A blog by @ooak
It's a place for me to give birth to my thoughts. Meta thoughts about "Steemit", external thoughts about life and experiences. My aim is to bring value to people, entertain the audience and craft my writing skills all at the same time. I will write short to medium size blogs because I believe that today more than ever time is money and attention is hard to get.
Online gambling or betting is a highly regulated market. Many countries ban them entirely (like the USA). Here is a short story about how an unregulated underage billion dollars gambling market had developed under the noses of authorities all over the world.
Around the summer of 2013 Valve (a game distributor and publisher) had presented an update to their popular game Counter Strike. The update presented design for different guns called "skins". The "skins" can be earned and bought through the game. They also hold monetary value according to their rarity in-game and are traded on the "Steam Market".
Through the years since the introduction of "skins" to the game many websites had opened using "skins" as currency. You could use a "skin" to bet on professional games or could gamble them in online type of casinos featuring roulette or card games. You could also trade "skins" on 3rd party marketplaces for real money. The meaning of it is that they hold real monetary value. Thousands of site opened wanting to capitalize on this gambling frenzy. Everyone could gamble. Kids could gamble, citizen of countries were gambling is banned could gamble. There was no regulation due to the fact it's considered as "virtual items" who has no value in the real world.
Everything was going smoothly in the skins gambling world until few months ago it started to collapse. A known streamer that was sponsored by a gambling site exposed the fact that the games were rigged. He used this information to show on his videos how he won big sums of money. Of course most of his users were young naïve kids that were primed to swallow the pill and dive into gambling. This exposure was the first domino to tip. It caused a series of
exposures of different sites and figures of the streaming and Counter Strike community.
Few known streamers who used to gamble live or on videos, owned gambling websites. They never disclosed the fact they owned the website they were gambling on. They also presented a false showing of them winning big knowing the games were rigged in their favor.
Currently there are some official lawsuits against them and it is yet to be seen what kind of
legal action will be taking. The fact is that they ran illegal gambling websites. Didn't disclose the fact they own the sites. They also tempted underage users to gamble. Valve as a large
corporation panicked and started sending letters of cease and desist to gambling sites. They stated that those sites using their API are breaking their TOS. Although those sites operated for years with Valve knowingly helping them.
In the fight between "humanity" and "Greed", "humanity" lost. Valve profited from skins
selling. Sites were taken advantage of young and stupid kids to scam their money. Also famous online figures wanted to profit from it by opening or partnering with sites. They lured their followings to gamble.
This story also shows you that regulation is painfully slow. A Billion dollar industry of illegal underage gambling can operate without interference for 3 years.
Here is a good video [13:37 min] exposing one of those sites owners:
Shower Thought: Steemit can facilitate legal sports betting without risking money.
