[Moon3D Pre-Seeding Event] Why we didn’t get the Bustabit License — Moon3D Team

[kxu1005]

To start, we want to thank the BaB team and RHavar for building out such a cool game to begin with! We also want to thank our awesome community of players, as we are so thankful to each of you. You won’t regret having picked us!



Why did we make Moon3D?



Much like most BaB players, we were fascinated by the gaming concept the first time we played it. But we soon realized we wanted more and that we could try to take the idea to the next level and manifest it with better UI/UX and features in a way that would appeal to more users. Hence, we decided to mold/modify it to make it our own.

What's different about Moon3D?



In building Moon3D, we took the time and genuine effort to dissect everything we knew of BaB and its open source codebase. In the process, we built new (never before seen) features like our bonus hunting system, profit share referral system, and our clean/futuristic graphics interface -- all in TypeScript (superset of Javascript). On top of that, we host and manage a custom exchange backend that processes near-instantaneous withdrawals! And we have much more to come...



Why didn’t we buy the Bustabit License?



Each week, we have been pushing new features to reimagine and innovate on our game! While we respect BaB's implementation, we don’t believe they own sole proprietorship to all other implementations of the idea. Like most “internet ideas,” it seems to us only the implementation matters. Unlike most “licensed” sites, we took the painstaking effort of upgrading our game beyond the usual v1 features.

And to those that believe that licensing is the only path to legitimacy, here is a recent counterexample -- a not-so favorable “licensed” site by the name of CrashDoge (and more).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/azh66t/crashdoge_crashingbitcoin_and_crashingcrypto_are/

If you're so different, why are you on license.txt in such manner?

Well, when we were notified about landing on license.txt, we contacted Daniel (BaB's current operator). And unfortunately we couldn’t come to an agreement that Moon3D was sufficiently different. While we continue to add upgrades to the game (including new crash-style games soon), we would like to open the question up to the community.

Should all implementations of the graph game be forced to conform to BaB's standards?

To Daniel and the team, we are still open to sharing our code with you privately, so you can take a look at all the changes we have made

What’s next for Moon3D?



To live up to our promise of innovating on the Crash Game concept, we have new (never before seen) crash-style games coming to Moon3D in the future! With new math and new hash chains



Join our Discord to stay updated and ask for free rolls to check us out on Moon3D!

[StackGambler]

I've played on Moon3D before. It's an extremely cool site with a gorgeous UI, and all my withdrawals went through without a hitch. The deposit bonus was pretty cool, too, never seen anything like it before (on a legit website, that is). Keep up the good work.

[areyoudonuts1]

Thanks for sharing more about why you didn't want to get the license. I have personally played some eth on the site and have withdrew 1+ eth successfully within seconds.
I would recommend you guys get your seeding even set up pretty quickly and that would be perfect

[ProfessionalBuster]

I've played on here before, deposited and withdrawn ~10ETH no problem.

Shoutout to the revamped bonus system. Got 5,000% bonus once. Very lucrative and competitive.

[tagrn1]

Regarding licensing, I think an important question is: are you running Bustabit code that you have modified, or has all your code been written by yourself?

My position would be that the idea of a crash game cannot be owned by anyone, and so it is fine for one to look at existing crash games - even reviewing the open source Bustabit code - and then write their own crash game. However, if rather than writing their own implementation one starts from the Bustabit code and adds modifications, then I have to side with the license holder

[souldriver]

I have been playing and promoting moon3D on YT from the start easy deposits and withdraws. Love the game and UI. user: ENLIL
TheDev is great.

[devans]

Why didn’t we buy the Bustabit License?



Each week, we have been pushing new features to reimagine and innovate on our game! While we respect BaB's implementation, we don’t believe they own sole proprietorship to all other implementations of the idea. Like most “internet ideas,” it seems to us only the implementation matters. Unlike most “licensed” sites, we took the painstaking effort of upgrading our game beyond the usual v1 features.

And to those that believe that licensing is the only path to legitimacy, here is a recent counterexample -- a not-so favorable “licensed” site by the name of CrashDoge (and more).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/azh66t/crashdoge_crashingbitcoin_and_crashingcrypto_are/

To my knowledge, the idea or concept of a crash game is not protected. In other words, anyone is completely free to create their own crash game. What is protected however is bustabit's work, namely the software we develop. We have published the code of an older version of bustabit's software (v1) under an open source license, the AGPLv3. This open source license allows anyone to use the code for free—even commercially!—as long as they publish their own source code under the same open source license. Casinos that want to use bustabit's v1 software but don't want to share their code have the option of purchasing a paid software license from bustabit which doesn't have that requirement.

So in short, bustabit doesn't own all implementations of a crash game, but it does own its own implementation (v1). Regardless of how many changes you make or how many features you add: If you use any part of bustabit's code then you must comply with the terms of the license.

You claim that your software is a clean room implementation that does not use bustabit's v1 code or parts of it in any way. Generally I would give you the benefit of the doubt, but for a number of reasons I believe that your claim is false and you are still using significant parts of our code:

• Your front end code shows remarkable similarities to bustabit's code, e.g. the rendering of the graph and the WebSocket protocol.
• At its launch, moon3d.io was undeniably pirating bustabit's v1 code. You have admitted this in private.
• Large parts of your FAQ were straight up copy and pasted from bustabit.com. Since then you've changed some words to obfuscate it a little but the plagiarism is still evident.

To Daniel and the team, we are still open to sharing our code with you privately, so you can take a look at all the changes we have made

That's what I asked you to do in my last email more than a month ago, but you have yet to follow through or even acknowledge my email. If I were a more cynical person I might suspect that you're delaying in order to reimplement or obfuscate bustabit's code.

[StackGambler]

That's what I asked you to do in my last email more than a month ago, but you have yet to follow through or even acknowledge my email. If I were a more cynical person I might suspect that you're delaying in order to reimplement or obfuscate bustabit's code.

This looks to me to be the case. I don't think Moon3D's intentions are malicious, and I'm sure they will end up being a great site, but from the get-go, they've had multiple issues and errors like this that they take a long time to fix. They should have created a stable, original, working release before actually putting up the site, instead of making money through piracy and then using that money to fix up what they had. Oh well.

[kxu1005]

That's what I asked you to do in my last email more than a month ago, but you have yet to follow through or even acknowledge my email. If I were a more cynical person I might suspect that you're delaying in order to reimplement or obfuscate bustabit's code.

@devans Well your reply is misleading(!), as you make us sound like we're maliciously lying. This is what we said earlier which you didn't address (i.e. asking for a call): https://i.imgur.com/hWQCi25.png

Instead, you wanted us to open source our code entirely OR provide you a full copy for review (like how? do you seriously want us to email you the entire codebase online?). Or perhaps there was some miscommunication.

Again, down to hop on a call if necessary.

[allo_moon3d]

Hi! To address your concerns in order:

It's just that if you're going to directly copy the bustabit source code you need to comply with the license.

I think this is exactly the point, we don’t believe we directly copied the BaB code at all. As a matter of fact, we took a lot of painstaking effort redesigning experience beyond the usual v1 clones and upgrading outdated packages. A lot of the changes we made are not only visually obvious, but also changes to the core stack and game functionality. 



"we are against copyright law, it's bullshit and we have no intentions of following it"

In regards to your core point on piracy, frankly speaking we don’t respect the integrity of copyrights on the internet. I spent my childhood torrenting away, because all the good content took ages to come to where I lived. Moreover, I've personally used countless stack overflow answers and several npm packages with no concern to whoever wrote them. I think a lot of people in this community have benefitted from similar use of the internet. It seems to me that a subjective moral debate around internet piracy, doesn't hinder both kxu and I from being trustworthy game operators.

If you don't have the money for a license, just keep your changes under AGPLv3 too. It's only fair.

To your point on open sourcing our code. Given all the modifications we made, open sourcing our code will open us to potential software exploits and make us less competitive against those that just copied BaB v1. As an early company that doesn't seem wise, and that's why we won't do it.



Having said that we don’t plan to leave our community with just another v1 BaB clone. And that’s why we push features constantly, almost every week we add some tweaks. And sure @StackGambler you are right to say we can be slow at pushing out all features, though we've always pulled through and gotten to the requests. And we do have plenty more features to come!



The number #1 thing players care about is playing somewhere trustworthy.

@RHavar you do bring up a really good point on trust, it is a top priority for us. We believe trust comes from: consistency over time. Each week we consistently push new features and fairly payout our players so over time players in the community will definitely take notice! We can't help that other game operators do not appreciate our approach, but we believe we can build trust with the community by continuing to prove ourselves over time. Which is exactly what we've been doing!

[allo_moon3d]

The state being largely the same is not true. There may be a few of the same variables at best, most everything else is completely different. You're only evaluating the limited scope of the minified code. Also in regards to the anti-lag algorithm. Should a one liner count?

Your description does not begin to give us credit where due! It does not mention the redesign effort and upgrading of outdated code we performed. Additionally it does not factor in our realtime ETH exchange backend or any of the visually obvious design changes that we’ve made. 


To your point on FAQ (which since Daniel pointed out, we also updated), but is FAQ really the criteria on which we evaluate software copyright? To me, it is absurd that we are even talking about the FAQ.

I don't think you're acting fairly by taking commercial software, making a bunch of improvements



Fair to who? Us getting the license certainly does not benefit crash players. At best, it would give Daniel some pocket change. It does not seem “fair” to a startup to be forced to either pay for a license or Open Source their competitive edge (in a sea of commoditized v1 clones). Hence we are sticking to our guns.

Frankly its a shame that the only people who think it is “unfair” to use the open-source code are other game operators that have cloned v1 BaB (or in your case made BaB v1). Much like George RR Martin wouldn’t be ecstatic at you downloading GOT, I’m sure you and the other license holders aren’t ecstatic about us not buying it.

Still to come out here and publicly claim we are untrustworthy (even tho we never did any wrong to our players), seems more “unfair” to me. Saying things like this “does not give me much optimism for your future” and we are “tarnishing our brand” just seems like blatant attacks on our character, rather than our actions as game operators. Still you’re entitled to your opinion. We will continue to build trust in our community one feature/one day at a time. I’m sure consistency over time will benefit us!