Bitcoin Forum

Turkey’s new gambling offensive will be implemented by the Interior and Justice Ministries in partnership with the Police Department and the Revenue Department. The departments will establish a designated task force that will comprise representatives of the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK), Revenues Department, Financial Crimes Investigation Council (MASAK), and the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), and will be headed by a special prosecutor. The BDDK will be tasked with preventing the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for illicit gambling activities, among other duties. More (https://news.bitcoin.com/turkey-to-initiate-major-crackdown-on-illegal-gambling/)

I think this will be very long war with the illegal gambling in Turkey. And with bitcoin, it will be very hard to put a stop on it. Gamblers will simple used TOR or other VPN services so that they can play online games. Mostly that will be affected though is the illegal bookies that runs on Turkey. But for online gambling with bitcoin, its gonna be difficult for the police.

Turkish authorities may prohibit the use of anonymizers, as was done in Russia. This will restrict access to users. If they are not forbidden to use such programs, then I agree, it will be difficult to do anything with gambling.

Illegal is illegal and no matter what you do you can not certainly come up with a gambling sites or company that are not authorize by the government and I think many country is into this kind of business, and a business permit is a must to simply continue it, and most of that illegal gambling activities are all online that is why bitcoin is very unlikely to be use.

Gambling has always been at odds with Turkey's secular policies and religious political parties, but it has found some balance through extremely tight regulations. This latest move is probably aimed more at maintaining that balance and keeping in line with commitments, rather than as a reaction to Bitcoin or crypto gambling. Bitcoin anyway is already considered legal despite strong advice against using it from regulators.

As it is, the online gambling ban (other than state-owned) has been enforced for over a decade now. The fragile leadership will want to persist with its strong stance on crypto gambling. Expect some very public shows of success over the next few years. Examples will want to be made to the public.

The irony is that the Turkish government are not actually solving anything, just pushing potential taxation revenues from gambling into other peoples hands. If people really want to gamble online they will find a way, most likely using bitcoin. Like the "war on drugs" of America, they don't actually solve the problem - just push it further underground and helping the criminals.

Using VPN or Tor would really makes things more difficult for the authorities and this war would really be long and cant be easily stop completely but there are possible ways on which they can track out for those people who do use tor or vpn services which they do have connections on ISP on the country would track them down but this thing can still be bypassed specially for those gamblers or people who do have knowledge on these things. Shut down wont really be an easy thing.

I think that gambling will also be difficult to ban as drugs. Many people earn money on this and they will look for ways to work around in order to provide again the opportunity to play.

As long as people don't actually cash out there cryptocurrencies to fiat there is no way Turkey can crack down these people.

As soon as you get a fiat payment from an exchange you will probably be on their radar though.

That's true. It's like in the USA during the prohibition. They will try to fight it' close down some illegal casinos and sites with local servers and the rest will prosper even better. Once something becomes scarce its price goes up, so the ones willing to risk fines and jail will get huge profit from running illegal gambling sites. Life will go on.