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Online Gambling Site Bets On Bitcoin To Avoid U.S. Laws
SomePgmr writes with a story about an online gambling site planning to use Bitcoin to sidestep U.S. regulations that effectively ban online gambling. From the article: "Michael Hajduk had sunk one year and about $20,000 into developing his online poker site, Infiniti Poker, when the U.S. online gambling market imploded. On April 15, 2011, a day now known in the industry as Black Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the three biggest poker sites accessible to players in the U.S., indicting 11 people on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. ... Infiniti Poker ... plans to accept Bitcoin when it launches later this month. The online currency may allow American gamblers to avoid running afoul of complex U.S. laws that prevent businesses from knowingly accepting money transfers for Internet gambling purposes. 'Because we're using Bitcoin, we're not using U.S. banks — it's all peer-to-peer,' Hajduk says. 'I don't believe we'll be doing anything wrong.'"
Not too long after Black Friday I had the same idea of using Bitcoin currency instead of real moolah. A site called Betcoin had already done this using the jpoker/jspoker library. I frequented the site for a while and even went back to it months later. In both cases the volume of people on the site was extremely low and the amount of bitcoin compared to real USD value was paltry even in comparison to the Full Tilt Poker $0.25/$0.50 tables. There just wasn't enough money in circulation on the site and not many people wanted to stake their futures on the volatile Bitcoin currency in the poker world. Plus, anyone that did any decent research just found various overseas and Indian-owned online casinos (harder for the US Gov to prosecute Indian territory casinos in Canada) and could exchange money by select Visa merchants, cash proxy sites, or by money order.
Proving Bitcoins have value is trivial - there are exchanges where they are traded against other currencies for non-trivial prices, so they clearly have value. What more proof could you demand?
Yes, you can charge back with credit cards. This is great for the credit card companies who then lose the incentive to make their systems more secure, because merchants (ie, the poker companies) lose the money. With Bitcoin you cannot, so the deck is metaphorically stacked in favor of the merchant vs the punter. It's a little better than the reverse because most merchants at least have reputations they want to protect and aren't going anywhere, unlike buyers who can disappear in an instant. But Bitcoin does have ways to offer buyer protection - it's discussed in the very first page of the white paper describing the systems design. The protocol allows for dispute mediators who can decide who gets the money (buyer or seller) but who cannot steal the money themselves.
Actually, like most countries the U.S. backs its currency with the authority to tax .
The dollar has value because it can pay a dollars worth of taxes.
When Germany jumped into the eurozone, adoption of the euro was extremely slow until the year that Germany required all taxes be paid in euros, and in that year almost everyone converted.
"His name was James Damore."