Monster Byte Crypto Gambling Series
State of the Industry Part 1: An introduction
The Internet and the gambling industry
Revolutionary is a much-bandied term in cryptocurrency and blockchain, but it was actually the Internet that truly revolutionized the gambling industry from the mid 1990s when the concept of gambling online began to take hold. Unsurprisingly, the idea that gamblers would willingly take their betting home, facing a computer instead of dealers in the flesh, was initially derided by most of the industry, believing that it would fail as spectacularly as the dotcoms of their time.
The first to venture were offshore-based companies, with Antigua and Barbuda’s Free Trade & Processing Act in 1994 opening the door for thousands of companies to operate online casinos in the following years, as the numbers grew from a mere 15 in 1996 to over a thousand in 1999, together generating over $800 million in online gambling revenue. By 2009, when Bitcoin and cryptocurrency first appeared, online gambling and casinos were household names: sponsors of giant football clubs, properties and festivals. Today, the online gambling industry stands is worth over $44 billion.
So what’s all this got to do with crypto?
Online gambling’s two decades went by with its fair share of high drama: adoption, followed by prohibition and regulation, as online gambling was finally recognized as a giant legitimate online industry. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is eerily similar to cryptocurrency today!
It wasn’t until after people had started transacting in Bitcoin for about a year before some enterprising people considered it for gambling. The earliest crypto gambling can be traced back to June 2011 with individuals who ran (now defunct) services like
Seals with Clubs is often credited as being the first Bitcoin poker site to launch in August 2011 but earlier examples can be traced back at least to June 2011: bitlotto.com (a Bitcoin raffle), BTCFor.me (a Bitcoin lottery), BitBook.biz (a Bitcoin sportsbook),and betco.in and bitbetter (Bitcoin poker sites).
Differentiated not only because all transactions were handled in Bitcoin, these games used hash technology based on the Bitcoin blockchain to conduct some of the results. It wasn’t until a year later, however, when the specific use of Bitcoin’s cryptographic algorithms would bring crypto gambling’s most significant innovation.
From “probably fair” to provably fair
In June 2012, Bitzino.com launched three casino-styled games that would further set the standard for future crypto gambling, such as anonymous play (no registrations required) and an offsite cold wallet storage. Most significantly, they introduced what they called a “Provably Fair” feature.
Unlike a traditional casino, where players must rely on third-party services to monitor and verify that the gaming software are legitimate and within accepted limits (usually, a testing of their Random Number Generation or RNG software), the Provably Fair implementation meant that players could themselves verify every bet made.
But in Provably Fair gambling, random values generated from cryptographic hashes are used to determine bet outcomes. And because all these values are recorded, every player can recalculate every bet to verify that the result’s computation was performed correctly without the system knowing the result before the bet was made.
Monster Byte’s place in crypto history
Monster Byte appeared on the scene along with a crop of Provably Fair gaming portals in 2012, firstly as the B2C site CasinoBitco.in. In 2015, CasinoBitco.in was rebranded to BitcoinRush.io to pave way for more innovative peer to peer gaming. Today, all the unique and custom software that is leveraged on BitcoinRush.io is syndicated and sold B2B through Monster Byte.
While the likes of SatoshiDICE would grab the headlines (composing almost half of all Bitcoin transactions that year, sort of like what CryptoKitties did to Ethereum in 2017), we introduced crypto gambling’s first peer-to-peer game with a zero house edge, a full-feature Bitcoin sportsbook, Bitcoin comps, along with provably fair gaming that is still featured in all our casino games today.
Crypto gambling may still be a relatively new concept, and there are still many hurdles to overcome, but we’re glad to be a pioneer in this extremely competitive business. We believe the ideals of cryptocurrency themselves carry much potential for a wider change in the way the world sees money. We also see the huge, unexplored potentials in the ways that blockchain technology can shape the future of how gambling is conducted, just the way the Internet revolutionized the way people gambled.
Unlike our peers of 2012, who eventually closed down, scammed or sold their businesses, we are still operating strong, improving our products and business for a growing customer base. Our decision almost six years ago to involve ourselves with a technology many considered unproven at the time has taken us today to a stage where we can continue to establish and grow our name, along with you, our community.
Follow our blog as we continue on to our next post: Is crypto gambling really that big of a deal?
