I think it's good that it's scary. Always makes me check 

@Evorhees -- it's a damn fine thing to stay and fight, and it's also a fine thing to leave and declare independence and live without any protection from a state. What galls me is when people think liberty is inherited and automatic, and will be handed to them on a platter. Thanks for your support. Just a radical idea -- if Free New Hampshire put together a deal between themselves, the Mohawk / Kahnawake of Canada, and an aligned tribe in the US, it could be the perfect legal storm to prove the legality of Bitcoin-based gaming in the States. We've approached tribes in the Southwest about online services, but there was little interest. Most of those tribes already have land-based casinos, and this was before Bitcoin really took off.

I'm willing to share 50% of any US revenues with a free state or tribe that's willing to shoulder the legal responsibility, to prove that UIGEA stands in contradiction of our Constitutional rights, and assert their right to operate a casino on Indian land that serves players cross-country. If a community like that was willing to back Bitcoin, it could lead to some incredible outcomes.

In retrospect, yeah... but we were talking to investors in the US, and we have mods who live in the US, and it seemed like a good idea to keep it open for play money, so we could demo the software. Maybe I'll open it again eventually, once all this ridiculous stuff dies out... but for now I gotta admit you're right, I should have done this a long time ago.

Okay...
Firstly, I'm American,,and I don't hate America. Actually I love America and I think at its best, it's the greatest country in the world. But I'm sick as hell of all my fellow citizens flooding my site and lying about their origin, and whining about not being able to play, and expecting me to deal with that and soak up the legal fallout for their failure to get it together and legalize online poker. Online everything. Because none of this SHOULD be illegal when you can walk into any donut shop in Bakersfield and gamble on the lottery.

That aside, you look at payment methods accepted for online gambling, and you'll see Bitcoin's never listed. When that's fixed up, and Americans can trade in and out without worrying about traceability, I think there can be a reasonable discussion about Bitcoin becoming a truly free currency that supersedes the USD. 'Til that point, everything bought and sold will have the mark of the Beast, and that's where we are right now. And we can't have that Beast breathing down our neck. We're free and 21. We're not gonna play Jesus to the federal reserve in the temple of democracy.

America is banned, see the main board for details...
this doesn't affect any depositors. America's a rogue country, in defiance of WTO rules, and we're tired of their citizens consistently lying to us about their identity. We hope our Canadian, South American, Asian and European players will understand and appreciate our efforts toward increased legitimacy and legality, even if it costs us some play-cash action.

don't push my buttons now, man. I'm on the warpath.

If there are enough Bitcoin users outside the US to sustain a real business like ours, then they're welcome. But we're NOT going to let ourselves be the conduit to let Americans get around their own laws by using the currency. I can't tell ya how much it's ticked me off to see one American after another log in and lie about where they came from. In the whole time we had the site, only one non-American lied about where he was from, and he was from a communist country. What's that tell you about the US?

Okay, I understand the frustration from US players, but consider two things:

#1, Your aggravation is misdirected. If you think you're pissed about US law, you should sit in on some of our board meetings. Talk to your congressman. Talk to the USDOJ. Write a letter to Obama. Get out in the street with a bumper sticker and a monkey in a little t-shirt that says "AMERICA KILLED POKER". Whatever passes for democracy these days.

Bitcoin to us is a payment method. If you think there's value in Bitcoin, then you should support our efforts to use it legally. Try depositing from the US on another poker site with your Visa card, without giving your name or your location. If you managed to get your money on, there's no earthly way you'd ever get your money back. We didn't make it this way. At least we're honest enough to just say no, we're not gonna take your deposit, and tell you to spend your time fixing the problems with your own government instead of annoying us with the fact that you live in a dictatorship run by the federal f*cking reserve. We don't want to block US players. We don't want to verify your ID. I could really not care less, personally, if you're a 9 year old mongoloid tied up in the basement of the White House for the sexual gratification of the President. (joking, people). But if we start taking your bets, we're gonna get arrested the next time we step foot on US territory. That simple. And then where do you think your money would be?

Would you run down to Thailand and screw a few boys, then head over to Colombia and grab a couple kilos of blow, and just come waltzing back through customs in Houston? No. But you think if you lie about where you live and do it on our watch, on our site, we'll mule the junk for you, right? Take off.

#2, Our signup questions are WAY less intrusive than what's asked of you from any other licensed and legitimate online casino. Any casino that takes credit cards will require a scan of your passport, another photo ID and current utility bills showing your address when you want to withdraw. What you're used to in Bitcoin are rogue betting shops that operate completely outside the law. Then you're shocked when they vanish overnight. You can't have it both ways. At StrikeSapphire, you know what you're getting is a legal casino. If you don't see that's better for the currency, I don't know what else to tell you. All we ask is your real name, your email address, and that you don't lie about what country you live in. And guess what, if you don't want to give us that? We don't want your money. Until you Americans figure out that Republicans and Democrats aren't the answer, vote in Ron Paul, and get control of your own country again, we're not about to be the easy way out for you. Stop gambling and wasting your time playing Farmville, and go out and do something useful.

I get that American players don't want to disclose anything, and every American's a special snowflake that can run around sucking up 40 gallons of gasoline a day and vote for lower taxes and more healthcare at the same time, and vote to ban gambling while illegally playing online, and ban drugs and be the biggest consumer of cocaine in the history of the universe... but we're frankly sick of getting 40 of you a day consistently lying about where you live, and y'know what? We don't give a f*ck anymore. The only reason we ever let Americans on our site was to show you what you're missing. But our conclusion is, you're lazy idiots. Get with the program, fix your country, and then come play at a real casino...until then, you're stuck with the ponzis and the crooks that'll run off with your money, and Fanny and Freddy and the Wynn and the lottery. Why should we be complicit in helping you break the laws written by your own President Bush and President Obama? If we did that, we'd be criminals living offshore. If we were offshore criminals, why not run away with your money? How would you sue us if we did? Seriously, are you dumb or something?

Think about it for a second, and understand that this is on your shoulders as a citizen. Bitcoin's not a magic bullet. The US is in deep, deep trouble and we won't do business with you. Fix your country and we'll talk later.

We've had enough of these ridiculous shenanigans. As of now, all American IPs are blocked.

Yeah, it was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but what's marketing without a little hyperbolic fluff? In case you didn't know, we've also got the Tastiest Prime Rib on the Strip, and the Coldest Beer in Town.

The right to make war is what separates sovereigns from petitioners and peasants. Sovereigns rule by mandate. Mandate is lost when the people lose faith. Just sayin'.

Well, this is pretty amazing. It's undoubtedly the first serious attempt by a government to regulate BTC, and as it's France it's going to strongly influence the currents in the EU if not the rest of the world. And of course, there are darker forces behind this attempt to regulate the market.

I don't buy the defense that bitcoin ≠ money, nor do I buy the defense that it's just a protocol. But I do think it's clearly a commodity. If Bitcoin wasn't worth money, there wouldn't be a whole lot of reasons for us to accept it as a gambling payment method, would there? But it's just a commodity -- we take it as barter and convert it in and out of currency. It's not a form of money in and of itself; it's a bridge, an e-currency, a store of value. A commodity holds its value indefinitely against fiat currencies, regulated only by supply and demand; as a limited resource, that's exactly what Bitcoin does. As a commodity, betting on it is just another speculative gamble against floating currencies. Does France stop its investors from buying pork bellies on the CME? Doubt it. What jurisdictional right would they have to do so? Under what law can France stop its citizens from paying a company in another jurisdiction to invest in a commodity on their behalf? Investing in Bitcoin isn't any different from investing in gold or copper or anything else with a limited supply. That's the way to approach it and to fight this thing.

TLDR: Google "casino payment methods" and demand those sites list Bitcoin as a legitimate payment method.

We're moving into the next phase of our expansion. Here's our analysis of the current Bitcoin poker/casino market, in a nutshell: Where gambling's not illegal, Bitcoin's redundant as a payment method. But that shouldn't be true, because it's head and shoulders a better payment method than any other, at least for an instant-transaction casino like ours.

So since we're the best BTC casino ever, our plan is to focus on the currency first, and get all those Bitcoin skeptics onboard. At least in the gaming/casino realm, which we think has a strong future. Bitcoin should be treated as well as any other e-currency, but it's not even listed -- not on any site in that search. We deserve, and we need, at the very least to get equal treatment with the Paypals and Netellers of the world.

Here's what we need. DON'T promote us, just go to any site in that search and DEMAND THAT THEY LIST BITCOIN AS A METHOD. With the power of everyone here, we CAN break the banking rackets. Get with us...Google "casino payment methods" and demand that those sites list Bitcoin!!!! =)

Outta curiosity, if you guys never took deposits and your software basically cost nothing to launch, why did you close instead of sticking with it?

You guys never took deposits? Wtf is this thread about?

Edit: Okay, after reading the other threads... no one ever deposited according to BTC PR. So Juggernaut118, were you bluffing? I think it's on you at this point to show that you deposited if they say you didn't, and no one ever did...

RE-EDIT: On the other hand, the "New deposit process" name of this thread definitely makes it sound like you already had a deposit process... (?!) BTCPokerRoom, a fuller explanation than calling the player a moron would probably help clear this up...

What stops a legitimate online casino from running away with players' money? Incorporation, licensing, paying taxes in a proper jurisdiction, and a sufficient long-term investment of time and money. All of that spells a legitimate business. Good rule of thumb (and this is true for non-Bitcoin, Costa Rican casinos that take US players, who we won't do business with either): If a company's willfully breaking the law, or encouraging their players to break the law, or haven't researched the law or don't give a damn about the law, if they're not incorporated where they're doing business, aren't licensed, and have a website that took about a week to build, then those are all great reasons to think that they don't give a **** about stealing your money. Look on Casinomeister.com at the "Rogues" section, and you'll see it's a common problem all over the industry, not just in the 0.001% constituted by the Bitcoin market. But Bitcoin's a completely new market, and it's empowered a lot of undercapitalized sites that would never otherwise have been able to open as casinos. Including ours. To this point, almost all of the Bitcoin sites out there match the textbook description of rogues. They're slapped up overnight with no-name software that looks 10 years out of date, have no legal standing, have no contact information, and few reasons not to disappear in an instant with your money. I'm just telling it like it is.


Weaver, I give BTCOnTilt credit, in spite of you saying that you've gotta be our adversaries, because I think BTCOnTilt is one of the only Bitcoin sites that's, at least from what I've seen, made a good-faith effort to run an honest, transparent poker business, come clean with players in all circumstances, and get on the right track to becoming a legit business as opposed to a fly-by-nighter. I'm assuming you've at least developed a legal argument for why poker in BTC doesn't violate UIGEA...and if you're willing to go to court, and it holds water, you'll be the American poker heroes of the decade. There's no doubt there's a huge market for what you're doing. Believe me, we've been tempted to take US players. But taking the shortcut of accepting them could turn into a longcut if the DOJ gets interested -- and given their interest in Bitcoins already, it's not a huge leap to imagine why they would. You're a lawyer, right? So maybe the point is to get this in front of a district court and make your bones. Our lawyers have less than zero interest in testing that. But it does mean that players have a right to be concerned about what happens if some grand jury hands down an indictment, regardless of where the wallet is. IMHO you should get outta the US market and physically outta the States as soon as possible.

OUR players have a right to be concerned about our standing as a Costa Rican casino. I'm the first to admit CR ain't the most rigorous jurisdiction, which is why we publish and hold to our own standards. But obviously after putting 10,000+ hours into software development and legal work, the main object for us is to license our code to other casinos for $50-70k/month, not to blow all our work by stealing a few bucks from Bitcoin players. The best insurance we can give our players is that the software and the legal status cost us 500-1000x the amount of player cash we're holding in our system; and we'll be making that back over the next few years by keeping them coming and playing, and keeping our 5%...and by proving how stable and reliable we are, so we can license our software to the big guys.

It's a good question and something we went through every possibility with before settling on our own solution.

We didn't want to use a trading house's API, we wanted to manage and hold our own funds so we'd know our money was safe. We run CentOS, so we had to compile our own version of the bitcoin client. We've made that version available here if you need it: https://strikesapphire.com/bitcoind.0.3.22.bin.tar.gz

It's a slight hassle to set up, but it's secure. Basically, get that Bitcoin daemon running somewhere else, on a cheap dedicated server. Turn off mining so you don't piss off your hosting company. Then just write a little remote PHP script on the Bitcoin server that takes an argument returns an address from the wallet. Lock that down with .htaccess. When someone on the webserver requests an address, you can just call the remote page with the proper password and read the result as text. Or you can get more sophisticated using cUrl and having callback scripts, but in your case you might not have to. This does two good things: Firstly, it keeps the wallet off your webserver. Secondly, it keeps it on your own turf, which is where you probably want it.

If you look at the cost of a $100/month dedicated server versus what you're paying in transaction fees, it probably makes sense (it does for us), and anyway you can use that server for lots of other backend stuff if you like. It's always nice to have a dedicated around.

Given the new rules on the forum (which I think are good) we're starting this as the official Sapphire thread. Future bonuses and announcements will be posted here, and reps will follow this thread to respond to any questions or comments.

Just a reminder, $1.10 NL Hold'em Freerolls are running 24/7. See ya here!

Josh Strike
Founder/CEO

Most casinos actually tell you RTP (return to player), which is what you're talking about. You commonly hear that a certain slot machine has a 92% RTP. A 100% RTP means the player breaks even over time. A 100% ROI means you double your investment.

Another way of putting it is that RTP=ROI+1

And the number one reason casinos talk in terms of RTP?  ...drumroll please... because all casinos have a negative expected ROI to the player.

It's gettin hot out, ain't it? So stay inside in the A/C and make some FREE Bitcoin!

StrikeSapphire announces our new, 100%-up-to-$100 bonus, from now until August 31st. Just use the bonus code:
DogDays11
when you deposit.

We're still running big ol' $1.10 freerolls around the clock in both Poker AND our original "Risk"-style game ChipWars...you're sure to find a game. Heck, play three of 'em each at the same time!

If you haven't tried StrikeSapphire, just ask around here, we're not only the fastest, sexiest and fairest Bitcoin casino out there -- we're the best in any currency.

Our RTP in our first month, after bonuses and freerolls has been a full 101.34%. We're bleeding Bitcoins! And we're committed to radical transparency. Check out https://strikesapphire.com/reports and see every card and every spin for yourself 

Very cool idea. Very unique take on real-money gaming. It's not just new for Bitcoin, it's new, period. I love original stuff like this 

Hey...Say what you gotta say...but we just found 100 Bitcoins layin' under the couch. In light of this development...

#1 We just upped our round-the-clock freerolls to a fully serious 0.1 BTC each at today's price (=$1.10) -- now through Sunday, play up to six at the same time, as often as you like!

#2 Deposit and use this code to get a 100% bonus up to $100:

GetUpGetOUT

Code expires Sunday at Midnight!!!

Cheaper than the kibbitz room? Don't think so. Now play it like Paul would, boys...before you're old & gray =)