Satoshi Aces – Closed Because Of Having Been Hacked?
Satoshi Aces, when it was first established in November 2013, was designed to mimic the success of Satoshi Dice, without the factor of being “un-interesting to play”, according to Satoshi Aces owner. The game was designed to have user interaction other than the “rolling” of online dice, that engaged players that knew how to play poker, an opportunity to see more than just a number pop up after a dice roll. While the concept sounded unique, it was still being run on a “provably fair” verification hash, with house odds set higher than that of Satoshi Dice. So while the idea to keep it “more fun” tended to get more players to play, in theory, it was just a marketing tactic for more players to play what was essentially the same game, but with a deck of cards. As quickly as it was established though, within the following few months, it quickly deteriorated.
The owners of Satoshi Aces, from its inception, was adamant on providing players a more thrilling opportunity to wager their Bitcoin on, than what Satoshi Dice was offering:
“In our opinion, a result of a ‘die’ roll in a numerical value just isn’t enough to constitute a result, so for someone looking for a full experience the game just can’t be that in the long run. Even if you could see the actual dice rolled, it would still probably not be very fun. More fun maybe, but not real fun.”
So they, in turn, created Satoshi Aces, which was based around the same concept of randomly generated cards that would determine whether player won the hand or not. It was set up in such the way as Satoshi Dice from the perspective of sending in a bet, then receiving potential winnings back to the same wallet. They quickly changed this to depositing and creating a balance and then withdrawing to whatever address a player so desired. Although it was just a slight change to how it appeared as a game, player feedback was tremendous in support of the “new look” style of a dice game. Satoshi Aces ran promotions quite frequently, and support of the site was growing quickly throughout the Bitcoin community. It was quickly rising to the top when it came to popularity, and its success was skyrocketing throughout the Bitcoin gaming realm.
As quickly as its rise to success was being displayed, shortly thereafter, the site was no longer able to payout winnings instantly, and subsequently was shut down in February of 2014. Coincidentally, this was also around the time of that Bitcoin had seen some of its highest valued days and with no public comments from the owner, the sudden drop of communication had players worried. In August, one of the owners made their first public comment about the incident by saying:
“Just to clear things up… Our operation was profitable, but we were hacked/robbed on multiple occasions and lost more than we profited as a result (not by too much mostly thanks to a few generous high rollers). The first couple of times it happened we identified and fixed some security flaws and kept going. On the latest occasion we couldn’t figure out what else we could do and so had to take the site down.
We obviously didn’t steal any coins. That’s ridiculous.. We always payed everyone out instantly and had lots of giveaways on top of that. We enjoyed working on SatoshiAces, our team has since moved on to other things crypto and tech in general, we were glad to see that some of you had kind words for us.”
