I missed this at the time it was posted, but
Daniel Cawrey wrote a piece at
coindesk that mentions TAABL (and DICEonCRACK), both services I developed and, well, the criticism as presented makes me think of the current economical situation of the world and how people look at their governments for a fix instead of trying to do something themselves. Much like an unprotected child seeks the comfort of the mother's skirt, I guess:
The AMAZING Anonymous Bitcoin Lottery
Do you like lotteries? What about one that is anonymous? Then you are going to love the AMAZING Anonymous Bitcoin Lottery. Unlike most lotteries, you won’t know where your money is going. And if you win, you won’t know where your money comes from. If that doesn’t sound suspicious to you, then you’ve probably been involved in money laundering at some point in your life.
amazingbitcoinlottery
In an environment where we’re seeing progress with bitcoin transparency, a site like the AMAZING Anonymous Bitcoin Lottery is a major disappointment. There are problems enough running a regular bitcoin operation, but in the name of making money the owners of this operation don’t want you to know anything about them. Instead, they’ll offer you other diversions to deflect those types of questions: if you get tired of playing the AMAZING Anonymous Bitcoin Lottery, you can play their other offering. It’s called Dice on Crack.
So, all non reported bitcoin transactions (where the outsider doesn't know the source or destination) are suspicious? Also, when you play the state lottery, do you know where the money comes from? Sure you do, from the people that play, just like on TAABL. The difference is that on TAABL you can be sure all the bets are accounted for without the need of an external entity and the cut the service takes is minimal, not covering the costs of developing and running it to be honest (all in the name of making money, of course).
The original TAABL was born as an experiment to interface with the bitcoin daemon, and had its moment of fame. The current version of it is quite different but keeps the same spirit. Now, no one ever asked me or the other people involved about the problems of running this "operation", and as such I offered no diversion to deflect anything. I love how it sounds like the guy tried to contact us and we avoided any reply... oh well. Half baked, silly journalism seems to be the common press style around bitcoins anyway.
All this would be fine, but he is calling bitcoin a "silly currency" and putting what might very well be the longest running bitcoin service (ok, not true, it did stop and was restarted as something a little different) in the same page as scams, schemes, money laundering, blackmail and drug deals. Color me impressed...
