There are some challenges though, like multi account cheating, and bot players.
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/02/seals-with-clubs-chair...
The truth is, Micon was the "chairman", but the actual operations and such all took place out of country.
Crypto currency gambling is legal in the United States so long as there is no USD involved because crypto currencies are akin to stocks. You don't pay capital gains until you convert stocks into USD or other fiat currencies.
The implication is that somehow Micon may have been turning BTC from seals into USD and not giving a cut to the Nevada Gaming Commission.
How are they preventing underage gambling if the site is completely anonymous?
There are a few things you could potentially do to make it not worth their time. The first is to take money before assigning a table, and then randomly assigning the person. The second is to have the house take such a large cut that even with collusion it's not profitable.
You still have to worry about Sybil attacks. It's one thing for me and my 3 friends to play poker together and try to land at the same table. It's another for me and my 1000 bots at different IP addresses (bots who will, of course, play computationally perfect games and collude any time they are at the same table) to try and beat the odds.
Even in the far fetched scenario where you place participants in Faraday cages, they can still communicate by timing bets, changing amounts, etc.
As others have mentioned, proxies and out of band communication make it nearly impossible to really detect.
That said, detecting blatant or clueless collusion is fairly simple, as things like chip dumping and soft-playing can become fairly obvious just by observing play.
What? How do you justify that conclusion? That seems at odds with most of the history of gambling.
You make the most money if you appear trustworthy but aren't.
The newer a poker site is, the more likely it is to be shady, simply because it hasn't had anecdotal reports of it not being shady from actual players.
So, no. Wise decision, at least if you're Stateside. Government wants to preserve its monopoly on gambling.
I'm not sure if losing your customers coins is such a great business model.
It involves a clever trick for keeping hole cards and the deck initially secret, despite the fact that everything in the blockchain is public.
