18.17
Unknown
BT: Where are you originally from, where do you live now, and what is your background in terms of education and previous employment?
JS: I was born in LA, but most of my family has lived in Las Vegas since the early '70s. I grew up around floor managers, pit bosses and bartenders, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the coffee shop at the Sahara, keeping track of my Mom's keno cards and wandering around the edges of casinos hiding from the Sheriff while my Mom played slots.
I started to think in terms of odds at a pretty early age. I remember stealing a bunch of keno cards so I could set up a game for my friends in third grade. Around the same time, my half brother graduated from Cal Poly SLO [California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo] as a programmer, and gave me his TRS-80 Model 100 laptop from RadioShack, along with the original manual, which had everything you needed to know to start programming in BASIC. It had 16k of RAM, ran on AA batteries, and I took it everywhere, along with a tape recorder for saving programs. So I was sitting in Vegas, turning the odds on keno cards into little simulations when I was eight years old.
Later on, in 1995, I got a summer job doing graphic design for an ad agency in LA and worked that and a coffee shop job until the end of high school. I then moved to a crackhouse hotel on Jones & Geary in San Francisco and got a job in Web design, and taught myself Flash and PHP. After the bubble in 2000, I tried college for a year at Pratt Institute, but I'm not a big team player and organized education didn't agree with me. I was getting burned out on design, so I dropped out and became a cab driver for a couple years in LA. After that I drifted to New York and waited tables at the Carnegie Deli and Deluxe on Broadway, and dealt underground blackjack & poker games in Harlem and the Bronx all night. Finally I found myself broke in New Orleans after a bad three weeks of solid gambling, and took the train back to LA to start my life over.
Once back in LA, I got a job working for a guy who ran an instant postcard montage kiosk at a mall, and did Bar Mitzvahs, and worked for him as a speed-Photoshopper for about a year doing 20
BT: How did you get started in the online gambling business?
JS: I guess I came by it honestly, but I'm definitely an outsider in the business, to put it mildly. About 3-1/2 years ago in New Zealand, I was the only coder on contract for the now-defunct sexypolitics.com, which was this video strip quiz site about the 2008 elections. It ended up getting bought out by Fox, who shelved it. I sat down to think about what to do next; I wanted to start my own site, and I compared a bunch of different business models.
I couldn't get past the allure of gambling. I knew it would be hard to satisfy the legal regulations, but it turned out I had no idea how hard that would actually be. I just happened to have the time and money to sit down and do something for myself, so I started writing a casino. I had the basic framework for Sapphire and a working blackjack and poker game in about six months; after about a year I had ten games. I started beta testing, ironed out a lot of bugs, and by the end of year two we had about 15 games and a couple of lawyers on board, and I thought we were ready to open for business.
I actually thought it was as simple as incorporating in Costa Rica, staying away from US players and signing up with some payment processors. Man was I wrong. Online gambling is a tight club, and they aren't accepting members - ever. Pity the fool that wanders into this naively. You've really got to do something unique to break into the club. I spent a year talking with lawyers and investors and payment processors, trying to get things working. The bottom line was, we probably couldn't have launched it for less than seven figures. And then along came Bitcoin...
What's been awesome about Bitcoin is, we get to start small and focus on the software. We can test the system, train employees, learn day-by-day how to run it, and be making enough to prove the concept from day one, without breaking any laws anywhere or exposing ourselves to more risk. And it's completely possible that in a year or two we could actually bootstrap it to other payment methods, without ever paying to buy into their club, and they'd be scrambling to catch up with us in the Bitcoin market. That's how I'm thinking, and I love the idea.
BT: How difficult was it to write the software?
JS: I wrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it. It's about 500,000 lines of code, front and back, and I know every line by heart. I don't think it could've been written any other way. One of my heroes is Chris Sawyer, who wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon back in 1999. He is supposedly the last person to publish a game that is completely written by one coder. I wouldn't compare myself to him because he writes in Assembly and he's a complete genius, but I've always believed in the DIY ethic.
BT: Are there any additional features coming to Strike Sapphire?
JS: Yes. I'm adding new features constantly, and soon I hope I'll be adding coders who'll be adding more features. Since we launched, I've brought in lobby chat, special FX for VIP players when they win, and improvements to a lot of the underlying systems for smoother performance in a lot of games. But more than anything else, I want to focus on inventing new games. So far, I think Mayan Gold, Sixty Watt Slots and Sapphire Keno are our most original, but there are about six more I've got on paper right now that'll seriously blow people's minds. I just need some spare time, because suddenly I'm deep into casino management and expansion and trying to train up new employees.
BT: Why should I gamble online at Strike Sapphire vice other Bitcoin casinos?
JS: Well, I could give you a stock answer but I guess, if you dig it, do it. I think the fact that all our table games are multiplayer gives us an advantage in the community because people can play and
Also, we do things with a level of transparency that no other casino does, like showing every single blackjack shoe and publishing our randomness reports every day. I'm not going to hammer on the bonuses or freerolls or whatever, because every casino has stuff like that, and honestly ours aren't as loud and splashy as others. But with us you know what you're getting. I think people should just check out all the sites and decide for themselves if we're better.
BT: Do you have any other projects in the works?
JS: (laughter) I'd like to build a 14-foot-wide version of Mayan Gold and put it in the Luxor, but I had a fight with the architect, and I'm kind of full up right now anyway...
BT: What sorts of projects would you like to see developed for Bitcoin?
JS: Anything that makes it easier to transact through Bitcoin is a good thing for the currency, and a good thing for us. I think the biggest hurdle is exchange, so I love the ATM concept, and the green address idea; we'd love to work with that. If you have a larger volume of generic, day-to-day transactions going on all the time, the market will stabilize and you'll have less volatility, less speculation. I think bootstrapping Bitcoin as a global currency is going to be a two-step process, and step one is stabilizing it as a medium of exchange between other currencies - a cheap way to get money online and send it to someone who can withdraw it. The second step is we have a completely functioning Bitcoin economy where you don't need the exchanges, and then the doors come off. Step one seems to me a prerequisite to step two, so we're happy to be helping with that.
BT: ...so I guess you think Bitcoin has a pretty bright future!
JS: I think it has an extremely bright future, and I'm not the only one. One of my partners in this project, who contributed to our initial float investment, was a co-producer on two of the three best-selling video games of all time. He prefers to remain anonymous so that's all I'll say, but it was my decision to go with Bitcoin that convinced him to get into it. Another friend of mine who works for Yahoo in a senior payment-related role has been asking me about Bitcoin too. People are curious. I think it needs to gain critical mass, and part of that is going to be ease of use, including ease of use as a simple exchange instrument without having to hold it or worry about it going down.
Another important thing is showing that the community can police itself so that Bitcoin doesn't end up being a medium of exchange for mostly illegal businesses. That's one reason we try so hard to be compliant with US laws, and I wish other casinos would see that it's in their best interests to do that too.
I think Bitcoin will go through a period of increased hardship as governments crack down and a lot of the sites you see now are targeted for illegal activity. All that's an excuse for governments to demonize the currency, to delegitimize it. But in the end, I don't think governments can actually shut it down. And if more legitimate sites pop up that have nailed down what we have - basically a plan for working within the system at the early stages, keeping it legal, hedging Bitcoin risk and just using it as a free way of receiving payments - then an explosion of Bitcoin value could happen pretty fast. That explosion has the potential to radically change the world.
Posted in: bitcoin,bitcoin casino,gambling,interview,josh strike,strike sapphire
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