Bitcoin Forum

I encouraged all of you to impelement and use Segwit last year to reduce fees and make your hot wallets more efficient. Plus because I believe Bitcoin's gambling industry is the most active of all, I want to revisit this topic.

For all gambling sites that have implemented Segwit, how is it? Has it lowered your withdrawal fees, having more savings for the site? Are your withdrawals faster and more efficient? How much of a difference does Segwit make from legacy?

Why do you think SegWit would make a difference in their daily operation? Yes, they might save a couple of dollars with the cheaper miners fees when gamblers withdraw some bitcoins, but the Legacy Bitcoin transactions has improved a lot since 2017. I think with a lot more people shifting to SegWit and transaction volume going down and spamming stopped, the Legacy addresses is still very fast and cheap.

Now, if you asked this same question about the Lightning Network, then you would see a significant response, but the Lightning Network is still in it's early days and most casinos have not incorporated that into their payment software.

I do not own a gambling site, but I know one of the Support technicians working at one of these sites and he says the SegWit thing is a non-issue with their casino.  ::)

For now there is no big difference in the transaction fee between the legacy and the segwit address and also most of the gambling sites have less number of confirmations to deposit our money so it doesn't made any difference if they even implemented the segwit into their wallets and mostly the gamblers won't care about the transaction fees.

Segwit basically didn't do much in the end because most of the network was freed up when the transaction spamming stopped.

It was pretty crazy at times and I remember having to pay maybe a $20 fee for a 1 input 2 output transaction because it was an urgent transaction I needed confirmed.

And many casinos were suffering also due to this hence the reason why many casinos introduced many alts to curb this issue. There were also some On-chain gambling sites which pretty much went out of business due to the fees.

However now its really a non-issue and for the long term doesn't look like people will be paying $20-50 fees per transaction since most of the spamming attack was BCH most likely which has stopped.

well to be honest since I mainly do sportsbets then I don't care much about transactions and fees , all the sites that I use for my betting have 0 withdrawal fee so even if fee went to 20$ it still won't affect much
also I make like one or two deposits a month where I have to pay the fee , but the fee is really tiny compared to the deposits that I make

anyways if network got busy and spammed like it was before I guess dice and casino players are the ones who will have struggles since they tend to deposit and withdraw a lot and usually the sites don't pay for the fee

Sadly, I haven't been able to convince any of my favourites sites either, not that I tried with everyone. Some already had P2SH for a while, and those aren't ready to move to native Segwit for fear of alienating depositors who are largely using wallets that won't be compatible.

Seeing withdrawal fees of 10 to 25k, I'm wondering why people are still willing to pay those fees and not ask owners to upgrade... I can do 100 txs for less than the price of most site withdrawal fees.

Those who did respond say that it just wasn't worth the hassle and downtime, and that may be true for many more months, if not years, since I don't expect congestion will ever again hit the heights of 100+k txs... those who wished the network ill with deliberate spamming no longer have the will nor motivation to do so. But you never know, price increase, next bull run, demand shooting back up, all those ingredients that led to "expensive" fees.

I, too, have only mainly seen P2SH addresses (3 prefix), and I don't recall ever seeing a native SegWit address on any gambling sites recently, nor really any ecommerce sites now that I think about it.

Fees for withdrawal may have dropped somewhat from what they were at the height of the spam attack, but I haven't noticed a significant decrease in withdrawal fees either. I don't have a problem with withdrawal on most sites though, and I started lowering the amount of withdrawals I made during the spam attacks to lower whatever fees were charged then. I still support SegWit even with fees where they are right now, though.

There's definitely an improvement regarding withdrawal/deposit transaction times for casinos and gambling sites but I think, this is not due to Segwit. Its just the process and management of these gambling sites improved a lot during the past months.

To gather some information regarding your question, I opened a ticket (have a chat with the representative) in one of these cryptogambling sites and asked whether they are using/implementing Segwit in their website and he literally said that he didn't know any of that. It is very evident that this is not a big deal in their operation and is not important in their industry.

I recall that some gambling operators were reluctant to
switch to the bech32 address format, because this would
make the tracking of transactions easier for the blockchain
analytics companies.

E.g. if only one popular gambling site uses bech32 addresses and
a player only deposits to gambling websites from his preferred exchange,
it could be easy to identify the addresses of the gambling operator, which
would enable conclusions about the transaction activity of other users of
the gambling site.

This problem would obviously be solved if enough gambling websites
start to use the bech32 address format.

Doesnt really need anymore nowadays which each casinos or gambling sites do need Segwit yet fees now are too low which its just senseless for them to make such changes or not really have that importance.
This question would be only suited to ask when we are on December last year which they might have that view on having such transition but well we do see the current situation when it comes to fees.

Cheaper deposit/withdrawal fees have certainly made a much bigger difference.

Frankly speaking, most of the casinos haven't even managed to implement a proper automated withdrawal structure. Implementing Lightning Network should be way ahead of their priorities.

Paying $20 as fees for smaller transactions would be basically the death of bitcoins. How the fuck anyone is cool with paying $20 for a bitcoin transaction?

Pretty sure they won't pay $20 per transaction just to make sure the players receive their withdrawals on time.

Most of the casinos where I gamble have a proper withdrawal structure for small withdrawals, but they still back that up with "human" verification structures for larger withdrawals. You cannot trust computers, if you have a small operation.

In the last part of your post, you got your quotes all mixed up, because you quoted things that SyGambler said and you put it under my quotes.  ;D

Do you believe Segwit has a big role on the network's cheaper fees? Many of the posters believe that Segwit did not help in it. Hahaha.

But I believe has helped because Segwit's higher block weight makes it more expensive for the spammers to flood the mempool. Flooding would also give evidence that Segwit blocks can grow as close to under 4mb.

This is more of a survey targeted at owners of casinos and gambling sites as against the players on those platforms. As a player, I can only feel the effect in a little bit based on the amount and the number of times the withdrawals over the past one year. But on the part of the casino administrators, it would come as the total of all withdrawals and how much they were able to save for those who have migrated to SegWit as with the drop in activities, the drop in transaction fees is across board whether Legacy or  SegWit. You should direct this to them in my opinion or better still if you can identify the address they use, a trace in each output would give the amount that is paid a transaction fees.

The purpose of segwit being good for transaction was because the transaction fee got a lot more expensive to what it was.

Now that daily usage is down on bitcoin and not that many people are buying or selling (or mainly sending or receiving) and the blockchain is not on a stress, the prices of fee went down as expected.

Segwit was a solution to when it was crowded and since its not crowded anymore it is not needed anymore. It is a great feature to have for future and when the blockchain gets jammed again with bunch of transactions segwit will help but for now at least for today, no one needs segwit. Hence I doubt if anyone went over to segwit side and had any significant improvements at all.

What I mostly notice is that most of the gambling sites I know instead of integrating Segwit is they added more cryptocurrencies for them to avoid the high fees during that time, not the solution what mostly wanted/demanded but it surely did the job as a lot of people accepted their solution by adding new cryptocurrencies, also the good thing about this is these sites accepted the cryptocurrencies permanently and not as a temporary solution to the high network fees of BTC.

That's a really good point. While of course some sites have been adding altscoins long before network congestion ever became an issue, just to try and welcome more coin communities and/or diversify and/or take advantage of psychological willingness for players to lose "lower value" alts, I've actually seen a couple of gambling places offer alts simply to get around the confirmation times issue. I'd say the profit taken from offering in-casino exchange for those alts is a big motivation too.

Again, for serious gamblers, the fee difference shouldn't make a difference but I can imagine that for regular depositors who also probably make regular withdrawals, gambling with Bitcoin and an alt makes a lot of difference as a percentage of bankroll.

It's somewhat a shame that the low network traffic on Bitcoin has made everyone forget the pains of 200 sat/byte fees and put off SegWit upgrades.

Gambling or not, we all need segwit adoption to be as high as possible so we won't be having the problems we had before. I know segwit itself may not solve the problem completely but nobody said it would. It doubled the blocksize more than twice practically without actually increasing it which gained us 2 to 5 years so they say. During this time clever devs of bitcoin will come up with other clever solutions I know it.

We may not need it at the moment but it is better to have it ready imo. Every upgrade bitcoin is going to have will probably depend on segwit. Just like LN.

I think it is very problematic to evaluate the impact, given the bearish market. Last autumn it was normal to pay about 5 dollars per transaction. At the most bullish time the fees reached more than 20 dollars. Now, even on wallets that don't generate segwit addresses(like blockchain.info), paying less than a half of a dollar per prioritized transaction is classic. What I am trying to say is that the transaction fees decreased tremendously anyway and how much of it is due to segwit is unclear. The real impact evaluation will come when the market gets bullish again and we see the big difference between segwit and non-segwit fees (or we don't, who knows).

I think that high fees have at least discouraged A LOT on-chain betting, and imho this is quite positive, as I think that sites like luckybit in the long run can generate a lot of dust outputs.

I was really happy when Crypto-Games finally implemented segwit. Not that it took that long, I mean they were faster than many other services.
I do see the benefits every time I make a withdraw. The fees are just really negligible now and if the Bitcoin network ever gets congested again, I won't be paying too much on those higher fees.

CG is the only site I play on, so I cannot comment on other website's implementation.

I did wonder if this was true, never exactly found out and if BCH is basically a device forward by Chinese government interests because they do not favour the headless nature of BTC.     
China very often I think has seemingly private companies go forward with orders that come from within government and those ventures are financed by central government banking initiatives.   While in theory private, that whole business would not exist without the insistance of Chinese communist government.    It certainly occurs with various commodity land purchases especially abroad, even loss making mines are snapped up if the price is seen likely to rise later .
Anyway I digress, I just wondered if BCH story had more to it and I was never sure if it was all confirmed or just part of the nasty stories each side of the fork spreads about the others.


I do think Segwit bust the dam open on this one.   It was part of why this accumulation in the backlog was not feasible, if malicious or not.   I believe I paid $30 at one point, totally ironic that this was with the highest BTC price

In my point of view, yes, segwit is a big help in every bitcoin transaction because I noticed that it reduce the transaction fee, unlike before, and also betting and gambling site is one of the fuel why bitcoin survived.. As far as I know one of the use of bitcoin is for gaming, gambling and betting.. nowadays it is using now in every commercial transaction and even in banking too..

the death of bitcoin is a big word to say , bitcoin has reached that fee before and there were many who still used it
of course lower fees are better , but as I stated the sites I use pay the fees for their customers so even if the fee went higher it won't affect me when I withdraw unless of course they change the policy
and if you compare bitcoin sites with fiat sites then even paying 20$ for a transaction to be done isn't that high unless you are gambling low amounts since most of the fiat sites charge big fee ( for example as I remember pinnacle charges 10 euros on withdrawals and it's considered the most gambler friendly site  )

Then I believe that is when the Lightning Network should be used. The whole community must have understood this clearly by now, that no one wants to store value in an altcoin, and considering them as a "solution" would be a mistake. There is nothing as secure as Bitcoin's security for good store of value, the rest are for dumping to, yes, hold Bitcoins. 8)

The solution I saw gambling sites employing prior to segwit was use of alt coins.   The whole deal with BTC solving its fees problem was probably a big fallout for the alt coin networks which had taken over some of that revenue stream diversions to the backlog.
So segwit has allowed use of BTC again without requiring alt coins though mostly the option to use that has remained.   Alot of people prefer to just stick with the simplest widest network option which is BTC, any ease of use improvement has to be a positive for business

Segwit has certainly impacted the way people gamble -before it was mostly "I will exchange BTC and send the cheapest and the fastest alt I can find and save on fees and time"
now bitcoin transactions are much  faster and in many cases cheaper than altcoins to deposit to a casino
you do not have to keep in mind the exchange ratio all times when you gamble and is way more convenient (at least for me is) to gamble with btc
the trend is to decrease the withdrawal fees too, I see many casinos reduce their fee to 10.000 satoshi and even less, while it used to be up to 40k at some casinos not so long ago
so in general,Segwit should shift the betting volumes back in bitcoin's favour

I believe the gambling sites started accepting altcoins more for the expansion of their player reach than a solution for the "slow" Bitcoin. Bitcoin by itself, and with Segwit, is already a good solution for regulatory arbitrage that unlicensed gambling sites need in my opinion.

Hello !

We use Segwit addresses for our website.
(Litecoin is already fast btw)

Our deposits and withdrawals are now lightning fast  :)

Yeah, this is for sure because most of them are already stucked on bitcoin but still if yoi can compare bitcoin wagered to altcoin wagered, bitcoin still fat from them and that means people still believe on bitcoin, although it has slower transaction and take a huge fee but bitcoin has more power than any altcoin. Gambler will still wager more of it, no matter how many altcoin is implemented

Sorry but let me correct you on your wrong comment. Bitcoin, right at this moment, does not have huge transaction fees. Plus high fees are not something that is permanent that newbies might mistakenly think to be true.

What I mean huge is when if you compared it to altcoin and it is slower too, you need a bigger fee to make sure that your money will be on your wallet. But what people need is lower fee and faster process which is better to use altcoin instead of bitcoin itself. I do not say that bitcoin has really higher fee too but for comparison to the altcoin, altcoin itself has a better performance from the fee and the faster process

I made a transaction today and paid 5 satoshis per byte, and it made the next block. Bitcoin's fee is very cheap.


You want faster confirmation time? Do you want Dogecoin better than Bitcoin, and would faster confirmation time give a "coin" more value?

I believe 10 minutes is already ok for Bitcoin to give blocks time to propagate across the network.


Maybe Bitcoin's higher fee is because there is more demand to use it than your altcoin? 8)

More and more casinos accept more and more coins for deposit, some of which are better suitable for gambling purposes (and for frequent usage in overall tbh). Why not using litecoin or doge? Most popular crypto casinos (https://btcplaymania.com/) accept both.
Bitcoin will be the coin "to rule them all" as long as you consider it so.