First of all, I think what you're doing is incredibly cool from a technology point of view. I think it's awesome you guys are pushing forward on that front.
The Smart Contract is what requires reputation. As you are sending your bet Tx only to that. So it is reputation of code, NOT people.
This trivially duplicated argument for code is pointless. Bitcoin can be "trivially duplicated" too. Just ask Charlie Lee. An experience is more than just its code base.
That's really not remotely comparable. Let's say I make a copy of bitcoin, it has little to no for anyone because it's not bitcoin or interoperable with it and doesn't enjoy the network effect, blah blah blah.
But now let's take a smart contract gambling service, let's say I duplicate it and change your 1.9% house edge to 0.1%. Which I can sanely do, because I don't have any development or operating costs. Now from a users point of view, they are two services which have the exact reputation and trust required (same code) but one means they will lose 19 times less on average. I personally would gamble on the 0.1% edge on, I guess you're counting on people like me being in the minority?
We get this sort of stuff a lot. Which is surprising to me. I never hear this stuff levelled at other software engineering teams working with open code-bases.
It's come to the point where all I can really say is, do it! We've been keeping an Ethereum Dapp live and working for a while now. We know what it takes. And we are very confident it needs a pretty damn significant team of professionals. Run a Dapp and you will see.
We're 2 years into Ethereum and we're the only live, functional, working, production gambling Dapp of this kind.
So, if it were that easy. Wouldn't someone have done it already? I really hope you or someone does do it. We'd love to work with you / whoever pulls it off.
That's not even getting into all the none engineering work it takes to grow a brand, etc, etc.