Casinos Push for Cashless Gambling Payments, Citing Virus, A Boost for Bitcoin?
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — The American casino industry wants gambling regulators to make it easier to adopt cashless payment transactions on the casino floor, citing a desire to help customers avoid handling money during the coronavirus outbreak.
In a report released Tuesday, the American Gaming Association, the gambling industry's national trade group, called on regulators in states where gambling is allowed to update their rules or laws to integrate cashless options for gamblers.
The push follows an 18-month study of the issue by both commercial and tribal casinos, and equipment suppliers to try to pave the way for cashless transactions on a wider basis.
Presently, a small number of casinos use such payments, which include debit or credit cards, as well as apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal. Wider acceptance of these options has long been a goal of the gambling industry.
Bitcoin Missed its Golden Opportunity, Says Bloomberg
The price of BTC turned out to be much more correlated to the tradictional stock markets than many experts predicted, writes Liam Frost of Decrypt.
Fears over the handling of paper money should have had a more dramatic impact on the cryptocurrency, as noted in the story above from the AP.
Frost writes:
When the coronavirus pandemic began to engulf the whole world, many experts, such as Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, argued that “Bitcoin’s moment” could be just around the corner. For a start, the US Federal Reserve was printing billions of new US dollars and inflating its supply while the new supply of Bitcoin was instead being reduced during its halving. Bitcoin was presented as a hedge against economic uncertainty, a digital version of gold and the one thing to remain resilient in a world of chaos. But per Bloomberg, Bitcoin failed at exactly that.
“Despite the extraordinary market volatility, it hasn't surged to new heights. In fact, it continues to make a general trend of lower highs. This takes away the argument that an economic crisis creates a boom for Bitcoin,” Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal wrote, in a market briefing.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
