Can You Use Bitcoin to Pay for Poker at the Top UK Poker Sites?

Depending on who you believe Bitcoin may be the future of currency in an increasingly digitised world, or a passing fad that will slowly fade away into obscurity.

Whatever your views on the eventual future of the digital currency, there is no doubt that in the present day, an increasing number of Internet users are using Bitcoin to pay for a wide range of services.

The question for poker players is, are the best poker rooms in the UK among them?

To clarify the matter, we looked at the five top UK poker sites promoted by www.nodepositpoker.co.uk to find out what their position is regarding Bitcoin as a payment option.

Read on to find out what we discovered.

Sky Poker

Sky Poker do not offer the option to pay for their services using Bitcoin at present.

There is no information on the site about if and when the company is likely to start offering this option to players in the near future.

Bet365 Poker

There are currently no Bitcoin payment options available on Bet365 Poker, or any of the other Bet365 family of sites. Neither is their information on the site about if this option will be available in the future.

888 Poker

As with Bet365 and Sky, the 888 Poker site does not accept payments or send payments via Bitcoin to users and there is no information about whether this will be introduced in the future.

Poker770

As with the previous three sites, there is no option to pay or receive payments via Bitcoin with Poker770 and nor is there any news about when this service is likely to be introduced, if at all.

William Hill Poker

And finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly given how the review of the first four sites has gone, William Hill Poker and its family of sites do not accept Bitcoin payments and there are no details on the site outlining if this payment method will ever be adopted by the company.

What about other poker providers?

So you may think that nodepositpoker.co.uk may only have a relatively small sample size and that any number of the other poker sites available to UK customers will likely have Bitcoin available for users to gamble with.

With that in mind, I decided to cast my net a little wider and check out some of the other popular poker providers that don’t offer no deposit bonuses to players to see if, perhaps, our five sites were in the minority.

Here’s what I found.

Sites that currently DO NOT offer Bitcoin payment services to customers

As it so happens, the list of UK online poker rooms that do not allow Bitcoin as an accepted currency is rather long.

• Sky Poker
• Bet365 Poker
• Poker770
• William Hill Poker
• 888 Poker
• Bwin Poker
• Titan Poker
• Party Poker
• Bovada Poker
• BetOnline Poker
• Carbon Poker
• Lock Poker
• Aced Poker
• Juicy Stakes Poker
• Betfair Poker
• SkillBet Poker
• Red Kings Poker
• PKR Poker
• Coral Poker
• Mansion Poker
• EuroPoker
• Betfred Poker
• Unibet Poker
• Muchos Poker
• Stan James Poker
• mFortune Poker
• Paddy Power Poker
• Winner Poker
• Full Tilt Poker
• PokerStars
• Ladbrokes Poker
• Winamax Poker
• BetVictor Poker
• Terminal Poker

Sites that currently DO offer Bitcoin payment services

The list of UK-facing online poker rooms that will permit players to use Bitcoin to deposit is, by comparison, much shorter:

• Switch Poker
• Seals with Clubs
• Americas CardRoom
• Black Chip Poker
• Win Poker
• BetCoin Poker
• Satoshi Poker
• Red Star Poker
• Infiniti Poker

Another thing which was striking was that the poker sites that accept Bitcoin tend to have been developed specifically for Bitcoin, with the sole exception perhaps of Switch Poker which was initially designed for mobile poker fans to play via iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Indeed, other than Switch Poker, you would hardly place any of the Bitcoin sites as being at the top of the industry, certainly within the UK.

Therefore the question must be asked: why if Bitcoin is now starting to become the currency of choice for many players on the Internet, are so many top poker rooms being so slow to introduce this as a method of payment?

Why has there not been a rush to adopt Bitcoin across the majority of UK poker rooms?

We now have something of a dichotomy – if Bitcoin is supposedly The Next Big Thing in the online realm, why are relatively few poker sites available to UK players actively seeking to expand their payment methods to include this new technology?

One of the biggest issues, I personally believe, is that Bitcoin as a currency is still yet to gain full acceptance across the wider community. There are many financial experts and analysts – and a quick Google search will reveal many such articles – who point out that the way Bitcoin is designed and its volatility as a currency make it an unsuitable choice as a digital currency.

These problems, and there are many, have been highlighted in major articles in major newspaper publications. And while Bitcoin advocates have rushed to the defence of the currency, the fact that many key organisations, including key banking institutions, remain non-committal about it, evidently puts people on edge about using it as a form of currency.

Clearly, it would then be a risk for many of the top UK online poker rooms to expand their payment services to include Bitcoin (which would be a costly endeavour to update all the software and financial structures in place to accept payments) only to then find that Bitcoin may not be accepted as currency by major financial institutions or that its value has plummeted due to its inherent volatility as a currency.

While this remains the case, it seems unlikely that the best poker sites that cater for the majority of poker players will be rushing to adopt Bitcoin as a form of payment any time soon.

However, as the number of sites that do offer Bitcoin payment shows, there are likely to be an increasing number of poker sites that offer Bitcoin, however they are likely to be new sites specifically developed to take advantage of this form of payment.

The future of Bitcoin as a currency for poker, or indeed any form of online gambling, is very much tied in to its acceptance as a workable, relevant and stable currency for the online age. While experts continue to disagree on that matter and while Bitcoin does not get the support it needs from the world’s top financial institutions, it is hard to see the majority of poker sites adopting it within the next 12 to 24 months or so.

However, if that does change, you can bet that the top sites will be quick to jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon.

For the time being though, if you want to play Bitcoin poker, you have a very limited choice. It is available, but perhaps not at the sites that offer the best gaming options or best value for money when you join.