The Best Gambling Crypto Is In A Closed Loop Blockchain Casino
If you were going to choose one industry most likely to be totally disrupted by blockchain technology, online gambling would be a safe bet! Blockchains appear to be the perfect tool for bringing transparency to a sector with a reputation for dirty dealings, rigged games and “black box” algorithms ensuring that the house always wins.
The simple act of gambling with a cryptocurrency, however, does not guarantee you a fair shake in an online casino. For that you need to look under the hood, so to speak, into what makes it a good crypto to gamble with. Specifically, that means considering:
- The blockchain on which the the cryptocurrency was mined and on which more of it will be mined.
- Whether or not your casino relies on technology from that blockchain — or any blockchain for that matter — and how so.
Do that for any cryptocurrency accepted at any online casino (except BlockStamp Games!) and you’ll find that:
Most crypto casinos rely on a “patchwork” of blockchain concepts and technologies bolted together from various sources to drive profits — and sometimes to mislead players.
The ideas behind blockchains are cryptocurrencies are new, exciting, and complex. They therefore make great marketing tools. Many online casinos owners use them as such by mixing and matching blockchain features and philosophies to make their platforms more popular.
If you skip the hype and look more closely at what technologies these casinos are actually using — not just associating themselves with — you’ll discover a few key facts:
A casino accepting crypto isn’t necessarily involved with blockchains in any other way.
Consider, for example, a casino that accepts cryptocurrency and, because of that, positions itself as forward-looking and aligned with the decentralized, transparent nature of blockchains.
In some ways, that casino could be forward-looking etc. Not all online casinos accept crypto.
But that isn’t the whole story. There is no guarantee that that casino does anything else with blockchains at all apart from accepting cryptocurrencies. To them crypto would serve the same essential function as fiat.
Because a casino accepts crypto doesn’t mean it runs fairly.
Just because it’s possible to use crypto at a casino does not necessarily mean the casino’s gameplay is more or less fair than any other casino’s. It could be that a casino accepts crypto and runs it through the same old “black box” algorithms that it had been using since before crypto became popular.
And even if crypto-accepting casino does provide provably fair gameplay, the core processes driving the provable fairness are based on various mechanisms, none of them are derived from a blockchain. An example of such a mechanism would involve “server seeds” from the casino and “client seeds” typically generated in a player’s browser.
Some of the better-designed online crypto casinos use a combination of provably fair gameplay processes — through random number generation software, let’s say — that is linked to a smart contract, usually on the Ethereum blockchain. The random number triggers the smart contract and the players wins or loses accordingly. This solution, however, is complex and invites potential errors: first in that the random generator must function properly, and second in that the random number generator’s results must feed into the smart contract properly via its code.
If a casino is using crypto tokens, be wary of the human factors.
If you are — or will eventually be, in case of an initial coin offering (ICO) — gambling an online casino’s crypto token, it means that you are participating in some kind of incentive structure the casino’s developers have thought up. You would be wise to know what that structure is and what you’re agreeing to.
That’s because crypto tokens are created by one person or entity on top of a blockchain — almost always Ethereum, as of today — to represent an asset or utility. Whenever you use a token you are therefore participating in “sub-economy” with a currency allocated according to human factors. One such human factor, for example in an ICO, would be the financial incentive to develop software in exchange for 20% of the initial token allocation. Therefore not everyone can obtain crypto tokens on the same terms: the token creator is pulling the strings.
While you should always do your homework whenever currency — crypto or otherwise — is involved, with crypto tokens your homework will be harder. The human factors behind using tokens, especially in ICOs, are notoriously complex or often downright fraudulent.
Compare with crypto coins from a proof-of-work blockchain. Anyone with the right computing resources can mine them. Proof-of-work blockchains aren’t necessarily perfect but they are highly predictable and anyone can obtain proof-of-work blockchain crypto coins on the same clearly defined, if not always attractive, terms.
And finally, on a practical note that is not related to the casinos themselves: if you hold enough value in a crypto coin to the point that you would want to gamble with it at “blockchain patchwork” casino, doing so will probably be inconvenient and expensive. As these types of coins gain popularity, transactions with them quickly become slow and expensive.
All of the above points are basically what you don’t want to see behind the crypto you’re considering gambling with. Fortunately, there’s a better option:
BST is a gambling-optimized crypto coin mined on the same blockchain that powers the provably fair BlockStamp Games casino platform.
BST the only crypto coin that you can gamble at an online casino, BlockStamp Games, whose provable fairness derives from the same blockchain, BlockStamp, that the coined is mined on. BlockStamp is a proof-of-work blockchain hardforked from the Bitcoin blockchain around a set of initial use cases, one of which is to offer a radically fair alternative to gambling fiat, crypto tokens, or crypto coins from blockchains not specifically modded for gambling — fair or otherwise.
If you’re gambling BST, it means several important things:
- You’re gambling a crypto coin in a “closed loop” blockchain casino. The system isn’t just provably fair. If the probabilities were off somehow, operations would stall. This “fair or bust” architecture also enables more exciting gameplay with huge jackpots!
- You’re gambling a crypto coin that you can mine yourself. You are not participating in a token sub-economy based on another person’s business model or ideas of fairness. BlockStamp Games’ fairness is all based on technology — there is no business model. The platform is designed to generate money exclusively for gamblers: not house operators, software developers, or anyone else. The only human factor is how much gamblers are willing to wager.
- You’re actually gambling. That is to say: you’re not waiting for ICO-funded developers to deliver software that will allow you to gamble eventually. No tokens means no ICO and no ICO details to do due diligence on.
- Your blockchain transaction fees to make wagers or receive winnings are minimized. BlockStamp has been designed for exponentially lower transaction fees and far faster processing times than popular crypto coins like BTC or ETH. Even if BST gains popularity over the long run.
To get started, visit BlockStamp Games. To play, you can trade BTC or ETH for BST on PicoStocks. The current price of BST is available on PicoStocks and the BlockStamp homepage. You can also download a wallet to use for your wagers and store your BST.
