There are very few processors in the US that will process this type of risk. I'm the founder of a lottery app company called Jackpocket and the compliance / due diligence is ridiculous. Now that DFS is seen as illegal and toxic its going to be near impossible to get someone to underwrite this risk. Time for Bitcoin to shine!
Yes. Because a currency almost completely controlled by Chinese miners who are strangling the network at 1MB blocks, causing transaction times in excess of three hours at peak and just introduced the ability to arbitrarily reverse those transactions during the lag is totally going to handle DraftKings and FanDuel.
Yep, they should just stick with the current system of 3-5 day transfers, giving over all of your personal information, and being subject to freezing/closure at the whim of authorities with no due process.
Bitcoin transactions rarely take more than 30 minutes, including peak times, if you apply a sufficient network transaction fee (right now equiv. to $0.05). It cannot be "arbitrarily" reversed. RBF is not even in production, and if/when it is, it's is a separate type of transaction that is optional and marked as such. China does not control bitcoin, yes they perform most of the mining but it's because China is huge, has cheap electricity, and produces mining hardware. There are a lot of independent actors involved and if there was foul play (which there has not been any evidence of) the network could route around China without too much disruption.
Bitcoin is not perfect and it's still in its infancy, but it is improving and it is still more censorship resistant and decentralized than any other form of money.
Ummm...all of the "conventions" about increasing block size had 5 people from China representing more than 90% of all successfully mined blocks. They won't let the block size increase because then it'd be too hard to get them across the Great Firewall.
China is currently an issue and the network won't route around them.
That's not really accurate. There are many stakeholders in bitcoin that are part of the ecosystem and all can determine its future. Mining is one part of the equation, there are nodes that validate transactions, there are exchanges that give bitcoins value by providing on-ramps to other currencies, there are merchants who accept bitcoin for goods/services, there are core developers, and finally the end users, investors and hodlers. If miners decide to damage the network through collusion, then it's unlikely the other actors will allow this for long without altering the code to mitigate the threat. What good are these ill-gotten coins if exchanges will not give them dollars for it, or users have no demand for them? Contingency plans have already been developed for this scenario and, so far, they've not been needed because the miners are as invested in the long term success in bitcoin as anyone else.
This is only the start of the corruption thats going on in the lottery. I'm the CEO of Jackpocket which is a mobile lottery app that we've been building pretty quietly. We're trying to bring the lottery into 2015, but a big part of our mission is bringing more transparency to the lottery and holding states more accountable to where to funds flow. I'm sure a bunch of you have seen the John Oliver video. The lottery has had a lot of dirty stories behind it. Really needs to be cleaned up because at the end of the day a lot of states need the revenue for social services.
Shameless promotion: If anyone is interested in giving our beta a try you can go to http://get.jackpocket.com for iOS or go to www.jackpocket.com on your Android device to download the APK
Actually a lot more secure then buying anywhere else. You actually get a digital receipt timestamped with your ID attached to it. Not to mention a picture of your ticket. You end up loosing the winning ticket and its anyone's to claim.
Just because I have a picture of a lottery ticket doesn't mean it's my ticket, and it's not gonna be good enough to take in and claim the reward myself. I still have to trust you to do that for me.
And quite frankly, I don't. I don't know you, and I have zero reason to believe that you would follow through on your promise, especially when there are potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. You're gonna have to come up with a better answer to my question than "trust us."
I think you actually understand contractual law. We've made an agreement that the ticket belongs to you, and back that agreement up with documentation showcasing that its been purchased and its been purchased on your behalf. You are the rightful owner. I would be impossible for us to cash it in. Any court of law would uphold that the ticket is yours. We have no ability to not keep our promise.
We've been super quiet about this and are not really ready to ship yet (bunch of bugs) but decided to let you guys give it a try since the Mega Millions is so big.
If you're on iOS you can use the code "money" to try it
I'm getting "Location must be enabled to use JackPocket" here in VA on my S3 running ICS. Looks like it's attempting to get a GPS lock and timing out before it gets one. Any reason you all need fine location data and coarse won't cut it?
Cool idea though- I'll definitely give it a shot if it starts working!
Totally should have mentioned this earlier. For now we're only going to be supporting NY lotteries, that's where our tickets are bought. In order to comply with current lottery rules, you have to be physically in the state of the lottery you're playing. We use GPS fencing to accomplish this.
After coming off a failure I think the part that really resonated with me talking about the fear of disappointment. I've been so afraid of disappointing others that believed in me and thought they wouldn't look at me with the same amount of respect. What I've found is that they saw it as much more of accomplishment then I almost did.
The other part is "You’re unemployable. You’re an entrepreneur." I am now in the process of meeting lots and lots of companies, big, small, new, old, re-invented and I'm finding that maybe its a case of once you've been a CEO you will always be a CEO. We will see what comes.
You mean that you hear from companies that they don't want to hire you because you have been an entrepreneur? That can't be right, it's the kind of person everyone seeks. Hack, I've paid millions in the past buying companies mostly to hire such people.
It means that once you've been in that position, you can't stomach being an underling any more, you're too impertinent and used to making decisions rather than following them. That's my take on it at least.
Yea thats what I am getting at, but I also feel that when your an entrepreneur you have an attitude that may not be in line with a more corporate setting.
No I use the term "current location" as Facebook labels it. You are correct in saying that other platforms call this differently but they are all asking the same general question. "Where do you normally live now". I think you are incorrect in the sense that this shouldn't be a supported part of the API. If your platform is based on Geo (Like Foursquare) then you can of course utilize additional checkins to help solidify the concept of a users "current location" but I still think its really important to index properly. These design decisions that you talk about were implemented before they were supporting geo tags in the API. I think its an easy design change to support this methodology. The platform, the users, and the developers would all gain.
Na, not trying to take anything away from anyone. Just want to know how this works in all honesty. Thought it was exponentially effected by time. Does anyone know the actual algorithm?
Plus I am totally cool with them yanking the tickets. If they would have said not to do it I would have removed them myself.
