Bitcoin was always designed to be a perfect match for the gambling industry, with it’s ability to conduct cost efficient and fast payments, while also providing an immutable audit trail that regulators love, and data networking opportunities for enterprising developers. CG London was a great exhibition of this, and it brought out non-executive chairman of Clarion Events Michael Caselli, who reflected on gambling’s history with Bitcoin.
Our very own Rebecca Liggero Fontana bumped into Caselli at the event and asked what brought him out. “It’s right down the road, it’s the ideal location for me,” he said. “Gaming industry’s here, it’s a huge global hub and I thought I better come down because I know a lot of other guys from the industry wanted to come down, and are coming down. And what’s interesting, anything blockchain is exciting, there’s got to be an application that we’re looking for now. A lot of companies are innovating and trying to find their applications for anything blockchain, and Bitcoin SV is just a really great platform with good throughput, good transaction volumes, the ability to do quite a lot of stuff on the application layers that you can’t do on some of the coins, and it just makes a lot of sense that the gaming industry is coming down and I’m here to support.”
Bitcoin SV, having finally unleashed the power of unlimited scaling on the blockchain, was impressing plenty of visitors at the conference, and Liggero Fontana asked what potential Caselli saw in it. “Decentralized solutions are good for a number of different things like exchanges,” he said. “Trust is an issue, so where there’s ever a trust issue for any application, then there’s a good solution for that. Trust issues may exist in countries which are yet to regulate, which don’t have a regulator that’s overseeing what’s going on, and then players could really self-regulate what’s happening by using an immutable blockchain.”
But while Bitcoin SV has only recently started unleashing the true potential of blockchain technology, the concept itself has been around a number of years, and Caselli reflected on how the gambling industry has approached it. “We were at fever pitch maybe six, seven years ago whenever things started to kick off, when Bitcoin got to its, you know, $100 value and then climbed to a thousand dollars,” he said. “And that was exciting and everyone’s looking at, saying ‘Where does this work, where does this work?’ And I think there was a lot of adaptation at that time to kind of move the systems over on the payment side of things. And then when smart contracts came out, there was a whole bunch of people launching tokens and launching projects so they can go and they could fund themselves, create some applications in gaming.”
Caselli still feels that excitement, and with the ability to store both value and data, he sees big things coming. “With the ability to create applications, who knows where we’re going to go in the future.”
We’ve interviewed Caselli recently about how the pandemic has affected the gambling industry. You can catch that chat, and all of our future videos, by subscribing to our CalvinAyre.com YouTube channel.
