An opinion piece by Rob Davy on Calvin Ayre this week presented Blockchain as the future of online and mobile poker payments. Mr. Davy described a series of financial scandals in the poker world, including the Full Tilt Ponzi scheme, a similar situation with Absolute Poker, and the Bryan Oulton Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
The idea was floated that only 10% of the world’s wealth is tied up in coins and cash and a much smaller percentage in gold and silver. Instead, 90% of people’s wealth exists in computer servers, which is another way of saying it exists in the collective imagination of mankind.
Poker and Public Distributed Ledgers
With that in mind, Rob Davy suggested that a far more secure way of storing and transmitting wealth was through the Blockchain. The Blockchain is a “public distributed ledger”, or a large datastream of financial information. In a poker setting, as wealth is transferred between one person and the next, new data is added to the block of information.
If a person tries to withdraw that virtual money illegally by sending your poker payments to a different offshore account, the Blockchain notifies other users and the transaction is denied. With the Blockchain, no one can cheat all the other people in the payment cycle.
Bitcoin Online Poker Rooms
Those unfamiliar with the Blockchain should note that it is the technology which underpins Bitcoin. That is why online payments using Bitcoin are considered so fast, anonymous, and secure.
People who use a blockchain have full access to the history of payments, but the encryptions change with each new transaction, making it next to impossible for identity thieves to hack from afar. Only if a person has the unique bitcoin encryption can they steal your money. People cannot steal information remotely from the other side of the world.
For the same reason, a poker site using Bitcoin’s cryptocurrency would not be able to squirrel away funds while pretending to be financially responsible. With Bitcoin, a FullTilt Poker or Absolute Poker could never happen.
Lite, Etherium, and Other Blockchain Alternatives
It should be noted that blockchain technology and Bitcoin are not synonymous. Other blockchain cryptocurrencies exist, such as Etherium or Lite. Craig Wright, an Australian claiming to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin’s supposed founder), has filed 70 Blockchain patents with the government of the United Kingdom.
In other words, Blockchain is a multifaceted, expanding technology. We are on the cusp of the next evolutionary step in how human wealth is stored and transmitted. We began with barter of eggs and barley. We moved on to shells, then to copper, silver, and gold. Then came coinage. The Champagne Fairs saw the invention of the bills of exchange, a form of credit that led to paper currency. In our modern age, credit card networks refined the process of lending money and transferring it across the expanses. Bitcoin took the process one step further, but new advances in Blockchain should refine the process even more.
The Best Way to Avoid Financial Scandals
Rob Davy’s premise is this: another poker financial scandal is a matter of “when”, not “if”. Eventually, the poker playing community will grow tired of such scandals and insist on a new way to avoid the delays, the fees, and the cheating. When it does, Blockchain payments will be there to step into the breach.
The question is whether Blockchain technology is going to be incorporated into the traditional financial system and made unavailable to the general public. Barclays became the first high street financial institution to use Bitcoin in 2015. As the cryptocurrency gains followers, other institutions are certain to follow suit. The question remains whether they will co-opt the entire system. That technological genie would seem to be out of the bottle, but one can never assume. Patents exist to be purchased, so it is not inconcievable that the technology is bought and tamed by the financial system.
