How Did Cryptocurrency Become Casinos’ Best Bet?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ll be aware of the boom in crypto casinos. These casinos allow you to play all the games from an online casino with bitcoin as the payment method. 

Casinos were an early adopter of cryptocurrencies and are partly to thank for their move into the mainstream. Allowing customers to pay in crypto was a big step in improving the perceived trustworthiness of this payment method, as well as the general awareness of crypto as a payment option. 

It’s not only this that casinos have done for crypto and there’s plenty that crypto has leant to casinos too. There are lots of reasons for the link between these two sectors, which we’re going to explore now. 

Safety and Security

The single most important factor for the success of bitcoin is that it is totally safe and secure. Blockchain technology is at the core of Bitcoin’s success, enabling this cryptocurrency to rise quickly above the level that others have so far managed. 

Most cryptocurrencies work using blockchain technology, but what is it actually? The blockchain is a series of encrypted blocks, each accounting for one coin in the case of bitcoin. It is a permanent ledger that keeps a record of everybody that buys a bitcoin, including who it is currently owned by and where it has been traded to and from. This means that there is a record that can be accessed by the public that keeps every single coin safe. 

This level of safety is a huge plus for casinos who strive to keep everything to do with their business as safe as possible. For instance, Bovada casino not only ensures that their customers’ crypto deposits are kept safe, but also that their games are legitimate and fair. 

Still, blockchain technology has the power to take the level of safety to the next level by exposing rigged games and illegitimate casinos in an instant. If a casino were to create unfair games, the ledger would provide that information for all to see.

For example, if a slot game offered a return to player ratio of 97% but the casino that offered that slot game appeared to be making 6% profit on that slot game, then it would be immediately obvious that the casino was operating falsely. 

Transaction Fees

Central banks are necessary for traditional currencies to function. Every single transaction that is made in a traditional currency has to be approved and undertaken by a central bank. As you can imagine, this costs money. Everyone who sells something, whether a service, like a casino, or goods, like a retail store, has to pay a transaction fee. Some businesses pass this onto their customers, whilst some swallow the fee themselves. 

The majority of the time the fees are tiny, just a fraction of a cent per transaction, or sometimes a small percentage of the whole transaction amount. This might not seem like a huge problem, after all, if you’re spending a couple of hundred dollars and only paying a handful of cents for the privilege then it really doesn’t matter. However, some companies deal with small transactions multiple times for each customer each day. 

For online casinos this is very much the case, they need to process thousands upon thousands of transactions each day, these fees add up. Cryptocurrencies totally remove the need for a central bank, meaning that in theory, transaction fees can be scrapped. 

At the moment, there are crypto wallets that do take transaction fees, so a lot of online crypto casinos aren’t currently feeling the benefits of removed fees. However, the hope is that in the future this will work as its intended, meaning fewer fees for casinos and better benefits for customers. 

No Borders

Another big benefit for casinos is that as cryptocurrencies are decentralized, they can be purchased by anyone anywhere. Online casinos are used by customers all around the world and offering deposits in all of the currencies available can be costly to implement and can even cause big problems with currencies that fluctuate violently. 

While cryptocurrencies aren’t the most stable currency, they do provide better stability than some of the currencies of struggling countries. Government corruption and unchecked inflation can lead to huge peaks and troughs in the value of certain currencies, causing huge problems for online casinos that need to offer a standard exchange rate. This means that many casinos only offer deposits and withdrawals in a small number of fiat currencies. Whilst this makes operations simpler for them, it means that some customers feel that they’re missing out.

The ability to deposit, withdraw and play with cryptocurrency makes online casinos a viable option for more customers than ever, meaning that casinos can reach a wider target audience in the most fair way possible. Cryptocurrency was invented with the intention of creating a fair, global currency, that nobody would be excluded from, and it seems as though the casino industry might be the