Thank you guys,

We have been thinking about the confidence of our customers that their coins are safe and cannot be hacked or stolen by the operators. The track record of the other similar services is just so awful that discussing this matter in the open is the prudent thing to do.

However, the actual implementation is not so easy yet. Our own expertise is from the finance, not from bitcoin technology. I don't say that it would be difficult for us to implement just about anything we want, but we want to not compromise the casual user's ease of placing bets. Our spex says that the site needs to be usable in 3 seconds after clicking the link, and in 3 minutes the joe6pack would have been able to figure out how to fund the account, to have done it, figure out how to bet, and to to have done that. Complicated technical solutions must be implemented without any extra effort from the user's side.

In the beginning we wanted to use the blockchain for registering bets, but needed to scrap the idea for 3 reasons:
- Blockchain bloat and sharply increasing tx fees
- We want to appeal to more people than the number of current bitcoin users, so it must look good and be easy to use
- Compromising the payouts for users using shared wallets (educating an increasing number of less technical users does not work)

If there is a fair implementation for blockchain escrow, we would jump on it, to offer it for our advanced users, who use the service for hedging and seldom do anything but the maximum (BTC100) one time transaction, and whose position may rise to 1000s. It is unlikely that a casual bettor would profit from this, except if it does not cause any extra hassle whatsoever.

Our current risk management approach leans on the following pillars:
- Strict maximum one-time bet of BTC100
- Our trading engine adapts to bets and changes the rates according to bets placed so far
- Widening spread in times of high volatility
- Possibility to hedge with other exchanges (unlikely to work in practice, as with all probability they have the same skew in their orderbook as we do)
- Underwriting system, where the total orderbook risk is insured with bondholders as in MPEx or underwriters as in Lloyds (or both). We consider that the prudent way is to insure all risk beforehand. We would never sell a contract that, if winning, would lead to insolvency. We have sufficient BTC to ensure this, our first worry is rather to grow a healthy userbase soon enough to capitalize on the opportunity. We believe that it anyway takes some time for the big money to find a new service because of trust issues, and accept it. The first months are needed for our odds-calculating software to adapt to the market conditions, and we don't even want to have too high volume when our system could still be exploited by a nimble trader or ruthless manipulator.

Please elaborate further, how this could be done. We have no need for the coins before the maturity, so if there is no risk to us, or hassle to the user, we certainly want to give it a shot.