The state of play for Steem gambling

In light of recent developments with Magic Dice and following today’s announcement from Moonsteem we thought it was important to open a conversation and state our position on gambling Dapps and their relation to the Steem ecosystem, including the reasons we back blockchain technology and its emerging communities.

Before we enter into the specifics of our stance on tokenised gambling Dapps on Steem I think it's important that we all remind ourselves why we became interested in blockchain in the first place. For us it quickly became apparent that blockchain is a very exciting development that can offer real freedom through technology rather than more of the same, served up by the usual suspects, do we use technology or does it use us? And for the first time it seems as though we have a technology that can cede real power to individuals rather than consumerised control through the ever-increasing power of corpocracy and broken democracies. But how does any grass-roots movement gain traction? Through risk-taking and outliers willing to take those risks. One of the beauties of blockchain technology is the real possibility for individuals, for the development of micro-communities, micro-voting and the potential for people to regain control over lives which seem increasingly cog-like in the larger machinations of state and business.

Unfortunately there will always be individuals who will take advantage of any opportunity for personal profit at the expense of others and we’ve seen that with Magic Dice as well as larger scams on other blockchains involving ICOs promising the world before the founders disappeared into the ether. What we think is very important at the moment is not to let the unscrupulous behaviour of people cause the whole Steem ecosystem to crash. Since releasing the Cupz site we’ve been transparent about our founders, our intentions and our promises. I have the utmost respect for the founders of Moonsteem and their recent statement regarding the shutting-down of their site, but I think they are fundamentally wrong on a number of points.

Primarily they are concerned that they are potentially misleading people expecting ‘for-life’ profits from playing Moonsteem, essentially they believe that people saw Moonsteem as an investment vehicle which would provide continuing and increasing returns. At Cupz we think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a tokenised Dapp offers to a burgeoning community. Sure, if you get in early, collect tokens and any subsequent dividends, you will see a steady trickle of returns for as long as the platform is profitable (and we hope it will be!), but our ultimate aim is to create a micro-economy which gives intrinsic value to tokens that can then be traded and used in a variety of ways as the ecosystem continues to develop in size and complexity, NOT to create a ponzi-style scheme of promised continued riches beyond your wildest dreams!

As the founders of Cupz we created the platform because we are interested and invested in the technology and its potential, we engage with users and the community because we are excited about the possibilities, we contribute code-wise to the community and have been discussing how to integrate Steem into other blockchains. We view Cupz as an engaging way to further the aims of the community and to offer a share in any profits made and tokenised gambling Dapps certainly have a place in the foundation of solid blockchain communities as an initial vehicle to bring intrinsic value to a growing digital ecosystem.

Essentially we don't view Cupz as an endgame, we view it as a start-game, any token-owners will become part of the Cupz ownership and then are able to engage in the future of Cupz and whatever it eventually morphs into.

I’m mindful this a long post so will bring it to a close, I’m not asking any of you to play cupz.io, but do join our Discord and let’s see what we can make!