A little more than three years ago, a small group of online casinos in the UK started accepting Bitcoin as a viable way for players to fund their online casino accounts. At the time, this looked like a trend that had the potential of spreading like wildfire throughout the UK online gambling industry. Here we are a little more than three years later, and the percentage of online gambling sites that will accept any form of cryptocurrency stands at approximately 10%.
Of the casinos accepting Bitcoin as a payment option, a great majority of them list Bitcoin as only one of many options. That doesn’t really inspire players to take the option seriously, especially if they know little about cryptocurrencies in general.
There is a very small group of online casinos that accept Bitcoin as the only banking option players can use. At issue here is the fact these casinos seem to come and go with a high level of regularity. At any given point in time, there might be a few dozen Bitcoin-only online casinos in operation, only to see the number decrease by a dozen or so within a month. Clearly, such online casinos are struggling to pull in enough crypto users to keep these casinos profitable, causing some of them to close because of financial problems. For interested parties, Vegas Casino, BitStarz, and mBit are all Bitcoin online casinos that have been able to survive.
What’s Slowing Online Casinos from Pushing Cryptocurrency Deposits?
A little more than two years ago, the cryptocurrency market, led by Bitcoin, saw a huge surge in activity. Many investment analysts saw this increase in activity as a signal the world was ready to embrace cryptocurrencies as a viable form of exchange for goods and services. While some of the largest merchants in the UK and Asia indicated a willingness to deal in cryptocurrencies, the momentum eventually stalled.
There are two issues that seem to be adversely affecting the mainstream’s acceptance of cryptocurrencies. First, hackers have been finding ways to strip tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin from the wallets of unsuspecting Bitcoin users all over the world. The amount of wealth that is being stripped with little to no recourse definitely causes crypto users to take notice and divest their investments.
The second issue relates to pricing volatility. As a maturing form of monetary investment, cryptocurrencies are still showing the kind of pricing volatility one would only expect to see with newer investment vehicles. With several daily drops in value of 10% or more other the past two years, coins like Bitcoin have failed to make even its most loyal users feel secure about holding big positions for any meaningful amount of time. Essentially, investing in cryptocurrencies is still being seen as nothing more than speculative investing.
It’s a good bet that until the cryptocurrency market can resolve some of these issues, merchants will not feel secure about accepting coins as a viable form of exchange until coins like Bitcoin can exhibit a reasonable history of stability.
