Casinos are huge business, and online gaming represents a growing share of it. What’s more—you can invest in them, and earn up to $10,000 per day. For the most complete guide to investing in Bitcoin casinos, including a detailed comparison of casinos and a useful investment return projection calculator, click here.

Who am I?

I’ve been a keen player on Bitcoin casinos since early 2011 on over 150 different websites, and I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the technical stuff like provable fairness. Everybody has a favorite Bitcoin casino—find yours today and learn why TheBitcoinStrip is the most trusted Bitcoin casino resource on the planet!

I only write fair and unbiased casino reviews, to help you make an informed decision. Every review on this website is 100% honest and unpaid-for.

Good luck, and gamble responsibly!

How online casinos started to love Bitcoin

Although there were some early examples of Bitcoin-enabled gambling like SatoshiDICE and bitZino, adoption from online casinos didn’t really take off until after Bitcoin came into the spotlight and the user community grew exponentially.

Something changed back in 2013, the outlook of the financial crisis wasn’t good and many people that were already looking for alternative investments stumbled upon Bitcoin. Bitcoin users crazy when the price hit $100 in April, only for that to be topped off with the still unbroken all time high of ~$1,200.

In the meantime, another thing that skyrocketed was demand for ways to use Bitcoin without having to exchange it. As Bitcoin had also proved to be a great speculative tool there was a lot of demand for full fledged gambling as well. The traffic already-existing casinos that supported Bitcoin received exploded, and for a time, it seemed as though new ones were created almost every day.

The state of the community back then allowed for numerous developers to experiment with Bitcoin by online casinos, and several were met with major success. At least a couple of Bitcoin casinos that had a humble launch back in 2013, gradually built up trust and have since then had bets worth tens of millions in dollars wagered on their platforms.

The “rollout” of provable fairness

SatoshiDICE was an early pioneer in the Bitcoin casino industry; it featured a single major game, which the gambling community community loved. The idea was simple, just a dice rolling game. But it’s the features that got players excited. Users could set the odds as they liked, change their bets from fractions of a penny to thousands of dollars and “roll the dice” as fast as they could send out Bitcoin transactions.

Most importantly though, it was the low house edge and provable fairness that got players hooked with this game format and made SatoshiDICE so successful. Players could spend all day wagering custom-set amounts of Bitcoin, and still have mathematical proof that each and every dice roll they did was randomly selected as a win or loss based on the odds they had selected.

While SatoshiDICE is still an active website, some if its successors have been met with greater success. SatoshiDICE no longer ranks first when it comes to the volume of bets. Certain websites like Primedice managed to come up with and implement further improvements for their provably fair dice games.

As of technical improvements, the most important one was making bets off-chain, this way enabling users to load their accounts with however much money they wanted to bet with by sending single Bitcoin transactions. This made the dice rolling process significantly faster as there wasn’t any need to transfer Bitcoin for every bet. Additionally, house edge on most Bitcoin dice games is 1%, which is extremely low compared to traditional casino games.

Finally, one of the new moves that helped new Bitcoin dice websites succeed what the fact that they made dice rolling more community oriented. Many people were showing up on such websites to wager pennies and chat with others or even the website’s developer on the public chat rooms of the websites.

Only with Bitcoin

One could argue that Bitcoin is more or less, programmable money. Nobody can mandate what it should be used for but everybody is free to find his own use-cases. It’s this programmability that has allowed for unique new innovations with gambling. Talented developers can bring their ideas to life by using Bitcoin, and we’ve already seen astonishing gambling platforms powered by Bitcoin.

One example of Bitcoin-only innovation would be the idea of user-funded gambling. Such websites were unheard of before Just-Dice was swarmed with new users. An event that encouraged the founder and lead developer to implement a crowdfunding solution through which users were able to invest in the house. This solution made Just-Dice one of the most well funded Bitcoin casinos at the time, this way allowing for bets of extremely high monetary value to be placed in the website.

Bitcoin’s contribution to online gambling doesn’t just stop at solutions to finance the house of gambling platforms though. There have been countless unique cryptocurrency-only games. Bustabit is one such game; described by its creator as a “social Bitcoin gambling game in which you place a bet and cash out before the the bust event”. A description which — unsurprisingly — doesn’t really make much sense as the game is so unique that describing it with words isn’t easy.

It was this game that inspired its owner to create the gambling wallet called MoneyPot. It essentially serves as a wallet for users and platform empowering provably fair gambling websites. Users of MoneyPot can handle balances on several provably fair online casinos with a single account, track their winnings and even invest in MoneyPot’s business by funding it, which in its turn funds the affiliated casinos and profits from their house edge.

The state of Bitcoin gambling today, and in the future

Bitcoin’s free market has allowed for many innovations for gambling, there’s enough healthy competition and numerous options for gamblers. There are several reputable casinos, dice games, bookies, countless Bitcoin-only games and even investment opportunities in Bitcoin’s gambling industry.

Those that want to try out new things always have the chance to do this with Bitcoin as new websites and games are constantly popping up. New websites aren’t always successful but oftentimes engaging with a new Bitcoin website is a great experience for both the developers and the players as Bitcoin gambling is still a niche that can be very community oriented. Bitcoin’s gambling community is very vibrant in spite of its youthfulness, something that is especially noticeable in related forums like Bitcointalk.

Overall, gambling is already a very big part of Bitcoin and one of its most popular use-cases so far. Bitcoin’s nature makes it especially fitting for activities like gambling, and while the cryptocurrency’s success with the rest of the world might not be guaranteed, it’s already increasingly popular among gamblers and has a guaranteed future in the industry.