I do not acknowledge your assertion here as truth. I am quite confident you know very little about this subject.

Are you asking if businesses and technologies exist that allow you to exchange crypto into fiat?

Are there companies that will sign contracts that they will exchange crypto into currency x for a guaranteed period and guaranteed amount? Or offer similar contracts/financial products that yield the same result? And are those companies regulated enough where it can be considered ~100% guaranteed that transactions will go through? You do not solve all risk related to accepting crypto currencies by "immediatly converting crypto into USD" whenever someone uses crypto. If you are as experienced on the subject as you are implying, you know this.

Are you asking if their are exchanges regulated by the us government just like banks?

Neteller, amongst likely others, already does this. I originally read the OP complaining about this, and the fees that they charge. It, however, could be read differently.

In addition, the OP appears to want someone else to do this, provide a better service, and charge lower fees.

Either he's found a market hole (in which case, he should start the business) or he's ignorant of the complexities of making this all work. There's no surprise which option I think is more likely here.

The latter! Exactly, legacy sites can't evolve as quickly as the emerging solutions. Besides, if a site like PS introduced their customers to the benefits of cryptocurrency they would quickly lose their de facto monopoly based on payment processor restrictions.

I'm pretty sure he's asking:

No, which is why I've not used one since they became obsolete a decade ago

All money depends on the faith people have in it to be a store of value. Intrinsically, there's no value in any currency or to be truthful, anything. If nobody wants to use it or is willing to take it in exchange for something else, it has no value.

Currencies like the US dollar have a core value because the US government insists that people use it pay for things in the US. The most important is taxes. Crypto currencies lack an actor that insists on being paid in that currency that others can not avoid. They are completely dependent on what others think it is worth. If everyone decides they don't need it, there is nothing to hold the value up.

Tulips, anyone?

/thread

all true in your post.

Im still learning about crypto, but I believe its not yet possible to understand or forecast the impact crypto and blockchain technologies will have on business, govts, banking, and society.

Much the same that when one first touched what is now the internet (prob back ~'93) it was impossible to forecast the impact it would have.

regarding tulips, as far as crytpo as a investment day trade, thats only moderately interesting. Day trade stocks, crypto, forex, play roulette... whatever all the same thing.

Blockchain seems to be just a better technology for financial transactions (and maybe many others yet to be considered). I imagine large global financial institutions are looking deep into this for all sorts of reasons for normal fiat transactions.


The technology and its applications is the key, much more so then current price of bitcoin, or the whatever the current crypto currency du'jour might be.

Blockchain technology certainly will become used in the business world. Crypto currency is just one application of blockchain though. And one that will likely not have a large impact on the world of business imo.

This is an exchange for all I can tell. And I can't understand what players are alluding to. Maybe someone can give an an example of the difficulties a site would have adding a "volatile currency".

If a players deposits 1 bitcoin, and the price skyrockets, or declines significantly, what is the difficultly the site would have paying out to the player 1 bitcoin?

There are many site that do this.

Am I missing something?

And even if there was a problem you can convert to fiat on an exchange instantly. I really can't understand what bbfg and others are referring too.

There are also crypto coin that have the purpose of remaining stable with the usd and there are things like smart contracts that do have a 100% guarantee of fulling the agreements set in them I just don't see any problem that is needed to be solved.

The respective domestic currencies in effect lose value over time as they are inflated for reasons such as increasing exports in times of "economic difficulty". Bitcoin has a finite supply, so over-all is always expected to be deflationary in the sense of increasing in value, especially in comparison to fiat.

It's strange to sort of hear you suggest that the national government decreed money should be more trustworthy in regard to its value because they say so, rather than an organically grown internationally valuation like bitcoin.



This story is not an example of what you think it is.

The fact that there is a finite supply of bitcoin predicts nothing about its value or value evolution. And if you have the opinion that currencies like EUR and USD are less thrustworthy in regard of its value than BTC you are clearly not an objective party. Not even the biggest proponent of crypto that is rational would make that statement.

You kinda didn't address what I said, or my questions about your concerns re: volatility on poker sites.

You have a government decreed money on one hand, which is effectively mandated to be devalued over time with an increasing supply.

On the other you have a money with a finite supply, and the price is organically driven by each nations exchanges around the world.

One is backed by force, the other is chosen by the diversity of the international citizens around the world.

I think nearly all crypto enthusiasts are happy to support the latter.

Are you able to clarify the issue a site faces in regard to adding unstable crypto as a payment method?

What I am saying is that I am not convinced that the crypto exchange markets are mature enough that you can fully mitigate the risk of accepting them. I'll admit that this likely isn't the main thing that is holding back online poker sites, it's likely more to do with KYC/AML regulations.

From a business point of view the policy "we'll just exchange them whenever we receive them" does not fully cover all risks, and the huge amount of exchange-related financial products and services that are available should be sufficient proof for this.

A simple example would be, I can easily see an event happening that heavily affects the liquidity (difficulty to do fast exchanges) and price (very rapid changes) of crypto. This could result in headaches for companies, especially in markets with significant consumer protection legislation. Companies can mitigate these risks for "normal" currencies because the products & services available and existing legislation regarding currency exchanges. I doubt these products exist for crypto. I also doubt whether existing legislation also covers crypto currencies, new legislation is likely necessary.

There is no need to speculate on this and the tech is nearly 10 years old. You didn't really give an example. Lets say a player deposits 1 bitcoin, and the markets crash and the exchanges crash and everything crashes...the site still has the players bitcoin and they can just send it back to them.

You haven't given an example where there is a problem. I'm wondering if you are just inventing issues that don't exist because you are unclear how the technology works.

There is great liquidity worldwide and internationally so its quite diverse and regulations and laws have been evolving for years in this space its getting quite mature in this regard.

this

I don't really know how all this works and I'm not at the moment spending any time at all looking into it or trying to think it completely through, but:

I think what you are saying only works if the poker games are played in bitcoin. Then it doesn't matter what the value of bitcoin is because the games are player in bitcoin and if the value of bitcoin crashes, the accounts are still in bitcoin (they are just worth less now) and the site just sends bitcoins to players who want to cash out.

But if the games are not played in bitcoin, then the poker site has to credit the players with whatever currency the games are played in while taking bitcoin. If they immediately exchange all of the bitcoin for whatever currency the games are played in, then ok, but if they retain the bitcoin and credit player's accounts with the currency that the game is played in, then this is where there can be a problem for them:


1. Poker Site's games are played in $, but Poker Site accepts bitcoin as a deposit method.

2. 1 bitcoin is worth $X.

3. Player deposits 1 bitcoin to Poker Site.

4. Poker Site retains 1 bitcoin and credits Player's account with $X so that Player can play in poker games

5. Player plays poker games and breaks even. Player now has $X in account. Poker Site has 1 bitcoin.

6. Value of 1 bitcoin goes down to $X-$50.

7. PokerSite now owes Player $X, but only has 1 bitcoin worth $X-$50.


EDIT:

I suppose whenever Player joins a table Poker Site can convert bitcoin to $ to join the table and when Player leaves the table can convert dollar to bitcoin, so that balance in account while not playing is always in bitcoin. I would think there would still be risk and other issues, but as I said I am not really thinking it through and I don't know all too much about it.

I get paid to answer concerns like these, but, basically onone point of yours ....

May 2017 was a tough month, capacity-wise, for processing bitcoin transactions. As a result the transaction fees spiked for good service.

Since that bottleneck, the bitcoin industry has evolved a couple of efficiency strategies, including an upcoming doubling of the size of blocks (circa Nov 18th) and the addition of a promising service dubbed "lightening".

Acceptance of multiple currencies, say Euros, USD, GBP etc. is not new to the gamng industry and cross-curency exposure is a known area of exposure/risk management.

Adding one or more crypto currencies to that mix doesn't change the concept of risk; it just requires closer management for cross-currency risk.

For years, PokerStars Dollars were the largest virtual currency readily tradeable in secondary currency markets.

Multiple currencies isn't new, but there may be greater risks or issues with crypto currencies, then fiat currencies due to:

1. Higher volatility;

2. Harder to quickly exchange large values??;

3. Exchange fee higher??;

4. Laws and regulations that differ in how crypto and fiat currencies are treated;

5. Exchange rate insurance available for fiat currencies, and not available for crypto currencies??;

6. Etc.


As, stated, I don't know too much about this, so I don't know if all of the above are necessarily true (hence some question marks).



It does seem pretty certain to me anyway that most people currently don't understand crypto currency or have any inclination to deal with it.

And then what happened?

The exchanges are quite liquid and the fees are reality low and exchange can happen instantly. Now this depends on the size of settlement, but settlement can happen hourly or daily etc. And when you become a settlement level entity there is not usually a lot of settlement involved and transactions can be pooled to lower costs etc.

I think perhaps the tech and markets are still perhaps too small for the biggest sites, but we might agree that this is the direction that sites will be heading for and perhaps even that it is a mutually beneficial change for players and sites (perhaps even regulators).

Was going to ask the same. I think for the most part they could afford to handle the risks involved but if they chose not to ...

Then it does seem this simple. Their costs for these conversions would be far lower than what they have for ewallets, credit cards, etc.

What makes you think the conversion costs are lower, let alone far lower?