Game of money with bitcoins?

[piranha]

Just sending out a question to see what the response is. The idea of games where you bet money and the winning player / team gets prize pool has been thrown around here a few times. It seems to me that it could be done. Games where skill is the deciding factor are legal here and after doing pretty good research online it seems that most countries do accept it as long as its skill based and not luck.

If anyone have texts that says otherwise please post links in this thread.

I've been thinking about how to do it for Warbarons. How to solve it for the game seems quite simple.
I'm imagining that you under the advanced tab can set a buy in for the game. For example 1 - 100 Euro (or what currency we happen to use). Then each player would have to spend that to buy into the game when selecting a color.
We would have a percentage rake that we take per game.
The rest goes to the winning player(s).
Only ladder games can be about money (to not create different competition areas)
It would be possible to have a ladder about winning money but then I think we would need to have a option to be private and not listed on that ladder.

The current credits could not be used for money games since you can use Paypal to fund credits and they don't accept games about money, and since we give ladder winners credits we would be ruined by Igor .

So instead there would have to be another type of money that you play money games with let's call them Warcoin.
The first question to ask is what funding system to use. I've looked into this a lot for a long time now and it's not an easy question. Since I want it to be possible to deposit and withdraw your Warcoin instantly without manual work from us. We only want to support one funding option when we start or we will need to have coverage for all the Warcoin in both funding options which we are too poor and small to do for now .

I want something that is easy to fund everywhere and even if WebMoney accept this activity it's really difficult to open and fund a WebMoney account outside Russia and the countries near Russia. It took me a lot of work to get our account accepted and funded.

I've looked at Skrill and Neteller for this. Either of them is one option. The other option is a digital currency that had a lot of coverage in media the last weeks and that is bitcoin. After looking at this for a long time now I can see many good reasons to go with BitCoin, but there are some bad too. So I want to ask those of you who could be interesting in games about money about your thoughts and opinions on this matter. Would you accept using bitcoins?

The main reasons I want to go with bitcoins are:
Integrating BTC (BitCoin) is really smooth. The API (programming interface to send and receive money) is very good.
I've been in contact with skrill and neteller and it's like a wall for a small business. They want to know the size of our business and when I tell them how small we are and expected deposits I receive no more replies so I'm sure we could get started months faster with BTC.

It's easy to fund and withdraw bitcoin through several different exchangers http://www.mtgox.com is the most popular but there are many others. It can be funded from bank transfers or other e-currencies.
BitCoin is a peer 2 peer currency where all clients act as verifiers and together keep track of all the existing money and what wallets it's located in. There are no transaction fees when sending it between wallets and no regulations of what you may do with it.

The bad for something like this with bitcoin is that it's a bit like a stock, there is a limited number of bitcoins so the value of the bitcoin is going up and down from people speculating on it. As long as the number of people who are using bitcoin increase the value of it will increase over time but it could also drop if enough people want to withdraw and if a bitcoin crisis should occur the value could collapse. Since the start it's been increasing, with many ups and downs but there is a risk factor using it.

To find out more about bitcoin read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Here is a realtime graph: http://bitcoinity.org/markets

[Omen]

[myhumbleopinion]

Keep your game clean. This is a beautiful thing you made, don't whore it up

[/myhumbleopinion]

[piranha]

Is it the idea of playing about money, the bitcoin involvement or both that you don't like?

[Omen]

Is it the idea of playing about money, the bitcoin involvement or both that you don't like?

Both. For me, Warbarons is an old school fantasy from the golden age of gaming, not a materialistic medium

[Igor]

I think a little bet is able to raise interest to game. No million dollars/euro cannot be earned by any player, but this can be a stimulus to think more about every game. In the same time, as I understand, every player will be able to choose, what kind of game to use: warcoins, or just ladder, or even non-ladder games.

What about BitCoins, I didn't see yet how to exchange them in real money, is it an exchange office or something else.

[Igor]

I just read that exchange rate of BitCoin dropped down from 230 to 75 usd from 11 to 12 april this year on Mt.Gox.
Description of this (in Russian language) is here: http://www.itar-tass.com/c11/704399.html and http://tasstelecom.ru/news/one/18689
There also wrote that three years ago 1 bitcoin had price 0.05 usd. Looks like this currency can jump up and down too much for short time.

[Igor]

Piranha, when you will start playing of warcoins, I would ask to let me to take part in the first such game, if possible.

[tabanli]

Also IRS doesn't like betting without taxation. They restricted access to most of the famous online poker sites. I think current system of gaming credits works well.

[Igor]

I would like to say something for defending WebMoney system. As I heard, very many sites for online poker used this transfer system. Very many players from different countries play there: most countries of EU, many countries of South America, Russia and countries of post-USSR, Australia, Asia. As such many countries use WebMoney, this can show that it's easy enough to open account with low level, just for simple user (cash in, cash out). I think all of us, who will wish to take part in games on credits/warcoins, will be able easily open own WebMoney account.
So, I vote for WebMoney.

[piranha]

Tabanli: I'm not sure this falls under the gambling law since its not based on luck. King.com is the second largest company on facebook and their business is simple computer games about money and I think it's legal to play there in the US? How does the IRS look at this? Warbarons would never be about the amount of money you see on a poker site. I mean it takes 1 week or more to complete a game compared to 1-3 minutes to play a poker hand.

Igor: If we use WebMoney for this (which I know several poker sites do) I think we would need to complement with something that is easier in other regions of the world. Most poker sites have 5+ different funding options but we can't really have that. Perhaps WebMoney + something else like neteller. Bitcoin would be nice but as you say it's going up and down a lot.