You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: ALERT - Betting account run by a trusted member of Steemit found to be a scam

in #steemsports8 years ago

I am interested in the audit findings. Everything is on the blockchain. Instead of speculation, I will withhold my opinion until definitive evidence is presented.

The social question I pose to the group is this:

  1. If no malice or fraud is shown, the what? @nikflossus apologizes and the community embraces these users for running a legitimate endeavor. Resteeming and upvoting for them seems a reasonable compensation for potentially false accusations.
  2. If found guilty of malice and fraud, then what? Do we ban or shun them? There really is no way to recover lost rewards and upvotes that a perpetrator has gained. What stops a bad actor from just creating a new account and starting over?

Do we institute a requirement for an independent 3rd party (holding org, trustee, or bonded administrator) to manage these games? How about mandating a digital contract, like Ethereum (or Steem perhaps), which runs the scripts and automatically dispenses payouts?

Recommendation
In the meantime, while we debate (as we should), how about for all such games of chance, we require the administrators to post the results which must include:

  1. The outcome of the game (winner)
  2. A list of player's usernames of the winners
  3. Date and amount paid to the winners
  4. Fees taken by the administrator
  • This should be an independent post, completed within 1 week of the known outcome. I would recommend any upvote earnings for this post be given directly to the game administrator, as compensation for their effort and reward for their honesty & transparency.
Sort:  

Your recommendations are sound. I agree with them.
And whilst I agree that it's polite and civilised to withold judgement on something, I lost 25 games in a row. I as ignored and then mocked for complaining. Others experienced the same thing. And it looks like more well known users were paid whether they lost or not.
This isn't a mistake.
These accounts are run by @virtualgrowth and he is guilty as hell.

I understand your frustration and totally respect the fact you are bringing this up in a community conversation (and providing evidence)! From a principle perspective, I just always revert back to innocent-until-proven-guilty (one of the more important foundations of the U.S. legal system). A proper audit will bring out all the facts, minus emotions. That is best for all.

I think we will get to the bottom of this. Hopefully soon!

The more I think of the possibility of future potential exploitation with these types of activities, the more I think my recommendations will help promote a strong moral code and weed out potential fraudsters. We are very short on punishment options as a deterrent, therefore we must focus on prevention and rapid detection. I was thinking of drafting up a full blog on this, with my recommendations above.