You believe but you have no reason behind that belief. What compelling reason do I have as a business motivated by money to accept bitcoins? The only reason I could see beyond the marketing is that I could overcharge like crazy if I were knowledgeable about the btc market which actually takes money out of the bitcoin economy not puts money in it. The only compelling reasons I can see to get involved with bitcoins are to fleece those who supply the demand for bitcoins.

No fraud and low transaction fees. We're going in circles here cwar. There are issues with bitcoin. There are issues with dollars. It's possible that the issues with bitcoin will be fixed, the majority are situational. It's also possible they won't. If you were looking for a sure thing then I don't know what you're doing on a poker forum.

Not sure what poker has to do it with it. Business loves certainty therefore business should dislike bitcoins based on your rational. I agree that bitcions are a gamble as that seems to be your main point and the only people supplying demand for bitcoins are gamblers and speculators.

I am involved in a business that deals with the fraudulent attempts on a daily basis and I can assure you that it is a far smaller issue than facilitating our customers and rarely we do we ever lose money to fraud. Transaction fees are not lower for bitcoins overall for a business and the risk associated with a volatile market and uncertain legal situation should prevent the majority of serious businesses from getting involved in bitcions for the "benefits" bitcoins offers in transactions.

If the guy wants to buy bitcoins, he can do it through the exchange, or he can send you stuff on NewEgg. If he wants to accumulate Bitcoins, which choice he makes is pretty much neutral assuming the person buying on NewEgg would otherwise use cash, and he would otherwise purchase on the exchange. Chances are, though, that he is selling his coins immediately (or at least a bunch of them), so that would drive the price down. So it's at best neutral, and at worst driving it down.

He could just as easily buy them on the exchange. It does, however, drive some people into the shop, which is why I call it a marketing gimmick.

And if he had any brains, if he thought they were going up, he would have just bought the coins on the exchange. If you think they aren't going up or you already have the equipment, then mining makes sense (although the price staying flat would kill most miners).


It already is used for gambling. Not by any significant market share, but it's being used. It's just that it makes more sense to use them for gambling than buying coffee or t-shirts online.

They look like amateur sites that would get 0 business if it weren't for bitcoin users, so I'm going to consider it a marketing gimmick.

Business does not love certainty any more than an individual when it comes to a livelihood. In fact I would say it has more tolerance to risk. Bitcoin with the money services and stability currently available isn't great for most commercial enterprises, I've made this point many times before. This doesn't mean it can't be in the future, and you ignore this in your posts. There's definitely a chicken and an egg problem in that stability will come with increased commercial activity which relies on stability, but this could be overcome by a larger niche industry, such as gambling, moving into Bitcoin.

I mentioned poker because the existence of risk doesn't make something not worthwhile.

Chargebacks are not an issue for you? You spend no time and therefore money dealing with these daily fraud attempts? We're talking in percentage points here, I'm not suggesting that your profit is going to increase by 50%. I'm not too sure what you mean by it being a smaller issue than facilitating your customers. I think that could have come out wrong.

Absolutely. I don't think it's a fit for any larger business at the moment. There simply wouldn't be enough liquidity for them even if they decided it was worth the volatility.

RE: Risk. Not talking about eliminating risk but comparable risk and the relative rewards. Putting a marketing campaign aside the risk:reward of using bitcoins in scale for a business is not desirable. I never dispute the fact that bitcoins could be useful if they existed in scale but that does not make them worth anything.

RE: Chargebacks. It is literally less than a tenth of a percentage point in employees costs per year in a very high transactionrofit business. Obviously this is not universal but just my experience.

For sure, there are plenty of people who bought them on the exchange when they were below $4-5, now they are $14.xx per BTC, so yes I would say they have extremely well, in terms of ROI, and for anyone who bought on the exchange and got into this early and for what they go for now, considering they held onto some if not most to see where they went, from an investment standpoint. People who took this seriously and bought a good amount on the exchange I'm sure were not daily traders, rather semi long term investors.

The company (person) that does the Newegg thing, I haven't really looked into a lot, but yes you could be right he could very well be exchanging them at a relatively fast pace, then again if there is some underlying factor to this were not aware of, I wouldn't be surprised, because I'm sure he or the company is not just doing this for the hell of it, there is some gain to be made here, perhaps has a partnership with Newegg of some sorts, I'm not at liberty to confirm this though.


From what I have read and heard, a lot of miners already had their setups and or servers that thought about getting into it, then maybe added on from there once they saw a desired return, again we must remember when BTC was cheap, and look where it is now, and it's still relatively new, not an old past time. People who have been doing this since the beginning and or around that time, I believe have done well.


Yeah I have seen the small scale gambling, however I don't feel this will take off imo. It could perhaps if BTC is more established over time, but I think we are a ways away of seeing BTC used for a payment method on lets say Stars, Merge, etc.

Most likely he's an affiliate for Newegg and gets a cut. The guy who was doing this with amazon did something similar.

Yes, they have done well. They would have done even better just buying the coins.


There's no reason for a big site to screw around with this. They have their business, there is little reason to screw around and thumb their nose at the law. Only new people looking to break in would do this. To make a quality gambling site, you need a lot of funds. There were a lot of wanna-be sites that started up during the poker boom, but really the only one that got a dent after the boom was Full Tilt, which had substantial investment and a new gimmick (play with the pros).

Yeah most likely, not a bad idea if he's working with/ through Newegg.


Yeah, like said, I really don't see BTC being used widely in gambling, although it's not a bad idea, I just don't see it catching on. I was using Stars as an example, but yeah I don't even see this catching on with anything somewhat reputable like Merge, etc. (lolmerge)

Tough for them to be useful but not worth anything. We're on the same page when it comes to their current state.

A lot of places have huge trouble with fraud. I know you're just speaking from your personal experience, but you can't have missed the fraud departments that online poker sites have, or ebay sellers refusing to deal with certain customers.

It just reverses the fraud capability though doesn't it? Now the fraud can be committed by the merchant and the customer can't reverse the charge. Will this make people less likely to use something like bitcoin in an ebay situation?

Absolutely. That feature is very merchant friendly.

I guess things like the escrow transactions that have been in discussion will help with multi-party trust.

It's way easier and logical for a merchant to build a rep with customers than for customers to build the rep. Merchants already have to build reps about quality of item, customer service, reliability, etc.

There's no reason the poker networks cake/merge/everleaf/bodog couldn't make withdrawals available via bitcoin. Easier to liquidate Bitcoin than cashout of these networks in the U.S. right now

It's supposed to be like cash, it's not a merchant friendly feature it's designed to be anonymous like cash purchases therefore you can't reverse it.

And for gambling and poker sites this would be a big plus since it eliminates the degens reversing charges on their credit cards.

I'd still just like to see it as a withdrawal option, for deposits I'd like to see as many options available as possible to give fish no excuse not to reload.

good npr podcast on bitcoin
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/...odcast-bitcoin

"its sort of a techno-libertarian's dream"
lol 2p2

Okay, let's say a bunch of internet gambling sites with $50 million total deposits get together and decide to allow Bitcoin withdrawals.

How easy do you think it'd be for them to buy enough Bitcoins to facilitate those withdrawals?

I dont see why a poker site wouldn't at least experiment with bitcoin withdrawals only either. Theres almost no risk involved. Money is stored at MTgox in USD, buy bitcoins when someone cashes out and then ship the bitcoins to the players address. This can probably all be done instantly using the api. You now have a site with nearly instant cashouts... a pretty good way to differentiate yourself from other sites.

If they don't want to have too much money at mt gox they can limit players to some small amount like $500 a week or less. Bitcoin is a pretty niche thing right now so its not like they would need much money on gox to begin with. Though if a site were to start doing this people would realize pretty quickly how much better bitcoin withdrawals are than 2-3 month checks that might bounce. I seriously think that a significant % of the sites withdrawals would be done using bitcoin within a few months if they started having that as an option.

The main problem is that mt gox might ban the poker site from buying bitcoins. If mt gox allows them to buy bitcoins though, I don't see how bitcoin withdrawals wouldn't be an insanely good thing for the site that starting doing them.

withdrawal limits obv... bitcoin doesn't need to try and instantly take over the world. Most people see it as fake money and probably wouldn't use it as an option, at least until smart people showed them that bitcoins are legit.

So let's say Bodog gets 100 Bitcoin max withdrawals a week. How long do you think they can buy $50,000 worth of Bitcoins every week from an exchange operating under Japanese law?

If its legal and mt gox allows it they can do it forever. As I said above obv the main problem is that mt gox might not allow the site to buy bitcoins for the purpose of cashing people out of a poker site. If the sites don't know the answer to this question already though then they must hate money.

It would be easy for them to do this. Say someone wants to deposit 10 BTC on the site. The BTC is instantaneously converted to USD via an exchange site and the funds deposited. As for withdrawals, it would be even just as easy, convert the poker web site pseudo dollars to btc and send the recipient the btc. The site might hold 1 days worth of BTC to act as a buffer.

The point being I don't see any laws being broken. UIGEA only applies to USD transactions. The site should switch EUros or better swiss francs. To get the $ completely out of the loop.

Also I think Russ Fox said the law was recently changed, where poker accounts over $10,000 do not need to be reported as foreign bank accounts.

How much does stuff like the below threaten Bitcoins popularity and edge?

"Bank of America has begun inviting a select number of customers to trial a new way of transferring money by providing a new service that will allow free money transfers to be initiated using just a phone number or an email address.

The pilot is part of a new venture by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo that was announced in May, helping remove the need to remember account information and providing customers with a new way to transfer or receive money whilst helping to shape the service before it is rolled out to the majority of the bank’s customers.

The venture, called clearXchange, ties into a customer’s bank account, meaning they won’t have to set up a new account and provide personal information, like rival service PayPal. This will also allow customers t check their balance before they transfer any money.

Bank of America has waived transfer fees for payments to those participating in the trial, allowing customers to transfer money to Wells Fargo accounts free of charge initially, with our source indicating that payments to and from Chase accounts will be waived soon.

The bank is also said to be readying its own NFC-based payment system, allowing customers to “tap-and-pay” using their mobile phones. With trials for both services in effect, Bank of America is hoping to provide the very latest innnovations to its customers."