ah fuckit. SO yeah, I lived outside the US and ran a bitcoin casino for some years for non-US players, which was blocked to US IP ranges and required IDs to eliminate US customers (even though Bitcoin gambling still wasn't officially illegal at the time). My general idea was to make a casino for smart people who liked puzzles, so to that end I built games that would let people have an even-money chance if they played the game perfectly.
The coolest thing that came out of this was one of my players went on to build an escape room in the Netherlands that used one of my games as a puzzle to solve to get out of the room. Here's some stuff from that casino (it was active from about 2010 to 2013).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJV40hu9J38 https://youtu.be/rkRfSAtCYAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD4GqCAAsmo
My advice to anyone is not to get into that industry, even though you can make any game you want and people love the games and the business model sounds way better on paper than selling your games through an app store... the civilized world has ganged up to make sure you won't succeed, or that if you do you'll either kick all your money back through licensing schemes or else be arrested. It's basically too good to be true and too profitable. You can't make money at it unless you're in the club.
Do you have any other interesting stories or references to that time of your life?