But if you don't have the money then don't you think they would come up with all sorts of excuses? Some skins on Ipoker have started to accept Bitcoins so its not like the idea is so far out there....

A skin on iPoker is now offering btc to deposit and withdraw.. don't jump on the wagon to late. Be a "Revolution" and get in there early.

Wouldn't you agree that Bitcoins are very volatile? See the problem with trading in Bitcoins is that in order to do so one needs to own Bitcoins.

Due to the volatility of this "new currency" the company could lose all the money. Surely this could happen in any currency, but there are currencies that are more stable than others.

In order to have a Bitcoins deposit/withdraw option, a whole new department would have to be opened to handle them. There would be a need for an in-house trader to monitor its daily variance.

It's not as easy as flipping a few switches and adding the currency. There is a huge leap of faith necessary in using Bitcoins.

No, because BitCoins can be exchanged pretty much instantly to USD. There's really no risk at all, Lock would never own any BitCoins for more than a few seconds at a time, in which timeframe they know the value and will sell and it won't ever vary more than a few decimals in these seconds.

that makes sense, didn't think of that. But there would still have to be a system to instantly convert them to USD... pretty cool.

So hold up. I know nothing about the bitcoin sites.

Do the players need to purchase bitcoins to deposit? Are mtt entries paid in bitcoins? Are players paid out in bitcoins?

It depends on how the site decides to handle it. There's BitCoin-only sites which will require you to buy BTC first to play with and get cashed out in BTC aswell, to then sell at mtgox.com etc. if you want. Seals-with-clubs is the most known BTC poker site afaik.

What a site like Lock could do however, is have the play remain completely in USD, but to process someone's cashout, buy BTC themselves with their own $, to then instantly transfer the BTC to their customer. No payment processor involved anymore (since this is something regular Lock support could do basically, "process" BTC transactions which is as simple as going to a BitCoin exchange site and buying some to then send them over to the BitCoin wallet/address their customer has given them. Regular support can't process USD payments however, because as per industry standard this should be done by a 3rd party payment processor also so that (on paper at least) the poker site doesn't have the financial data from their customers, but a 3rd party does. (and there's probably far, far more and more important reasons for this, but i don't know em and from a customer's point of view this is the most important one tbh )

@Mccormick

So essentially Withdrawals could be sent to BitCoins, but deposits maybe not. I think the problem with BitCoins is the anonymity.

What happens when a player says they didn't receive their money (which you know they will and possibly lie too) how is it tracked?

A friend of mine is a Bitcoin fanatic and he loves the anonymous part. Suppose they register their Bitcoin tracking number with the cashier or something?

There's really multiple ways to go about it. Lock could have their own BTC wallets randomised for each customer in their system. The payment would be made to this wallet, so now both parties know and can see the available BTC and freely transfer them. The other option is to have the customer generate his own wallet and enter the address in Lock's system so they know where to send it to.

If you know the address of the wallet, anyone can verify the transaction took place afaik. The anonimity is there because you can't easily link a BTC address to a person. It is possible however. I'm afraid anonimity isn't BTC's biggest strength btw, far from it, and i think the future will show that. There's simply been little interest and research etc. for hackers to find out, but if it ever becomes popular, you can be sure they will find ways.

Well, as quite a large amount of players are waiting for their money, where you can officially state that?

I think the anonymity is pretty solid. If you buy and sell coins on an exchange, obviously your personal info will be tied to the wallet address you use for those transactions. But after making those transactions, you could send coins to any number of other wallets you choose to set up, and those wallets would never have to be tied to your name. You could also 'wash' the coins by depositing them somewhere where there's a large supply of coins, like an ewallet, and then when you withdraw from there you'll probably get back different coins than the ones you deposited. This would make it much more difficult to trace.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

Right now, I think it would fairly easy to set up a system to create enough anonymity to avoid criminal prosecution. .

The difference between lock and the sites u mention is they pay players in a timely fashion.

Why would lock add bitcoins when they cant even pay out ROW?