Post
Topic
Board Gambling
Re: dice.ninja - Now with Plinko!
by
dooglus
on 23/10/2014, 19:03:33 UTC
I think the SEC would see a difference. By investing you are only bankrolling. If investment was offered as shares then maybe. There are no real regulations for this sort of stuff at the moment.

Agreed.

In retrospect, "invest" was a bad word for to pick for what people do at crowd-bankrolled dice sites. It suggests to the uninformed that you're buying a share in the site when of course you aren't. I don't know what a better pair of verbs than invest/divest would be though. "bankroll/unbankroll" is clumsy, and has the disadvantage that "bankroll" is a noun as well as a verb, and so is confusing. I guess crowd-funded bankrolls are new enough that we don't yet have a good vocabulary for describing them and so "borrow" words from a related but different activity.

The SEC seems mainly concerned with unregistered share offerings, such as in the SatoshiDice case (Edit: this quote is from the SEC):

Quote
An SEC investigation found that Erik T. Voorhees published prospectuses on the Internet and actively solicited investors to buy shares in SatoshiDICE and FeedZeBirds.  But he failed to register the offerings with the SEC as required under the federal securities laws.

What sites like dice.ninja were offering wasn't anything like a share offering (it's more like a long-standing bet against the regular dice players) and so I doubt the SEC would be interested.