Seal with club bitcoin talk podcast

I ended up asking a friend with some Bitcoin to help — I told him I'd buy him a couple beers later. So, I created a Bitcoin account, and he shot me a few. The first gambling site I tried was SatoshiDice , an online dice game specifically designed for Bitcoin. Honestly, it's a pretty boring game. You just bet on whether a random dice roll will come up below a certain value. After I bet 0. So, I bet the equivalent of 34 cents and I won 38 cents, meaning I came out a little bit ahead. The federal government says online gambling is a no-no.

In the last few years, the Justice Department has made it very clear: You can't just open up an offshore casino online and start taking bets using actual money from the United States. But last year, a couple of entrepreneurs asked themselves — what if you were only betting with Bitcoin? This month, Brito has been following news of SatoshiDice's financial reports. The dice-game company says it made the equivalent of over half a million dollars in profits in just six months of operation in , accepting bets in Bitcoin.

But that betting could turn into a legal black hole. There's no bank of any sort that we do. We only do this one weird brand-new Internet protocol transaction that some of the nerds out there are calling money.

Micon says it might be tough for the Feds to regulate what is just a piece of computer code and not real money. I started to wonder if I broke the law by gambling online using Bitcoin. So I called the Justice Department. Another major advantage of Bitcoin for online poker is the extremely low fees for transactions. I know I promised not to get too technical, but those private keys are actually mathematical solutions to their corresponding public keys and without that string of characters your coins are lost.

Much of the Bitcoin thefts you can Google about involve the thief getting their hands on the wallet. Nevertheless, the savvy Bitcoin user has much control over their money and how securely they wish to store it. Even though Bitcoin poker is my focus, the currency itself has many other applications. A lawless area like Somalia could transact business in the digital currency that is tradeable for many other traditional fiat currencies.

Micro-lending across Africa as a whole seems to be a natural application for Bitcoin. Funding for organizations like Wikileaks that seem to piss off everyone in the name of truth have all always been attacked at the banking level. During the Wikileaks banking blockade, when major financial institutions were forced to disallow their customers to donate to Wikileaks using their accounts, Wikileaks cleverly turned to Bitcoin to facilitate a trickle of anonymous donations.

Bitcoin takes away the bank, changing the game—not only for online poker—but for many other much more important areas as well. Online Poker News - Pokerfuse.

Bryan Micon, site pro at the Bitcoin-only poker room Seals with Clubs and head honcho of the always-controversial DonkDown forums and podcast, argues why the digital currency is a game-changer for online poker. He also runs DonkDown. Latest from our Sponsors:. Check them out here.