it would make no sense if one chicken were permanently worth 0.1 oz of gold. You need to not just subdivide the gold further -- you need to create more gold, or more paper, or else people will not continue to make a growing number of chickens.

[ed] the above being the best explanation I can come up with after 6 beers, for how printing more paper or creating interest in a virtual currency is not necessarily inflation, but may just be keeping up with the rate of economic growth.