Bitcoin is a cryptographic currency founded on complex mathematics that allows people to transfer money as a store of value worldwide. The core principle of bitcoin is at every transaction is public and provable so it’s impossible for someone to spend the same bitcoin twice in two different locations (this was a problem with previous digital currencies since the coin itself could be easily copied). I’m not going to go too in-depth on the core technology of bitcoin in this article as I could easily write a few thousand words! However if you have time to check out this explanation video provided by the bitcoin foundation which covers a lot of the common questions people have about the currency.
What you’re really wondering though is how bitcoin can be used in a gambling scenario and what advantages it has over normal currencies like dollars or sterling. One of the main advantages is that since bitcoin is not controlled by a central authority no government can stop any individual from sending funds to anyone else. As you’re probably aware the US government recently stopped the major credit card companies from funding US gamblers on International betting sites, this would be impossible with bitcoin.
I should also point out at this stage that because bitcoin is a very new technology there are still relatively few betting sites that allow people to fund their account via this method. However MaxBettingSites has compiled a great list of bitcoin bookmakers serving the UK and worldwide markets. You could say that most of these sites are specialist in that they base their entire operation around bitcoin but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a unique experience to offer today’s gambler. Indeed bitcoin sites have one very unique feature that no other gambling operation in the world can rival and that’s that they can prove their games are provably fair.
But what does provably fair mean? In short because bitcoin is based on cryptography it is possible to build in a random seed which is hashed and sent to the player, this seed is then used to calculate whether a particular event (i.e. a dice roll) is a win or loss. Based on this seed the client can prove how the server calculated the win or loss independently of the site. There has been a lot of controversy in recent years about how truthful many betting sites are with the odds and win percentages of their online games, bitcoin provides a complex but provably fair solution to this issue.
There is one other problem with bitcoin betting that I should mention and it’s that getting your hands on bitcoin with traditional money in the first place can be quite difficult. For a start it is almost impossible to buy bitcoin with a credit card or PayPal since these monetary systems can be reversed. The most common method is bank transfer or cash which obviously isn’t ideal if you want to get your hands on some currency fast, gamblers aren’t known for their patience! However I do expect this situation the change in the future as bitcoin use becomes more widespread and people start to realise that it has massive advantages over traditional currencies. Hopefully this short article has given you some insight into the world of bitcoin betting.
