Rational people expect to lose their money when gambling but not like how Magicdice took it. They operated a Steem based gambling game and pulled an exit scam yesterday. Many people including myself played there and had tokens. We expected these tokens to pay dividends far into the future and liked the fact that the game and the site worked flawlessly. Luckily for me, I was up a few hundred Steem but had invested time and effort into collecting tokens; the tokens are all gone and so is a little of my dignity. At least I stopped playing as often and warned everyone they sucked weeks ago!
No one likes getting ripped off. I thought Magicdice was enormously profitable and it was one of the best sites out there except for the low payout. Most days upwards and over 100k Steem was gambled, Magic kept 60% of the 2% house edge and distributed the rest to token holders. Even on a bad day, Magicdice likely profited hundreds of Steem-all with minimal effort and customer service. Pretty sweet if you ask me, so why did they shut down their website, transfer everything to Binance and close their Discord?
It's all so strange. On their Discord a week or so ago, they stopped by to mention work on new games. They had paid hundreds of thousands of Steem in dividends and were very profitable. There are rumours that they paid accounts to fake volume and there were many bots active mining all day long who were owned by real people here. We can only speculate about the motive behind this, was it the developer's intention all along? If I controlled the site and wanted to scam everyone I would have waited much longer. It doesn't make sense.
I don't think this is the case. Why would a thief delete a discord channel and shut down the website? Why wouldn't someone come forward and apologize? Time will tell but I doubt we are getting an apology or a refund.
A more likely scenario is that the owner had to make a quick getaway and couldn't wait any longer to rip us off. Maybe the taxman was onto them, maybe the law, or maybe they owed money to someone and had to quickly pay up. I maintain my opinion that these gaming sites are for the most part illegal as none of them makes any effort whatsoever to determine if their clientele can legally gamble. They operate beyond borders and it is definitely illegal to access their site in some countries, these 'gaming sites' ignore this fact.
It's not the first time an exit scam has been pulled and it certainly isn't the last. Gaming tokens are not an investment. They are not worth even a 10th of their expected cost to acquire through mining. Magicdice has proven a well-known fact, that you can lose 100% of your 'investment.'
Four weeks ago I said I was over Magicdice https://steemit.com/game/@crypticat/magicdice-i-m-over-it for anyone who read my blog and stopped playing at that point you're welcome! I accept tips in both Steem, SBD and/or in the form of an upvote. If you are looking for new gaming sites, check out this post for an Expected Return and Payout from Gambling with Steem
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