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The poker market was driven by ease of putting funds into an account. That is to say, the casual person looking for entertainment and willing to lose money drov
by nowarninglabel 15y ago
The poker market was driven by ease of putting funds into an account. That is to say, the casual person looking for entertainment and willing to lose money drove the sites. As anyone who made a living off the sites will tell you, things started going south after the first bill was passed making it illegal for banks to do the transfers. Now, if all you had were bitcoin transactions to deposit, then you would end up with a pool made up mostly of sharks. Until a dead-simple and ubiquitous solution is available for making bitcoin transactions, I express much doubt that a bitcoin poker operator would appear and thrive.
- btilly 15y agoThere is no question that the online poker market was much tougher after the US laws were passed. But even after the laws were passed, after casual players were limited because payments to/from the poker sites had to wind through payment processors to get around the restrictions, the poker sites were still making something like $1.4 billion/year in revenue from the US market. Dealing with bitcoin doesn't seem to me to be much more complicated than the network of payment processors people used to use to get money to/from Full Tilt. Sure, the potential market is going to be smaller. But even if it is an order of magnitude smaller, $140 million/year in revenue is nothing to sneeze at.