Wow 200k Jesus Christ how

hes a betting god

will we see proxy gambling after this? Like skins -> tokens -> gambling -> tokens -> skins

is there proof of this miraculous feat cause right now im skeptical

I mean yeah clearly but like seriously he could buy a fucking house

200k is a dick load of money

According to Federal Reserve SCF data it almost makes him a one percenter for his age group

All from betting pixels

For the record, I would guess the vast majority of skins available on OPSkins for decent prices were sourced from gambling websites. These sites generate so many items in profit, and they need to get rid of them ASAP, so they're going to seriously mark them down.

The real question is how many gambling sites ran on fractional reserve and can survive a run on their inventory.

What a joke, total hypocrisy. TF2 is funded in its entirety on gambling, the only reason Valve is even allowed to get away with this bullshit is because they don't technically assign monetary values to unusuals themselves -- though they've certainly done every single thing they can to allow the market to do that part themselves.

1 Sell lottery tickets, except we're going to call them keys.

2 giveaway prizes worth tons of money, except they're just pixels, so it's like, whatever, man.

3 Do absolutely nothing to promote responsible gambling like limit the number of key sales per day, allow people to self-ban from buying keys, allowing stop losses, age verification, or the countless other things that legitimate casinos do

4 Now they're going to ban these third party gambling sites, which is fine because it looks like they were rigging games (not sure, anyone got a quick summary?) but anyone pretending like Valve gives a shit about stopping little kids from manifesting a horrendous gambling addiction has to seriously reevaluate Valve's primary (by a tremendous margin) source of income for this game.

https://blog.twitch.tv/twitch-and-third-party-terms-of-service-and-user-agreements-b9827599e0fc#.6blst92e6

LOL valve doesn't care. Money is money. Unboxing is gambling, and by putting it into a game that kids play they are encouraging kids to gamble by unboxing.

Exactly. The only reason valve is starting to act like they give a shit about these 3rd party sites is because of the recent class action law suits filed against them and CS GO lotto and a few other sites. CS GO lotto though was on another level, not only was it illegal rigged gambling, but also they were shilling for their own site without any FTC disclosure statements saying they own the site and have a financial interest in the site.

I'm not sure if valve will be able to completely kill off gambling though, as some sites may still be able to operate through countries that don't really respect US gambling laws. I suppose they can just ban API calls from specific sites and stuff, but I'm sure there are ways around that.

Skins > bitcoins might work.

What valve has created is a way to pay for virtual items, not gambling. They have themselves no way in turning steam items into real money, that's what third party sites are doing.

buying and opening a pack of pokemon cards/ lego figures is not gambling despite you having a random chance of what you get, nor is opening a case

Opening cases isn't gambling by legal definition because you always get something out of it. Doesn't mean that kids should be doing it, but valves never gonna change it unless the legal definition of gambling changes.

I can see the logic but it's only really gambling if you can directly get your money back. Crates are more like football sticker packs or kinder eggs.

a secondary reason valve isn't gambling is because they don't actually give you anything. Legally all your tf2 items are just part of TF2 and don't actually count as a commodity you own. Part of the reason they're so against gambling is because it further enforces the idea that steam items have real world value, which makes it more likely that a later court case will rule in such a way as to say they do. If this happens, a lot of shit gets really bad for valve. They're already half-way a bank, they really don't want more regulatory pressure. If items become "real" VAC banning becomes a bit hairy, since now people are being denied access to assets, which could be a huge lawsuit against Valve.

Please tell that to the IRS. Valve is still required by law to collect your social security number (for tax reasons in the US) if you sell more than 200 items or $20,000+ in a year on the steam community market. Yes, even selling 200x 3 cent crates for a total of $6 will get your steam market blocked for the rest of the year unless you hand over your SSN. Yet there is no direct way to cash out, so why would that information need to be provided to the IRS for tax reasons when the steam wallet $ can not be withdrawn to your bank account? And all you can do is use that virtual money to buy more virtual items.

Really now. So lets say if I started a new lotto (and rolled it out at all convenience stores across the country) where lets say each lotto ticket is $1. But you are guaranteed to get 1 cent back at minimum, or instead of the 1 cent maybe like 1 small piece of candy or gum, then its not gambling by definition? If its not gambling then even 10 year olds can irresponsible spend all of their allowance (or steal their parents money) and play lotto at the 7-11, and thats totally fine? I think there are lots of grey areas, and the whole case opening thing would probably have to be challenged in court to see if a judge or jury considers it gambling (which is regulated by US law.)

That's because it still counts as you making a transaction, even if its for what is legally a service or nothing. If you sold intangible and legally worthless widgets you'd still need to report to the IRS. Doesn't really matter what you're getting, since Steam$ is counted as a currency of some sort, so the IRS wants to know about it. The IRS is also not the legal system so that's a bit of a stretch regardless.

Legally, gambling for tokens is fine in a lot of places. Exchanging those tokens for money is the legal grey area. If its money->token->gambling->tokens the government is pretty unconcerned. Its when it goes money->token->gambling->tokens->money that it really becomes an issue. If the tokens have an actual defined value, or count as property legally, then valve can't say that their tokens aren't supposed to be sold for money. Right now, the Steam trade market is designed to prevent you from selling things for "real" money to prevent this. All you can do is put money in, and receive either steam currency (valued in real currency but NOT real currency itself) or tokens (skins)

Otherwise, valve would've never gotten this far without a lawsuit.

keys for crates is, albeit in the least harmful of ways you could have one, a gambling service... but that's no more harmful than a card game booster pack, and last I checked you can make a pretty penny off of mint-condition rare MtG cards. I see the value in talking about that, but to directly compare them to services which were literally just any other adult gambling site that used items as a middle-man is a huge disregard for size of impact

Who were you responding to? The two comments above you never said it was fine for kids to throw money away to buy keys for virtual crates. I like how you just assume that's our opinion.

Note how the coordinating conjunction "but" shifts the focus of the sentence towards the second phrase, meaning that the comment never implied anything about the preceding comments or "your opinion".

The reason for valve collecting your tax information is because a law congress passed around 2013 or 2014, which requires payment processors such as credit card processing companies (including paypal and amazon payments) to collect your tax information if or when you hit 200 transactions or $20,000+ in sales, whichever comes first and issue you the IRS tax form 1099-K. It is my understanding that it is not relayed to the IRS unless you actually exceed the 20k/yr.

The reason for it is because there were Taxi drivers and other businesses accepting credit cards and yet never reporting their earnings as income. The funny thing though is with a closed on the steam market you are just essentially trading lets say a 3 cent crate for steam money which you will then later put towards a game or in-game item etc. No $ is ever directly exchanged between the buyer and seller on the community market. It's actually kind of funny because it seems that valve could have side-stepped this whole thing by calling it steam bucks or steam points instead of USD.

It's rather silly because lets say you sell a crate to someone for 3 cents on the market, or you could sell it to them for 1 rec. Both the 3 cents and the 1 rec hold the same purchasing power, but one is monitored by the government and one isn't.

It's like a credit note when applied to people who sell items on the market, looking at all this I get the impression that it's required because it's all part of the same system that also pays devs and item makers and as you say they haven't separated the distinction between user steam wallets and "real" business transactions. I've no idea if the IRS would be interested in credit notes in the way they're applied here, through trading you can certainly acquire more of them than you put in.

The complication with something like points instead of $ for users is that exchange rates become a source of real difficulty, if currency markets move in a certain direction you can end up with more points in the system than there is real cash to cover them, and somewhere a real business transaction has to take place when a game or item is purchased, so then they become a kind of bank that is potentially technically insolvent. Scary stuff.

e: Although I suppose if you forced all incoming transactions to be in $ it would eliminate that risk. It's also slightly brain melting stuff.