Ideas

Not legal in many countries, limiting the target audience. Some places it works out well but it is very open to abuse.

Usually how businesses like this operate is a bet is proposed, an amount is offered, and the proprietor of the site would then tell them the odds of payout.

The audience may be limited due to US legal issues, but if you see the turnover of places like betfair etc the potential audience and revenue is still vast, so I think this is still a goer regardless of local issue. It's also got more of a fun element as well as more newsworthy stuff such as "how much longer will Tony Blair stay in office" etc.

Like many people said betting is problematic, though it does make good money.

legal issues period...(am not commenting to the moral thingy anymore)

I'll echo saigon.

Legal issues are not a problem. All the gambling sites have US customers, but they are based offshore (Bahamas, Trinidad or wherever). The issue is how to make this different from any regular online Poker game? You can join with 4 friends and sit the same table....

Are there not already betting shops that make odds and take bets on just about anything?

OK, so I think what you are proposing is not to become one of those shops but to create a do-it-yourself bookie kit for any user to set up on any event(s) he chooses.

If you did it without an exchange of cash it would probably be much less problematic.

It's not the sort of thing I would contribute time to work on b/c I don't like gambling, but that's beside the point of whether this is a good idea.

I think it has potential, particularly in a non-cash version.

How do the bet-site ensure that you and your pals don't fake the bet? If it's local and you decide what the bet is about, you can use a month to plan a fake system?

Torgrot

cops behind u man! run :)

How will you estimate the odds for a random bet proposed by a user?
How will you stop people rigging the bets?

This idea is like hubdub, currently generating huge amounts of interest

and like http://uk.techcrunch...or-friendly-betting/ , $6 of finance.

Why are people here so apparantly negative of what would have been the first mover in a $6M venture when it was first posted here 18 months ago. People seem too quick to dismiss it due to the legal issues, which clearly the other sites have overcome without seeing there is a viable business here.

If crowdsourcing is to work, then ideas such as this need to be able to make it to the top to compete with non crowdsourced ideas going via the normal VC route otherwise sites like this will go nowhere.