Topic: Poker Market (Read 1877 times)

If pokerstars.eu and full tilt gets off easy there would be no reason for them not to use bitcoin.  However, why can't we log into ftp.  Thus the path between us and ftp must be blocked, which is an illegal act because poker is legal to play.

Just like they shut down pokerstars.eu

Of course it would be overseas.

You could not have a bitcoin poker website or bitcoin sever using bitcoin.  The Doj would shut it down.  Server to server would not work because you could cheat.  The site would still have to be overseas and you hope the doj would not shut it down. 

If something like this happens, the price of Bitcoins (in USD) will simply rise dramatically. Which almost makes me wish I could snap my fingers and have a Bitcoin-accepting poker site up and running.

$5M for the poker economy is nothing.  Say just initially 10,000 US players start up with $100 in BTC to play.  That's a 20% of the bitcoins in circulation today needed JUST for poker.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  50,000 players and you have to have all of the bitcoins (or have half the bitcoins and double the price).  It does not take much to go up by a lot.

But a few steps need to happen before that can happen.  There needs to be easier ways to get bitcoins for decent sums automatically or at least with a little effort.  I could see poker sites taking on this task since it's in their interest to make it easy.  Plus it ensures the transaction costs they eat would be recovered by putting it directly into a player account.  Next, the software needs to be written.  This requires significant investment.  Betco.in exists, but there's no way it could support that kind of user base right now.  The software is much flakier than anything I've ever played for real money, but it's at least a start and a proof of concept.

So we are looking probably 1 year away unless someone with some serious resources goes after this market sooner.  I could be wrong on this estimate, but things will start out with some clunky and poor sites with low traffic initially, then the bigger players enter.  Pretty much like 2000 all over again.

TBH I'm a little surprised by how little change there seems to be in traffic volumes. Down, but not a huge amount. I do tend to play during the US dead times though so it impacts me less than others I expect.

Personally I haven't noticed much of a change in the pokerstars market. Other than the fact that many americans are gone.

There's now a gaping hole in an economy once very active...  What implications could a huge increase in volume in the online poker market have on bitcoin?

-EP