The use of Bitcoin in online gambling

It's clear that we have now live in a fully fledged digital world when there's now an online currency available to us. Digital currency is quite clearly something that is going to become a prominent part of our society in years to come, but is it already being used in some of our common online markets such as gambling?

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins, despite their name don't actually come in physical form. They aren't printed like dollars or Euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, using software that has the capabilities to solve mathematical problems.

Bitcoin is the first digital currency to be rolled that falls into a category of money known as cryptocurrency. Only similarity that cryptocurrency shares with money as we know it is that it can be traded digitally; in fact, that's the only way that cryptocureency can be traded.

Do major gambling sites accept Bitcoin?

With Cheltenham festival just around the corner a number of bookies have welcome offers on at the moment; but will people be able to take advantage of these offers by placing bets using Bitcoin? The answer is largely no; especially when it comes to the major bookmakers most common markets.

The majority of major bookmakers don't accept bitcoin as a legitimate currency; however there are ways around this. A simple way to use your bitcoin to gamble online is to exchange it for more traditional currency. This, as you'd imagine is a transaction that happens online and once your bitcoin is converted into dollars, pounds, euro's etc you can then gamble online as normal.

The other way you can gamble online with bitcoin is by using certain bitcoin friendly gambling sites. In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source bitcoin client and soon after people started to realise there was a gap in the market. People we're getting hold of this digital currency, but they had nowhere to gamble with it. This realisation was the beginning of bitcoin friendly gambling sites. On top of being used on some gambling sites, bitcoin can be a preferred method when it comes to buy stocks and shares.

How much is bitcoin worth and where can I get it?

As it stands, one bitcoin is currently worth somewhere in the region of $1160-$1170 depending on the fluctuating exchange rate. It may be a surprise to some that a currency that you can't physically touch or see is worth so much, but that's down to how difficult it can be to get hold of.

When bitcoins were first introduced a common method of obtaining them was called mining. In 2009, every block mined (takes roughly 10 minutes) brought a reward of 50 bitcoin to the person who managed to solve the computational problem. Nowadays the problems that need solving are much tougher and the rewards a lot less. Because of this people now tend to stay away from mining coins and instead accept them as payment for online services, goods trades etc.