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May 05, 2014, 07:32:55 PM |
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always wanted to make a superlative-inside thread.
most european countries already regulated or are in the process of regulating the online gambling sector, including france, italy, spain, denmark, estonia, bulgaria, belgium, switzerland. in other countries the situation is getting worse every day, for example in germany where online gambling was always illegal but only recently authorities started to force players to retrospectively pay taxes on their gambling income. other examples are poland, and of course russia which only a few weeks ago added popular gambling sites like pokerstars and titancasino to its "putin no like" blacklist (luckily, it's only applied by one major isp so far) and will certainly start to take more drastic measures in the future because of the huge number of players in these both countries.
then there is still the uigea in the usa which prohibits any gambling business to accept payments for the purpose of gambling + attempts of some states to open their borders again for a heavily regulated gambling market.
the situation leaves us with to major players that have a lot of money invested and a lot of money to lose:
- established gambling companies like bwin.party, pokerstars, 888, microgaming, playtech, bet365, william hill, ..., that purchased expensive licenses to be able to operate in regulated markets and spent a lot on their software to support a gambling world with isolated national markets.
- governments, that regulated their market in order to secure their share from the gambling cake in form of taxes.
and there is more: partygaming (now bwin.party) left the very profitable us market in 2006 and on top paid a $100 million fine only for the vague possibility to be a front runner in a regulated us market which is still not there 8 years later. pokerstars paid $225 million to purchase full tilt poker and settle theirs and full tilt poker's case with the u.s. department of justice. but even then they did not manage to get hold of a license for the nevada market and instead are now turning full tilt into a poker+casino business.
on the other side of this story you have a growing bitcoin gambling market. a big portion of bitcoin and altcoin transactions are still related to gambling, even worse in the altcoin community where most altcoins lack of any real world application and are solely made for speculation and gambling, because it's easier to clone a dice script than finding a shop accepting your clonecoin #1024. in the majority of first and second world countries these gambling sites are illegal businesses - ignoring all the websites that don't look like they ever paid taxes or applied for a license to be be able to call themselves a company.
it's a not to unlikely scenario that at some point somebody will take action against bitcoin/altcoin gambling: governments that don't want to lose their gambling taxes and gambling companies asking for government protection of their markets. it would be too easy to ignore this issue and see it just as a problem of these gambling websites. there are several examples in the history of the uigea showing the very likely approach of "bad neighbourhood" as the one that will be taken by authorities. for example, although the uigea was mainly about gambling businesses accepting payments from their customers, 2007 the founders of neteller were arrested under conspiracy charges. hundreds of thousands of accounts were frozen on neteller and moneybookers. it took them until 2011 before they attacked pokerstars, full tilt poker and cereus. much earlier they went for those who managed the transactions, not for the gambling businesses itself.
if you would apply the same "spirit" to the bitcoin/altcoin gambling issue, just replace neteller and moneybookers with blockchain.info or other websites that allow you to keep an online wallet and take no measures to prevent usa customers from transferring coins to gambling websites (or for uk customers to businesses without uk license, etc). if the same rules apply we've seen in action in the past, also every exchange will be a possible target if it does not take any measure against such transactions - similar to the measures paypal took.
some kids now may call this "fud" because for them everything that's not "bitcoin to da moon" is fud. but you could also learn from history (i know, this rarely happens). the bigger this sector grows, the more pressure will be on the established gambling companies and governments to finally do something about it. the issue of the unregulated "wild west" cryptogambling sector is in fact a problem of many legitimate businesses that try to run their operations in accordance with national laws. we've seen it before. they will shut down bit777 but certainly not try to shut down an anonymous dogecoin dice site hosted somewhere in east europe. instead they will seize the domains of every reputable online wallet and exchange that has a meaningful number of usa or uk inputs and too many outputs to this east european gambling website.
it would be a wise thing to do for every honest cryptobusiness to have a look at their processes and their business model and check in which way they could be seen as supporting illegal gambling or gambling transactions, once a state attorney again decides that it's time for some action and has a closer look at their business.
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