Play the record-breaking $1.5B Powerball on Jackpocket using Bitcoin!
Jackpocket is now accepting Bitcoin to fund your account.
Jackpocket is a mobile app available on iOS and Android that allows you to order official state lottery tickets on your phone.
Disclosure: You must be within the boundaries of NY State when placing a lottery order on Jackpocket.
Today, Jackpocket is excited to announce that you can now use Bitcoin to fund your account and play all of the games offered in New York, including tonight’s record-breaking $1.5 billion dollar Powerball jackpot. Jackpocket is trying to bring the lottery into the future, and we’re very bullish on cryptocurrencies and block chain in general. Our goal at Jackpocket is to create a more efficient lottery platform. This means reducing friction and providing more options for players, utilizing playing data to fully embrace responsible gaming principles and ensuring the lottery itself is more safe and secure. Utilizing Bitcoin is one step in right direction to accomplishing our goal.
Over the last few months, Jackpocket has been exploring new and innovate ways to process mobile payments due to the limitations and heavy regulations within the US market. Back in September Jackpocket launched on the front cover of the New York Post, Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning, which lead to a huge spike in sales. The large volume triggered internal alerts for both our credit card processor, their acquiring bank and the card schemes themselves. We’ve been patiently waiting to finalize a migration to a completely new channel for credit card processing, but the process is slow and tedious.
But not to worry! When dealt lemons, the Jackpocket team has been hard at work to produce some lemonade in record time (we’ve pushed hard to get this out before tonight's HUGE Powerball drawing).
To fund your account using Bitcoin, simply go to jackpocket.com/bitcoin and sign in using your mobile number. If you don’t already have an account you can sign up with a few quick forms which includes ID validation. Once you’re in our system, we process the Bitcoin transaction and use a web hook to automatically fund your account with Jackpocket credits. You’ll also receive an email from Jackpocket letting you know that your account has been funded.
Following a successful transaction, simply open up your native Jackpocket app (available on iOS and Android) to find the credits waiting for you to use on your next order. If you created a new account and verified your age using the mobile website, simply download the native app and sign in using your phone number to authenticate.
Utilizing Bitcoin to play the lottery is exciting for a number of reasons. First off, holders of Bitcoin have been looking for a real life touch point to utilize their wallets for e-commerce. A number of online retailers including Overstock and Expedia have launched the ability to accept Bitcoin, however, there are few examples of where Bitcoin becomes relevant in DAILY transactions. With lottery drawings every single day, Bitcoin starts to feel more like a traditional currency.
Furthermore, accepting bitcoin creates a new demographic of lottery players. The lottery has notoriously been associated with harboring on a poverty-stricken population.
Those in poverty or near poverty not only are more likely to play the lottery than those with greater means, they also spend a larger percent of their money on average on these games of chance. — CNN
The opposite is true of individuals who hold Bitcoin in a digital wallet as mentioned in the Wired Magazine article, “Who Owns the World’s Biggest Bitcoin Wallet? The FBI”.
The rest (large Bitcoin holders) seem to belong to what Meiklejohn calls Bitcoin’s “nouveau riche”: People who are accumulating bitcoins from non-mining sources. “What you’re seeing is this influx of a different kind of wealth,” she says.
Allowing Bitcoin holders to play the lottery is ensuring that a more affluent and tech-savvy customer is spending their income on lottery tickets who previously might not be purchasing lottery tickets. Remember, the beneficiary of profits from the lottery are socially-run state programs including the New York State Education Fund.
Finally, micro-transactions are becoming a serious problem for e-commerce merchants that offer products at a low price point. The passage of the Durbin Amendment means that any transaction done with a debit card MUST have a fixed fee of $0.22 cents to process. On a $1 lottery ticket purchase, that’s 22% of the cost before factoring in the variable cost of the transaction (which actually is extremely low at 0.05%). The average retailer commission for a lottery ticket is somewhere around 5–7%, which means accepting debit cards is simply not an option. Bitcoin provides us the opportunity to take small transactions and we’re excited to bring the experience into our native checkout in the near future. Until then, you’ll need to fund your account using Bitcoin before arriving at the checkout page within the app.
This is just the beginning of many new features and products we hope to roll out over the next few weeks. We promise that 2016 will be a very exciting year for Jackpocket.
Peter Sullivan — CEO Jackpocket
