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This past week Gambling91.1com broke the news that Americas Cardroom confirmed as much as 80% of its customer base now bets with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But make no mistake about it, ACR admits this was no easy task getting to such a milestone. Learning how to use bitcoin to gamble is intimidating at first glance since so much of what is on the Net deals with investing, price fluctuations and regulation. There are actually few discussions in regard to use of bitcoin with every day transactions.
What's often lost in the discussion is that bitcoin is really no different than PayPal, the intermediate payment platform that is now commonplace among nearly anyone who conducts financial transactions online.
The average person may see that today $1 US dollar is equivalet to 6242.69 bitcoin. They want nothing to do with using the anonymous digital currency after seeing that. The bitcoin exchange (Coinbase is one of the most popular but there are others) simply can convert bitcoin to US Dollars or any other currency and vice versa, linking directly to your bank account.
As a gambler, pay no mind to those figures. It's like $1 USD is equivalent to 0.0018 colons in Costa Rica. If you win US$500 betting online, you will receive that money (minus any fees) into your bank account once converted into US dollars via the bitcoin exchange. Don't worry that this $500 USD is equivalent to 0.080 Bitcoin, just as long as you can convert it back to the currency you use in every day life, this is all that should matter....not the number denomination. All you need to know is that bitcoin can be converted into regular money and paid right into your personal bank account.
Online gambling sites generally encourage folks to open an intermediary wallet for storing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is for security reasons. Bitcoin exchanges are only meant to convert the digital currency into US dollars, British pounds, euros, etc... They are not meant for storing funds the same way that an airport currency exchange kiosk does not act as your personal bank account.
The bitcoin revolution is like learning how to use a computer. Today's four-year-olds can operate a computer blindfolded whereas there are folks in their 60s and older who have never even turned on a computer.
11-year-old Andrew Courey, a middle school student in Massachusetts, will be doing his part to ensure the next generation of adults have a full understanding of how bitcoin works. The youngster recently published a 57-page book on bitcoin.
"Anyone can learn about cryptocurrencies if they're willing to spend 70 to 80 hours researching every source until they find a couple sources that make sense," said Andrew in an interview with CNBC. "The whole book, in the simplest terms, is very easy to read and simple to understand."
Just as we drew an anology above to how currencies function in other world markets, Andrew compares bitcoin wallets to an every day mailbox.
Here's the analogy comparing the mailbox to one's own cryptocurrency wallet that only they can access: "Imagine there is a mailbox — the mailman can drive the mail to any mailbox, but only the person with the key can access the mail."
Courey's "fun facts" at the end of each chapter will still go way over most folks heads. For example, at the end of the chapter on bitcoin mining, he writes that the current power consumption required for mining "is estimated to be more than that of 159 countries."
Bitcoin mining! Well that's for another article.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
