Even P.T. Barnum would be surprised at the soaring birthrate of suckers falling for online gambling-related initial coin offerings (ICO).
Recent weeks have seen a seemingly endless number of gambling-themed ICO announcements, including Ethereum-based projects like Gamblica, a new Cardano-based project called SP8DE and the still largely undefined aspirations of legacy gaming brand Atari, whose primary interest appears to be boosting the company’s stock price by hitching it to technology that doesn’t date from the 1970s.
A quick glance through this site’s archives will reveal dozens of similar announcements over the past year, all aimed at convincing individuals to part with their hard-earned fiat currency in exchange for vaporware linked to threadbare and unproven gambling platforms.
These would-be gaming operators all promise some kind of new customer-friendly approach to wagering, be it commission-free exchange betting or the comparative lack of a house edge versus traditional online gambling sites.
But in order to deliver on these promises, the sites require customers to buy into the idea that these tokens will eventually have some value independent of their respective sites. Which is basically a less musical version of The Simpsons’ Monorail episode, except very few people will still be laughing when the credits roll.
If these new operators truly desired to fuse cryptocurrency advantages with online gambling, they could take a page out of the book of Roger ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Ver, who launched his own online gambling sites using the legacy Segwit BTC token and the newer, more flexible Bitcoin BCH technology.
Unlike these other proprietary currency sites, Bitcoin Cash Games’ customers can take their winnings off the site and exchange them for any number of unrelated goods and services, rather than trying to find some new low-man-on-the-Ponzi-pole dumb enough to take these Confederate banknotes off their hands.
Lest anyone accuse us of being aging Luddites ordering the crypto-kiddies off our lawn, remember that this site and its fearless leader were early advocates for the potential of fusing Bitcoin (and more recently Bitcoin BCH) with online gambling. It’s just that there will be a reckoning from this frenzy of gambling-related ICOs, and both crypto and gambling are going to be tarnished in the process.
We’ll leave you with what is probably the earliest recorded footage of an online gambling token auction, although they keep referring to it as ‘Florida’ for some reason.
