I'm surprised by HN sometimes.
I mean, I have mad respect for the hustle with the former MP etc. I agree with what you say in that you did not actually break the law - because you found a loophole (made a loophole? hustled it? again, I'm impressed). You ran a gambling site from IoM though :-)
It added a nice little feature too, which was that every spin and deck could be stored on a separate server that would show them all at the end of the day. This was a little before "proven randomness" took off in btc casinos, but I made the RNG reports available daily for analysis (without explaining the whole infrastructure, obviously).
[edit] I just want to say that yes, you're obviously right, and yeah, I ran a casino from the IoM... without anyone knowing if that was okay or not... and it was just a moment in my life. of which I'm proud, I guess. I was living illegally in a small apartment in Alhama de Granada after violating my EU visa. hah. It was a great, great piece of software and I don't know if I'll ever write anything that good again. But it didn't really change my life or anything.
Around here (and probably elsewhere) bars aren't allowed to make wine stronger by adding spirit.
So if you mix a drink from wine (or similar) and spirit in that order you might lose your license.
Put the spirit in the glass first and all is ok.
I guess at this point it is just a shibboleth that inspectors use to see if the bar has read the rules at all, kind of like the no brown m&ms.
Point is though: rules matter, you can lose your license over it.
No, not really. It shows that you went to great lengths to find ways to exploit a loophole where, even though you are clearly breaking the spirit of the law, you argue that it doesn't break the letter of the law.
I get it that you have a vested interest in keeping up the plausible deniability thing, but you know it and everyone knows it that you went through great lengths to put up a tech infrastructure which meets absolutely no requirement other than exploiting a loophole.
I mean, you explicitly expressed your personal concerns in this very discussion regarding what you personally chose to describe as testing "legally grey areas". Who do you expect to fool?
This isn't a court of law. I can understand trying to avoid language that makes it sound like you may have been in violation of the law to a judge or jury, but you literally described that what you did was intended to keep operating a service that had been banned by using an absurd technicality in the definition of the ban.
I'm honestly surprised it worked (though having a former MP of the tiny nation you were operating in as a lawyer might have helped) considering that your service still facilitated online gambling directly and was advertised as such, despite the randomness source being on a remote server rather than local.
In other words, using a non-local randomness source (like a remote server you cURL into or a webcam pointed at a bunch of lava lamps) is functionally indistinguishable from a local dice roll or other source of entropy. This "hack" is so flimsy it likely wouldn't hold up in court in a nation that is actually interested in pursuing such violations that has a population larger than a small city.
When I did it, the only thing I was really afraid of was getting arrested if/when I stepped back on American soil. There was redundancy so I could run the whole thing in Costa Rica if I had to cold shutdown the IoM servers. And the coin was in private wallets, mostly on my laptop. But I was very concerned about breaking any laws, anywhere. I was the only one to implement ID verification and fully block American players.
Call it a hack or whatever, they wanted my business and I needed their servers, and I split up my code so it would be legal according to their laws. Not too different from what a lot of companies do.
Morally dubious? For sure.
Just because OP isn't in jail doesn't mean they didn't break the law. Laws are broken all the time.
Generous to assume that all that break laws go to jail.
His solution was a clever hack because he worked around the law without apparently breaking it directly - clever.
That said gambling systems are specifically one class of software I refuse to work on.
Incidentally both gambling AND fintech (including crypto) are on the list of industries I refuse to do work with. So I guess BTC gambling would have been off the table for two reasons.
First, he did comply with all applicable law. No laws were broken.
Second, he did not break the spirit of the law. The law clearly allows gambling from the Isle of Man.
Third, he did not conflate the law with morality. What is the morality of a 400,000 GBP 'licensing' fee? Laws around licensing are weird. Another poster mentioned that pouring wine than liquor into a glass is illegal, but liquor then wine is fine. Not much moral sense in that reg.
There is no "The law", just a bunch of different jurisdictions with different laws. He didn't break Switzerland law. Does Switzerland's law not matter for some reason?
Obviously he did not break the law, finding holes like that is the number one job of a tax-lawyer.
