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Two events happened in the last seven days which has altered my perception about BitCoin and the future of this virtual coin.
1. The apparent loss of 1,300 BTC by a Bitcoin betting site called Just-Dice when a gambler betted coins that he/she did not own when the coins should have been transferred away from the site. The owner was supposed to have transferred the coins away from the account but forgot to actually take them from the account. The account holder or as the account holder stated a person who used his unguarded laptop in a cafe managed to bet and lose 1,300 BitCoins which worked out as about $100,000+.
The owner of the website said he will cover the losses although a load of BitCoin users have donated some of their BitCoin to help cover the loss! If this seems remarkable then please read the source of this story at Coindesk.
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2. According to the Financial Times IG Group – a company not known to make silly bets – have decided to take bets on the price fluctuations of BitCoins!. Now an organisation as big as IG Group do not get involved in markets in which they are not going to make humongous amount of money. What also made this story interesting was the fact that they will take on the risk associated with the market. Yes, I thought of it right away, why would not a BitCoin investor take bets on BitCoin going down and then dumping a load of Bitcoins and cleaning up? This should be interesting.
Now, with my ongoing row with William Hill and their customer service, who want me to jump through hoops like a puppy so that I can get my meagre winnings from Royal Ascot, still running (I now want them to donate my winnings to Save The Children fund), I am seriously looking to BitCoin as a way of bypassing the overly paternalistic attitude to MY money and what I want to do with it! If I want to bet then I should, but, if I win then I should be able to get my money as and when I want it, not, when some prickly jobsworth decide I should get it.
I therefore did a half-arsed search and so a site called http://betwithbtc.com/ and yikes it scared me, when you see the amount of sites that do not payout. But when you look at it a little more carefully it is not too dissimilar to what most bookmakers do so further research is needed to see why a site is only 99.8% likely to pay out. It is alright having stats but what lay behind those figures?
I seriously want to get involved in using ‘virtual currency’ for betting and with the Zynga model well and truly tested I can see it being viable. Yes there are going to be ‘accidents’, hustles and scams but that I suppose is the nature of the world wide web wild wild west nature. Anyone what to do a deal in BitCoins, I am still open to offers?