The 2013 run up in bitcoin prices is highly correlated with the increased bitcoin transaction volume due to bitcoin-facilitated online gaming, e.g. Satoshi Dice, which are especially attractive to US gamers wanting to circumvent banking restrictions.
Besides the privacy that bitcoin affords to gamers, benefits to gaming sites include very low transaction costs and credit card fraud elimination. Thus bitcoin gaming sites can have a lower rake than non-bitcoin gaming sites - which is better for customers.
Accordingly, there is a lot of upside left as new bitcoin gaming sites go live, and existing gaming sites begin to accept bitcoins.
Perhaps not the right story to add this comment, but would someone please make an easy way to buy bitcoins using a credit card?
I know about charge-back problem, but I'm too damn lazy to do a wire transfer or skulk in IRC to buy bitcoins. I bet I'm not alone. Solve the problem = make a lot of money. Multi-day escrow would be fine.
Poker sites do need traffic to attract players. Players love choice of tables / type of games / tournaments / not having to wait before a game starts / etc.
Despite "black friday" (when the U.S. DoJ confiscated all the dot coms from the four biggest poker sites) PokerStars is still number one. Moreover PokerStars bought Full Tilt (which died due to their ponzi scheme being discovered sooner than they had planned "thanks" to Black Friday). Just look at pokerscout.com's main page and you'll see just how big of a % of the market PokerStars+Full Tilt are representing.
Long story short: unless one of the major site starts accepting bitcoins bitcoins ain't going to grab a big share of the online poker market.
Agreed - for example Seals With Clubs is 1/1000 the activity of Poker Stars.
Yet bitcoin gaming is currently less than one tenth of one percent of the total online gaming market, is growing very rapidly from this very small base, and has caused bitcoin prices to double since January 1.
Besides the privacy that bitcoin affords to gamers, benefits to gaming sites include very low transaction costs and credit card fraud elimination. Thus bitcoin gaming sites can have a lower rake than non-bitcoin gaming sites - which is better for customers.
Accordingly, there is a lot of upside left as new bitcoin gaming sites go live, and existing gaming sites begin to accept bitcoins.