When it comes to business the gambling industry is a huge one with around 8 percent of its business, which is a sizeable portion, currently conducted online and this percentage is growing steadily.
The current global market value of the online gambling industry was valued back in 2012 at €21.73 billion, which is about $28.54 billion, according to the H2 Gambling Capitol, an established research company, which works out the value of this market based on gross winnings. It also believes that by 2015 the online industry is likely to see a compound annual growth of about 9.13 percent.
In terms of the total revenue made in online gambling at the moment the bitcoin only makes up a tiny fraction of this percentage. It seems obvious though that with its combination of fast payments and low costs the various companies that offer gambling facilities using cryptocurrency will now be making every effort to take full advantage of this online gambling growth as it is their chance to make large sum of money from it.
Since bitcoin came on the scene it has become increasingly clear that bitcoin users love to use their cryptocurrency to gamble. Analysis of bitcoin use has shown that in the early years of adoption as many as half of the bitcoin transaction made were made to a single bitcoin betting site, SatoshiDice. With cryptocurrency being very useful for micro-transactions it came as no surprise that mid-2013 saw about 5 percent of all bitcoin transactions going through the same site following further analysis of bitcoin trends.
With an increasing number of entrepreneurs wanting to get in on the action it has been revealed that over a six month period as many as 400 requests had been made for casino site set-ups that offer either bitcoin or fiat gambling facilities and out of these there were anywhere between 3 to 5 casinos that were in the process of actually being set up.
Although bitcoin is a very popular micro-transaction currency this is not always the case when it comes to online gambling and there have been recent instances of wagers of as much as 200 – 400 BTC hitting the online gambling tables. One recently launched casino site has claimed that an equivalent of about $10 million worth of bitcoin transaction have been processed on its site each month.
A big stumbling block for the growth of online gambling is the current US regulations that have been put in place to prevent online gambling from taking place throughout the country which essentially prevents players from using banks in the US to process online gambling transactions. This, however, has worked in favour of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as none of the transactions go through any banks and this has led to a number of online gambling sites allowing US players to play on their sites.
An even more significant turnaround is the recent news that a number of US states are now starting to soften their regulations with regards to gambling online which could allow cryptocurrency and online gambling sites alike to flourish.