Poker News – As Bitcoin becomes more and more of an emerging currency market, it should be something that is on every poker player’s radar. In the PokerNews Guide To Bitcoin, Part 1: we discussed what Bitcoin is and how it can relate to poker. For Part 2, we will look at the advantages of Bitcoin on the online felt.
To give PokerNews readers a better understanding of the pros and cons of Bitcoin poker sites, we reached out to Michael Hadjuk, owner and CEO of Infiniti Poker, which offered a soft launch of the site on Nov. 27, 2013. We also spoke with top Toronto-based iGaming lawyer and accountant Stuart Hoegner, who has been researching and writing about Bitcoin since 2009 while representing several major clients (gaming and otherwise) in this emerging sector. He is also general counsel to the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada.
1. Transferring Money On and Off the Online Poker Sites Works Better Than Current Models
Requirements for depositing and cashing out for Bitcoin (BTC) sites is similar to playing on traditional online poker sites in the sense that an intermediary eWallet is needed to move money to and from a site. However, that is where the comparison ends. Depending on which non-Bitoin online poker site you use and how much you first deposit, moving money on and off a site can be easy or difficult, but according to the leading Bitcoin poker site, Sealswithclubs.eu, players can make instant deposits, and cash-outs take less than 12 hours at most. Satoshi Poker claims to offer deposit and withdrawal capabilities that take less than an hour.
According to Hadjuk, the speed of transactions that Bitcoin offers is arguably one of the biggest reasons players would want to use the site. “Cash-outs are processed immediately,” he said. “Once there is confirmation that the player’s account will support the withdrawal request, our administrative team is notified, at which point there is a secondary or manual player identification and account balance confirmation. Our team will then transfer BTC to the player’s Bitcoin address directly from our segregated player fund account. As a company, we will strive to complete the administrative process to get the bitcoins into our client’s account in the quickest time possible, which can be as fast as 15 minutes to an hour. But it is also only prudent that we set a broader corporate standard as to the absolute longest a transaction could possibly take under a worst-case scenario, in which case we set that at 24 hours (still incredibly fast compared to traditional methods).”
