Can you rephrase this? I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Just saying that it is so small that there could be huge growth and it still be considered alternative.

Here's what i think needs to happen
1. someone buys up a ton of bitcoins over the next few months
2. they buy a merge skin
3. they start offering bitcoin cashouts and bitcoin tables. maybe a limit of $1000 a month of bitcoin cashouts to US players only to begin with.

The price of bitcoins would probably increase significantly if a legit poker site started taking bitcoins. That would give them a profit right away, or a least cover the cost of having to acquire a lot of bitcoins and drive up the price in the process.

I will be def doing this if I win the lotto or something.

I found a couple more Bitcoin poker sites to add.

I came across another Bitcoin poker room called StrikeSapphire.com, listed on Pokerscout of all places. (The only bitcoin site they had listed). However they banned a bunch of places including the US, Costa Rica, Israel and all primarily Islamic nations.

On another forum I saw someone say they just launched BitWorldPoker.com. They appear to have no country restrictions. They do list active players and tables on their website, and it's been all zeros the times I've looked.

BitCoinStars.com, a gambling exchange say that poker is coming at the end of the month or early October. I have never done any betting with them, but I'd welcome feedback from anyone who has.

Although not poker-related, BTfuture.com launched last week, which is a prediction market for futures betting, like InTrade.com. I love InTrade so I will be keeping an eye on what kind of selection of betting markets BTfuture adds. They'd need to build some liquidity before they could offer anything more than a few months out.

hopefully btfuture is good, I've been hoping for a Bitcoin version of Intrade.

I don't know why more people don't play poker for Bitcoins. Everyone wants to lobby their congressmen and join the PPA, but we actually have something in our control with Bitcoins.

Damn early adopters crashing the market. Look at them just sell all their early coins.

They haven't done it yet, ergo they never will. Boy I'm buying into bitcoin right now!

As a side note, there's a discussion of a potential competitor to bitcoin that I found kind of interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44682.0

Take a gander if you think you can wrap your mind around something that doesn't promise millions in returns to the early adopters.

Competitor to bitcoin, you say? Ah, we get to the crux of the matter. Anyone who didn't already give you zero credit does right about........now. Btw, to all impartial observers, I STRONGLY recommend against clicking that link, or using any bitcointalk.org link, or any bitcoin.org forum link (which redirects to bitcointalk.org now I think).

They are amateurish and got hacked, badly, and passwords were probably leaked. Just no reason to risk it, I will never be logging onto those forums again. They were actually since then bought by Mt. Gox, I think, which I'm indifferent to, since I'll never be using either, but people are free to do what they will. Just releasing the information so everything is out in the open.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand, online poker. I'm sitting here at micro stakes bitcoin tables, watchin the final 3 tables of WCOOP. I can't help but imagine how sick its going to be when its WCOBP. And when you win, if you want you literally have the 300k coins safely in your wallet seconds later. Yeah yeah its a pipe dream, so many obstacles and its gonna be a haven for multiaccounting, but its so nice to see at least a few people are starting to wake up to the fact of how strongs this can potentially be. Gimme dat bump.

I just can't imagine Joe lunchpail would ever be willing to deal in bitcoins. That's the biggest hurdle. Nothing technical about the implementation. It's all marketing the idea.

haha, nice pipedream. If the US government doesn't come out with some sort of legalized alternative to poker (for Harrah's etc.), then I think it's only a matter of time before this develops.

If Bitcoin really takes off, then it's only a matter of time anyways.

Multiaccounting is the big thing though. I don't really care about multiaccounting itself.. I think you'd just have to accept it as the new norm, and even though it isn't ideal it's not the end of the world.. just collusion is the problem. Maybe white list tables would be one solution to that, rather than just ban the people caught, you can have tables for only accounts that the admins believe they can trust.

Maybe posting IPs under the screen name is an idea too. Not the actual IP address for privacy reasons, but some code, and then you can see if someone else is playing on the same code. I think while traffic is small the admins can police it OK but if it gets big maybe they'll want to do stuff like this.

Joe lunchpail goes with the flow. He'll do it eventually if other people like doing it.

I looked into bitcoins to see for myself and the process was long and bothersome. One of the suggestions was physically going to Wells Fargo and depositing into a person's account and then waiting. At one forum, the "How to Get Started" sticky was much too long and was more an argument for bitcoins than a set of directions.

The question for bitcoin poker is not just can it work? But will it work? The first is theoretical, the second, practical. Right now, to me, the second is a no.

It is not illegal to own bitcoins, right? So using a bank transfer or CC should not be blocked by a bank like what happens to a poker site. (?). So why is there no exchange, like a Forex/Ebay-type exchange, that people can buy and sell bitcoins?

If there were, a set of simple directions could be set up that would walk the average person through the process of, first, getting bitcoins, and then, transferring them to the poker site.

???

wire transfer into bitcoin exchange ---> buy bitcoins
wtf is so hard about that?

opening a dwolla account and using that to deposit onto an exchange is better. which is basically the same thing as neteller --> poker site

You are right, the second is better, although a little longer, but if the directions are straight forward, it should be easy for Joe Blow (me) to follow.

I guess, but am not sure, that one of the problems with this kind of thing is chargebacks and such. Once bitcoins leave the exchange, I don't think there is anyway to get them back, but there is a way for a low life to get his money back. But all this would mean is a longer wait. Not good, but not a killer.

I had a friend tell me about bitcoins. I did some minor research and popped US$1500 of my paoker bankroll into them. Really easy. I wired money to Mt Gox who are one of the largest exchange houses. Bought Bitcoins. Downloaded the software for bitcoin and transferred the bitcoins to my PC from Mt Gox. Easy. Now we'll see if the speculation pays off and if poker sites open up even better.

Bitcoins can't be charged back, tracked, traced or have any other big brother control as they're unregulated peer to peer currency, that's the beauty. All transactions are sent to everyone on the network which makes it almost untraceable yet verifiable. Within minutes of purchasing you get dozens of confirmations that verify the purchase. They are like cash though. If you lose the number or address key you lose the money - whether someone hacks you and steals them, your hard drive dies or your house catches fire. Back up the keys.

But I am guessing you have a high internet IQ. For bitcoin poker to succeed in a way that rivals what US players have had in the past, it is going to have to cater to those who are the least internet savvy, not the most. Simply put, it needs some good salesmanship.

I just can't understand why people are all of a sudden so willing to wait for legalization or whatever. SINCE WHEN ARE YOU ABLE TO WAIT TO GAMBLE?!?!? I KNOW IM NOT! I WANT TO GAMBLE RIGHT NOW THIS SECOND. IN FACT, I AM GAMBLING AND I STILL WANT TO GAMBLE.

Seriously, I'm so confused. I'm playing 100nl right now. It runs almost every day too, on at least one site. Not to mention you can like insta cashin/cashout between your accounts on different poker sites, and sports betting sites, casinos, etc.

I see your point and to a degree you are right as it's a mental step outside the box. Practically it shouldn't be any different to having to load money onto Neteller Moneybookers or direct onto a site just to get started with an additional step of converting starting currency to BTC. It will take volume and someone to develop a huge piece of software but it has the potential to solve all of the current online Poker issues.

Yeah, and to address the point of "Oh but then they'll just go after the exchanges, the weak link"

They had better do it quickly, because if this grows any further, it is just a matter of time before it hits critical mass and it is to the point that almost any online poker players will know someone near to them in real life that they can give bitcoins for cash or vice versa.

I, personally, have never used an exchange, and I have traded in more volume than like the 30th biggest exchange on bitcoincharts. So, this is ALREADY going on. It's impossible to know how much more is being traded, completely off the radar.

Average players in US will use VISA or eCheck, or you have no volume. The exchanges who sell for cash will provide very small (comparative) volume. The meat is selling poker for VISA / eChecks ... and if bitcoin exchanges start doing that they WILL be shut down, eventually.

It is easy to be under the radar with small volume. You are looking for 40k transactions a day of which 5% will be people who never did one before... that volume will kill the exchanges stone dead.

if you are planning on trying out bitcoin poker do not deposit money with BTC On Tilt. Right now they are not processing any cashouts.

They tell people that it takes up to 24 hours to approve a cashout. Right now no one is getting cashouts approved as far as i can tell and i have been waiting 72 hours now for it to be approved. I have emailed them twice about this is 24 hour intervals but have yet to recieve any sort of reply.

Other people in the lobby over the past week or 2 have also been complianing that they are not recieving cashouts. One guy won a tournament on the site and told me yesterday he never received his cashout. That had taken place over 2 weeks ago.

Ill update in this thread when i recieve my cashout but its looking pretty slim right now.

Alot of players are speculating that they are spending player on money on upgrading the site and servers and therefore do not have money to process cashouts . . . . . this is indeed just speculation tho.


So as of now i would not deposit on this site. There are two other sites that seem to be reputable. One is Bitcoin Poker Room which has been around the longest. Another is Seals With Clubs which i was told is run by a member of these forums.

FWIW I'm not very internet savvy and found Bitcoin really easy. I mean, I'm probably more willing to try new things than the average person, but as far as actually using Bitcoin goes it isn't complicated. Once you click around a little, you get it.

+1, I love that you can cashout of one place BY cashing in to somewhere else lol.

Ok, i got the cashout processed.

They responded to my second email saying that they would get it approved shortly and it was approved within the next 2 hours or so i would say.

You did something incredibly stupid then. No one is playing bitcoin for stakes above 5/10 chips which corresponds to .005 / .01 BTC which would be like playing $5NL. You should have bought $50 worth of bitcoins instead of $1500 - now bitcoin prices are gonig down from $5 / BTC to $4 / BTC so there you go you just lost $300