Bitcoin’s Betting Beginnings
it’s easy to understand why better odds, faster payouts, lower fees, higher liquidity, and no account closures make cryptocurrencies are a better option than credit cards or cash.
So would it surprise you if Bitcoin, the world’s first real Internet currency, was actually designed with gamblers and bettors in mind? Contrary to what most people commonly associate Bitcoins with — drug markets, e-Commerce, international money transfers, speculation — gambling was actually the first ‘killer app’ of cryptocurrencies.
In April 2012, long before Bitcoin was considered a legitimate investment asset a website called Satoshi Dice was launched by pioneering entrepreneur Eric Voorhees. It offered a simple online dice game: anyone in the world could simply make bets on the roll results. Bets could be as low as fractions of a penny and Satoshi Dice earned a small commission.

At one time these bets made up half of all transactions on the blockchain.
After 12 months of operations the site was compelled to block US users from gambling. Soon after, Voorhees decided to sell the company for US$12 million. Since then, of course, we have seen many ,much bigger online casinos and websites move into the market. At Crypto Sherpa we provide reviews on which of these operators are worth your custom and can be trusted.
In our research, we found out an even earlier reference to gambling in Bitcoin’s history.
In 2008, before Bitcoin was launched it included some rudimentary online poker functionality in its source code. The developers have long deleted these lines of codes but we find it fascinating that the mysterious inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself thought about gambling applications so early on.
Some people speculate that Australian computer scientist Dr. Craig Wright is one of the inventors behind Bitcoin’s famous whitepaper. He has publicly stated that he co-developed one of the first online casinos in his early career in the 1990s. It is also alleged that Dr. Wright and his partner Dave Kleiman contracted for Bitcoin casinos in Latin America in 2012.
While, the vast majority of the crypto community does not believe any of Wright’s claims, one of his current associates, the flamboyant billionaire Calvin Ayre is a well-known and controversial online gambling entrepreneur. Ayre and Wright have been heavily promoting Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the lower fee & bigger block alternative to Bitcoin (BTC) since August 2017. Wright recently announced the implementation of new privacy functionalities for BCH transactions. This anonymity feature may prove popular within the online gambling community which recently has started to move from BTC to faster, cheaper and more private alternatives such as DASH, MONERO, LITECOIN and ZCASH.

Where to from here?
It’s hard to say whether Bitcoin Cash’s low fees or Bitcoin’s fast and cheap Lightening Network or any of the privacy coins will succeed in this industry. But it is evident to us that gambling has played a big role in Bitcoin’s tumultuous past and will likely be impacting the future of crypto currencies as well.
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This article is part of a series written by Crypto Sherpas in the summer of 2018. These introductory articles aim to provide an entry level understanding of the intersection between crypto currencies and betting/gambling for the general audience and are intended for mainstream audiences. Visit www.CryptoSherpas.Net for our in-depth reviews of leading crypto casinos, poker providers, dice games and sportsbooks and follow us on Twitter @CryptoSherpas1
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