re: Bitcoin Casinos Release 2012 Earnings

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I'd imagine the end game to fully develop an online currency that is difficult for government officials to trace, and thus becomes more attractive to bordeline legal activities such as gambling.

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While bitcoin does facilitate borderline illegal activities, it can also be used legitimately.

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The problem with that though is how can a Bitcoin become a truly recognized currency without larger companies (Amazon, eBay) accepting it?

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Who says they won't?

The CEO of BitPay* made a speech on why companies should accept bitcoin. He went through a convincing list of reasons why, including:

-prevention of fraud (no chargebacks): This is by design in the bitcoin network. Some will say no chargebacks are a bad thing for the consumer, but for the merchant, it is a money saver. We'll have to see how the market plays out in that regard. But there are already 3rd party escrow companies setup to mitigate any potential issues if desired


-lower transaction fees: He commented that Amazon pays about a billion dollars a year to credit card processors in fees. Imagine if, instead of paying .10-.15 cents per swipe, plus a percentage (isn't 3% pretty common?) of the sale to VISA and MasterCard, they only had to pay a fraction of a penny for each transaction? How much money would they save?


But yes, it will take a long time for Amazon to consider it. I doubt eBay ever would accept it because bitcoin is a threat to PayPal and eBay owns PayPal.



*BitPay is a company that provides services to other companies to allow them to accept bitcoins. BitPay will handle all the transactions and render the currency of choice to the company. For instance, if you sold something for $5 equivalent in bitcoin, you would get $5 US dollars (minus BitPay's transaction fees --I think they are 1.99% right now)