Bitcoin Poker Sites

An address is essentially an “account number” that you can give to people so they can send you bitcoins. Your wallet can generate billions of addresses, so you can use a new address every time you want to receive a payment.

To be a little more technical, when you send and receive bitcoins you’re actually using a pair of keys:

• Private Key – This is a randomly generated number.
• Public Key – This is a number calculated from the private key.

An address is essentially a user-friendly version of a public key. So when you give someone your address, you're actually giving them one of your public keys. And when someone “sends” bitcoins to you, they are essentially creating a new box of bitcoins and putting your public key inside a lock on top of it.

And when you send bitcoins to someone else, you use your private key to unlock the box.

This is getting in to the realms of cryptography, but this kind of technology has been around since the 1970s (see RSA), and bitcoin just uses it to construct a system that works as a digital currency.

Summary: We use private and public key pairs from cryptography to provide ownership over digital data (i.e. bitcoins), and an address is just the convenient version of the public key.

Well, there are two different types of mistakes you could make when creating a transaction:

1. Making a typo in the address.
2. Copying and pasting the wrong address.

All bitcoin addresses have error detection built in, so if you make a small mistake, your wallet should tell you that you’ve entered an invalid address and prevent you from making the transaction. The chances of you making a typo and it not being detected are 1 in 4,294,967,295, so typos aren’t a worry.

However, the most likely mistake is that you copy and paste the wrong address. If this happens, you’ve got a problem. The address will be valid, so the transaction will go through, and once it gets in to the blockchain it cannot be reversed. The only thing you can do is hope that you know the person who owns the address so you can ask them to send it back to you.

So always double-check when copying and pasting an address.

There’s no need to be fearful about making transactions, you just need to be careful.

Tip: I usually just look last 5 characters to check that I’m sending to the right address. Checking each individual character is overkill. The odds of the last 5 characters of an address being the same as another address are 1 in 656,356,768, so pretty unlikely.

A confirmation is when your transaction goes from temporary storage (the “mempool”) in to permanent storage (the “blockchain”) across the computers on the bitcoin network.

In other words, it’s when the transaction is finalized.

To give an analogy; a transaction in the memory pool is up in the air, and getting a confirmation for it is like burying it in the ground. Extra confirmations pile more dirt on top, and the more dirt you pile on top, the harder it is to remove it from the ground. And in the world of bitcoin, the dirt is processing power.

Some people like to wait for more than one confirmation before they consider a transaction irreversible. In 99.98% of cases one confirmation is enough, but extra confirmations are useful in the rare event of a chain reorganisation, where the transaction goes back in to the memory pool and has to be mined in to the blockchain again.

But anyway, when it comes to how many confirmations you should wait for:

• 1 = Good enough.
• 2 = Best if you want to avoid a chain reorganisation, which happens roughly once every 5,000 blocks.
• 6+ = Only necessary if you suspect someone is going to perform a global-scale attack to try and reverse your transaction.

I'm happy with one confirmation.

The blockchain is basically one big file where all the bitcoins are stored. This file is shared across thousands of computers running the Bitcoin program.

Note: Bitcoins aren’t actually stored in your wallet. Your wallet just holds the keys that you need to lock and unlock the bitcoins in the blockchain.

It’s called the blockchain because new transactions are added to the file in batches called “blocks”, and each of these blocks is built on top of another to create one long “chain”. So blockchain.

New blocks are added to the chain through the process of mining. Mining takes a lot of computing power, and is essentially a network-wide competition where anyone has a chance of mining the next block. This means that no single person or computer is in control of which transactions get added to the blockchain next.

You can see inside the blockchain (e.g. check the status of your transactions) using blockchain explorers:

• https://mempool.space (Most Popular)
• https://bitcoinexplorer.org/ (Open Source)
• https://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/ (Technical)

A transaction fee is used as an incentive for miners to include your transaction in the next block. In other words, it increases its priority.

A block can only hold roughly 1.5MB of data (around 4,000 transactions on average), and blocks are only added to the blockchain every 10 minutes. As a result, there is a bottleneck on the rate that transactions can make it in to the blockchain.

If there are a lot of transactions in the memory pool (more than can fit in a single block), a miner will fill their block with transactions with the highest fees on them first, as they are allowed to collect these fees if they are successful in mining the block.

So again, by setting a fee you are setting the priority for getting the transaction in to the blockchain.

Your wallet should give you a rough idea of how the different transaction fee sizes will affect the expected time for your transaction to get mined:

As a general rule of thumb, set the lowest fee on the transaction that you can get away with. But if you want to ensure that the transaction is mined in to the next block, you will need to bump up the fee. Just be careful not to go overboard.

Advanced Tip: If you want to look at exactly which transactions are getting mined based on fee size, check out this awesome live visualization: Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Statistics

But at the end of the day, if you’re not sure what fee to use, just stick with the default option in your wallet.

If you want to keep your bitcoin extra secure, use a hardware wallet like a Trezor or Ledger. I like Trezor.

A hardware wallet is basically a mini computer that is specifically designed to manage your private keys and addresses (like your desktop wallet does). However, this is the only thing the hardware wallet does, and it does not have an internet connection, so it is not vulnerable to attacks like your desktop wallet is.

A desktop/mobile wallet (also known as a "hot wallet") is fine for day-to-day usage, but if the amount of bitcoin you hold in there is starting to make you feel uneasy, you need to get a hardware wallet.

It’s like keeping cash inside your home. You’d be comfortable leaving your day-to-day spending in the kitchen drawer, but when it comes to your life savings, you’d rather keep it inside a heavy safe. A hardware wallet is that heavy safe.

Just get a Trezor and put your mind at ease.

And keep out of my kitchen drawer.

In 2011. Here’s a brief timeline:

• 2008 – Satoshi Nakamoto starts working on a computer program for an electronic payment system. This was likely motivated by the financial crash caused by banks in 2008, and Satoshi’s desire to have an alternative to the traditional banking system.
• 2009 – Bitcoin is released.
• 2011 – Seals With Clubs is launched, the first bitcoin poker site. Bryan Micon is the front man for it, although probably not involved with actual technical development.
• 2014 – Americas Cardroom is the first well-established online poker room to adopt bitcoin as a payment method. You still play in dollars, but you can get money in to and out of the room using bitcoin.
• 2015 – Seals With Clubs stops operations after its servers get raided, but players are able to withdraw their balances. A couple of months later the room is reincarnated by a group of volunteers and is rebranded as SwC Poker.
• 2016 – Ignition Poker (and other major gambling companies) start adopting bitcoin as a payment method too, reinforcing bitcoin’s role as a viable deposit and withdrawal options amongst players.
• 2024 – Everything is ticking along nicely.

So basically, the first bitcoin poker site came out in 2011 (Seals With Clubs) and still continues to this day (albeit under the new name SwC Poker). In 2014 the more established sportsbooks and poker sites started to join the party by adding bitcoin/cryptocurrency as an option in their cashiers.

In 2020 the landscape is steady. Bitcoin is no longer the “new thing” and is actually becoming a preferred option amongst players due to the freedom it provides, and I believe it will only become more popular as a payment method as time progresses.

Historical Note: It’s worth mentioning that Seals With Clubs came out a mere two years after bitcoin was released. This was back when using bitcoin was a technical minefield, and building a functioning poker room on top of it would have required a high level of determination, skill, and belief. Just wanted to acknowledge their efforts and achievements.

Save yourself the hassle and stick with Bitcoin.

I know how it goes... you’ve been using bitcoin for a little while and you’re enamored with this new technology. You start to see a whole new world of various other cryptocurrencies open up, and you want to get involved with those too. You sign up to an exchange and start trading for the coolest coins until you have a nice diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies you know nothing about. But, you’re riding your first wave of financial freedom, and the promise that one of these random coins could explode at some point keeps you going.

You could be right, but you’re on a dangerous path.

Bitcoin is easy to clone, but it’s not easy to create a coin that is technically superior to it. Other cryptocurrencies may look promising, but the vast majority of them are merely copies with a marketing campaign. And marketing campaigns don’t last forever.

I’m not saying that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency you should use (nor can I stop you), but it’s the only one I trust completely at this moment in time. It’s volatile enough as it is. If you want my advice, keep the majority of your crypto in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is boring, and that’s a good thing.