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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

mark.mcnally.je

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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#411

Post by noduerme »

ricardobeat wrote: post #395
noduerme wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. The original plan was to take normal payment methods (Visa/MasterCard) but it became apparent after Bush passed the ban on online poker that Costa Rica was going to follow suit (or that visa/mc would soon start holding up payments from CR casinos... in which case we might be stuck with debt we couldn't use to pay winnings). Setting up a CR bank acct as a shell requires you to hand over power of attorne…

With all this trouble, why not just set up shop in one of the many places where online gambling is legal?

I spent 3 years writing the software in my spare time, and launched it on the $20k I had in savings... personally bankrolling the games. When I began the alpha phase, you could still get an "information processing" license to run a casino in Costa Rica that would allow you to host gambling and which the credit card companies tacitly accepted and would do business with. (Those gambling payments to shady jurisdictions are how Paypal got big, and how Elon Musk made his first nine figures). But by 2010/11, all payment processors had abandoned Costa Rica, and there was nowhere in the world offering a license I could come close to affording.

I looked for investment, put together thick books of plans every few months, built 24 games... No one would get behind it, and I couldn't just shelf it, so this was how I launched it without breaking any laws.

A few months in, one existing online casino network offered me $100k to just hand it over to them and then come work for them, but I considered the offer extremely insulting.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#412

Post by Gigachad »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #387
SilverRed wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github/Gitlab pages is my choice for being free, managing https and just generally being pretty good. You can even use the CI to compile the site for you.

Ah, kids these days. So I guess by "webserver" grandparent meant "A server you actually control", and by "not webserver" people mean "It's on the cloud somewhere". GH/GL-pages still respond to HTTP/HTTPS requests, in my dictionary that's a webserver, but I guess for the millennials (I say with snark) it means "I don't have to think about what happens, it just serves my content for me."

I read "do you need a webserver" like "do you need one yourself" and freeloading off someone elses server like with GL pages counts as not having a webserver. Otherwise how else would you serve content?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#413

Post by MagnumOpus »

silverscania wrote: post #393
mvc wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got an MP on his side which seems to be all it takes these days in the UK.

The IoM isn't in the UK and nor does it have MPs. Probably just semantics but I have to point that out.

IoM has MPs, just not UK MPs. The OP almost certainly meant an MP from the Manx Tynwald parliament.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#414

Post by rualca »

noduerme wrote: post #310
elcomet wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

Uh, excuse me, but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws , no matter how large or small the jurisdiction. Had I been willing to bend laws, I'd surely be a lot richer today.

> (...) but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws,

No, not really. It shows that you went to great lengths to find ways to exploit a loophole where, even though you are clearly breaking the spirit of the law, you argue that it doesn't break the letter of the law.

I get it that you have a vested interest in keeping up the plausible deniability thing, but you know it and everyone knows it that you went through great lengths to put up a tech infrastructure which meets absolutely no requirement other than exploiting a loophole.

I mean, you explicitly expressed your personal concerns in this very discussion regarding what you personally chose to describe as testing "legally grey areas". Who do you expect to fool?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#415

Post by noduerme »

rualca wrote: post #414
noduerme wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, excuse me, but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws , no matter how large or small the jurisdiction. Had I been willing to bend laws, I'd surely be a lot richer today.

> (...) but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws, No, not really. It shows that you went to great lengths to find ways to exploit a loophole where, even though you are clearly breaking the spirit of the law, you argue that it doesn't break the letter of the law. I get it that you have a vested interest in keeping up the plausible deniability thing, but you know it and e…

I just really wanted to launch my software. Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it apart as necessary. I never even meant to take Bitcoin, let alone make it the only currency in the casino. It was just the only option if I wanted to launch. I had very little money and had written a giant gaming platform. I wanted it to see the light of day.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#416

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

funnybeam wrote: post #304
spfzero wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though stored procs will always execute on the server that is probably already the system bottleneck.

Sending multiple queries from your web server will likely put more load on the database server than using a stored procedure. With either technique you are still pulling all the data you need from the DB but with multiple queries instead of a stored procedure you are usually pulling more data than you need with each query and then dropping any rows or fields you’re not interested in. Together with multiple calls over…

>Sending multiple queries from your web server will likely put more load on the database server than using a stored procedure.

Lots of people seem to not realize that db roundtrips are expensive, and should be avoided whenever possible.

One of the best illustrations of this I've found is in Transaction Processing book by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuters where they illustrate the relative cost of getting data from CPU vs CPU cache vs RAM vs cross host query.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#417

Post by krzrak »

noduerme wrote: post #331
skrebbel wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, cURL'ing to a foreign server to get a random number and not just reading /dev/urandom is logically identical. It's a hack, just like calling into GPL'ed code over HTTP is a hack to avoid "linking" the GPL'ed code. It doesn't really suddenly turn a site from gambling site into a non-gambling site. I mean, I have mad respect for the hustle with the former MP etc. I agree with what you say in that you did not a…

What's so funny is - I was in a peer group of early btc founders who were starting random Bitcoin hustles and didn't care at all about laws. No one at that time had even approached the IoM about whether BTC was currency - nor would they have, because trying to find legal haven was the furthest thing from their minds. And so not surprisingly, the IoM didn't have a ready answer when I asked them whether gambling with B…

> Please write a book. Or an article, at least.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#418

Post by abstractbarista »

elcomet wrote: post #303
Gepsens wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a fricking genius.

He's a frickin genius because he found ways to break the law with impunity for his own profit ? I'm surprised by HN sometimes.

Yes. Gambling should be legal anyway.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#419

Post by rualca »

noduerme wrote: post #415
rualca wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) but this whole story demonstrates that I went to extreme lengths to never break any laws, No, not really. It shows that you went to great lengths to find ways to exploit a loophole where, even though you are clearly breaking the spirit of the law, you argue that it doesn't break the letter of the law. I get it that you have a vested interest in keeping up the plausible deniability thing, but you know it and e…

I just really wanted to launch my software. Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it apart as necessary. I never even…

> I just really wanted to launch my software.

Come on. Cut the bullshit.

> Which when I began coding it, seemed completely legal and possible in Costa Rica. As the laws started to change - and even before Bitcoin came on the scene - I looked for how to do it without running afoul of anything. So it's not like I set out with a plan to exploit all the legal loopholes in the world, I just adapted my code and split it apart as necessary.

You are clearly and unequivocally stating that you set to exploit all the legal loopholes once your "grey area" was made black and white in Costa Rica.

Please, spare the thread from all that nonsense. You're not fooling anyone.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#420

Post by carlmr »

noduerme wrote: post #367
j1elo wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing on a small but important detail that some have already mentioned but with a more aggressive tone... was your "loophole" system tested in an actual litigation at any point? What I mean is that this: > The IoM server would call the Swiss server every time a hand was dealt might seem like a clever loophole around the laws in IoM, but in reality it sounds to me like the kind of technicalities that wouldn't reall…

It was never legally tested. It was what I felt I had to do such that the randomness didn't take place on the island. And no randomness ever did. I was in touch with a lot of officers of the large casinos operating out of there at the time, who were curious but skeptical about Bitcoin. I think by the time they realized it was a potentially valuable thing, I had already shut down operations, because I wasn't willing t…

If you go by technicalities you could have used the argument that you're not generating random numbers, only pseudorandom numbers.
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