From the Blog

How To: Finding good Online Casinos That Accept Bitcoins

BitcoinNow, if you’re here reading this, you’re probably one of two types of people – a Bitcoin enthusiast who’s curious about using his or her virtual resources to play some online casino, or an online casino enthusiast looking to learn more about just what this whole Bitcoin thing is and how it can be used to play casino games, poker and bingo. either way, you’ve come to the right place! The people in the first category obviously need no introduction to the concept of Bitcoins, but those in the second one may need a quick summary. Don’t worry, I’m going to be quick – just skip to the next paragraph if you already know all of this! Bitcoin is what’s known as an e-currency – meaning that it has no physical form (no coins or bills that you can hold in your hand, nor checks that you can write), and in addition it’s also not owned by any person, company or government. Hell, nobody even quite knows who made it! What matters is that numerous people are using the currency to sell goods online safely and securely outside of official channels (namely – banks). If you so desire, you can later convert Bitcoin into other currency, or you can leave it like this and pay online with it.

While at first pretty much the only things you could buy with Bitcoins were illegal ones (the famous drug selling website Silk Road accepted them), over the years there have been many more, thankfully legitimate, services which accept the currency. Hell, there are even terminals in some cities around the world which allow you to pay your bills and taxes with Bitcoins, how cool is that? Naturally, often plagued by legal trouble even when they operate lawfully, online casinos were among the first to start accepting Bitcoins when making deposits. Some of the biggest casinos that are active in Europe now accept the currency, but really, you’d need to manually check each one to see if they’re willing to take your money that way. Hmm, if only there was a site which told you exactly which online casinos worked with Bitcoin… Oh, wait! This site shows you how to find the best bitcoin casino easily and conveniently, without the hassle of having to check dozens of casinos by yourself. The work is already done for you!

The site will verify each casino to ensure that it’s legitimate, and then will post a recommendation giving players a thumbs up or thumbs down. Sometimes they’d even go above and actually full on review various Bitcoin-centric online casinos – for example Bitcasino, you can find a detailed review here, which I highly recommend checking out so that you’ll know exactly what you’re going into. The reviews talk about the standard stuff that you’d want to know when visiting an online casino, such as the games (and the software they run on), the minimum and maximum deposit amounts, that kind of thing. It just so happens that every casino that’s currently reviewed or mentioned on the site just so happens to accept Bitcoins. So if that’s what you want, you’re pretty much all set! All you need to do is read through them, check out precisely what you need and what you’re looking for and, at last, sign up to your online casino of choice! And all I can say is happy gambling!

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Economic Potential of Online Gambling

Casino chipsOnline gambling has been on a continuous rise ever since its first steps almost twenty years ago. While originally it was introduced as little more than a small distraction, with many people actually believing that online casinos were fraudulent and that their games were all rigged to steal your cash immediately (a misconception which, admittedly, still continues to this day, albeit it’s not nearly as widespread as it was years ago), today online casino (and online gambling is general) is one of the biggest industries… Well, ever. One only needs to look at the charts to see a gradual progression in profits that shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. But how much more can online gambling grow, truly? Are there any limits to how big it can possibly get, in the UK or worldwide? Will it impact other industries positively or negatively? From a purely economic standpoint, what are we looking at when it comes to the future of online gambling?

First of all, I think it’s pretty obvious that yes, it’s absolutely, 100% going to continue to grow. Anyone can see that the progression is a fact, and nothing has really happened in recent years to make me think that the industry will stop growing or even slow down. Hell, not only that, but sites showing the best real money casino comparison typically tend to be very optimistic when it comes to how individual online casinos are developing and what opportunities they’re providing for their players. Many people believe that an increase in online casino profits must absolutely mean a decrease in physical casino profits, but honestly, I disagree. Look, when it comes to other forms of gambling, for example betting, its online form is objectively better than its physical one, no doubt about it. But there’s really no comparison that can be made between online and physical casino – online casinos weren’t made to push their physical ones out of business, they were made to complement them. If you couldn’t really go to a physical casino and have the full experience, you could go online and play a few games of live roulette. The two can co-exist, and subsequently can help each other grow further by increasing their player base. A person only needs to be interested in one form of casino in order for them to develop a natural interest in the other.

However, I do feel like we’re going to start seeing a very interesting symbiosis form between online casino and the entertainment industry. Right now, the relationship between casino games developers and, say, Hollywood, is a very one-sided one – Hollywood don’t make a lot of money out of the deals they make to have their products turned into slots, and generally only accept because whatever money they do end up making is free and doesn’t tarnish their IP. As such, certain Hollywood studios can afford to simply cut all contact with the gambling industry without losing anything at all (looking straight at you, Marvel). However, as the online gambling industry grows, I imagine that studios will be fighting harder for a piece of that pie. Best case scenario, we’re going to be seeing less slots like “Bridesmaids” and more slots based on licenses that the developers are actually enthusiastic about.

In any case, these are just some of my own predictions based on what I’ve seen. They could be totally wrong, but then again, I have a feeling they might not be. What do you think? Let me know by hitting that Contact button above!

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China’s Gambling Market – Q1 2016 and Putting Things in Perspective

To cut long story short, gaming revenue in the first quarter dropped 16.3 percent to 18 billion patacas ($2.3 billion) in Macau according to Bloomberg. Still, Las Vegas Sands, Wynn, Melco Crown, Galaxy have highly optimistic predictions for the Q2 of this year.

The Background

Without making too much noise about it, Asia has consistently been doing well economically speaking, with double digits growth between 1999 through the 2000s. Today, as all the worldwide economies have slowed down, they still account for 40% of global GDP growth (compared to 25% in the early 90s). Poverty has dropped from 55% to 21% and health, education and infrastructure standards have improved for millions of people. And most of that is thanks to China. Just to put things in perspective – for this year the (pretty realistic) forecast is 6,5% GDP growth for China and the (most optimistic) one for USA doesn’t go above 2,2%.

China’s gaming market overview

 

The Reality

It is an interesting and little known fact that the growth of China began as and is mostly due to a massive migration of 250+ million people from rural areas to the bigger cities. With the accumulated savings from living modestly and off their lands, those people had money to spend. And where do you think that went? Whoever thought of casinos got it right. Micro areas like Macau flourished and grew with the new flow of capital. Similar was the reason behind the real estate and industrial booms. The demand for mass production from the West and for jobs for the new-comers to the cities saw China growing factories like mushrooms after the rain – a growth that has not yet been seen anywhere across the globe.

Every miracle lasts for three days as they say (well, in this case a “bit” longer but still). Competition for the cheap labour and skilled workers has aroused in the face of Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and India. The so called “reverse migration” is a new thing in China now – people going back to their villages after the closing of factories, and trying to start small businesses. This logically makes them unreachable and completely off target when it comes to gambling. Top that with the recent crack on corruption and you’ve lost the high-rollers as well, leaving not much for Macau’s casinos. Even the long-awaited Lunar New Year didn’t help as much as expected.

The Future

Well, put it however you like but for the (at least) near future, China is still the biggest and most skilled workshop in the world. So even with higher average wages, likelihood is a good 60% or more of whatever you see and buy in shops is and will be coming from there for some time to come. And higher wages mean more money to spend for the people remaining in the cities. Which is good news for Macau’s resident gambling destinations. And let’s keep it real – 2015 was pretty bad on all fronts and they still got over 20 million people visiting. That is still 50% of the number who arrived at the Las Vegas Strip (41 million). Keep in mind that of those visiting LV, only 35% participated in gaming and only 12% pointed out that gambling was the main reason for their visit. So all in all, Outcome predictions are positive and we are hoping to see some slow but steady growth.

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Mystery Dude Haunting Turkish Traders with Massive Bets

Some of you may remember how nearly two years ago a mysterious investor rattled the market at Borsa Istanbul throwing $450 million of bets on a single day (nearly double the market average at the time). Now the so called “Dude” also referred to as “Herif” is back. It is possible that the historically rather volatile market has become an easy target to better experienced players.

Financiers from Istanbul Portfolio have been trying to dig out the identity of the phantom for months now with no luck. Borsa Istanbul has a relatively new platform for online betting, having moved its servers to a new data center only late last year. The high hopes for attracting new business from online traders with the faster and better connection are materialising but not quite as expected. It is a new market and so there is still the “Big fish in a small tank” effect. To achieve a similar result on the LSE for example, one would need much deeper pockets, making it virtually impossible to create such noticeable fluctuations with just a single investor.

European bank’s clients are rumored to have stopped trading short-term Turkish stocks until the situation becomes more transparent. “Herif” single handedly has helped raise the average daily trading volume on the Borsa Istanbul with nearly 8 percent in 2016 so far. This compared to the 15% drop in Warsaw and 27% decline in Moscow places the Borsa’s 100 Index in the front run, beating by 13% Russia’s Micex and Poland’s WIG20 indexes. As you can see from the graph below (source Bloomberg), Yatirim Finansman has now under its belt the majority of all trades. Just two years ago the company (which is the first Turkish brokerage house founded back in 1976) handled less than 2 percent.

Yatirim Finansman accounts for the majority of trades

Local exchange firms such as Ak Portfoy, Gedik Yatirim and Meksa Yatirim announced they cannot comment and are not permitted by law to reveal client data.

Figen Ozavci (Meksa Deputy Chief Executive Officer) believes the switch over to a brand new system last year made the market “vulnerable to harsh swings” since the move was too quick and the local investors didn’t have time to adapt to the much more sophisticated trading system. It is possible that “the Dude” is simply a more experience player taking advantage of a new market with clever trading algorithms. One thing is sure – the competition will soon catch up.

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PayPal – A Preferred Payment Method at Online Casinos

One of the most important criteria for choosing an online casino to play at is whether it accepts the payment that is most convenient for you to use. And while all casino sites accept the most popular debit, credit and prepaid cards, things are not exactly like that when it comes to e-wallets. The same is true for PayPal – unfortunately only about half of the casinos on the UK market accept this payment method, yet it is one of the most popular ones among the players. How come? Let’s find out.

Advantages of Using PayPal at Casino Sites

The main reason why so many players prefer to use PayPal as a deposit and withdrawal method at online casinos is that they already have an account with this payment service. As the payment method is popular on other sites as well (especially at e-commerce websites like Amazon and eBay) chances are that if you are used to making purchases online, you already have opened an e-wallet with PayPal. And chances are that you know very well what are the advantages: both the deposits and the withdrawals are very quick compared to other Internet payment services, the minimum payment limits are quite low, you can make payments on the go and their customer support service is quite helpful.

Paypal logoOn top of everything else, there are some additional perks of using PayPal especially for the casino players. First of all, there are some British casino sites, such as Eurogrand, that offer special bonuses for every single PayPal deposit you make there. Second of all (and this is one of the main reasons why players like the service so much) is that when you use PayPal to make a deposit at an online casino, you have to provide only your email address (the one that you’ve registered at PayPal with) to the gambling operator. This way, your real banking details remain concealed from the casino.

Disadvantages of PayPal and Useful Recourses

Sure enough, PayPal has its drawbacks as well. First of all, the maximum deposit limits for this payment methods are usually not that high which makes it not very suitable for the high rollers. Furthermore, the payment service is not supported in all countries and, as we already mentioned, not all casinos support it and some of those that do, apply certain fees for transactions made with PayPal. This is why it’s important to have a reliable resource where you can find good suggestions for casinos that do accept PayPal and information about the potential fees. One such resource is undoubtedly ponlinecasinos.co.uk. If you are a British player looking for a great casino to play at with a PayPal deposit, then this is a highly recommended site for you. There you will find a shortlist of the best PayPal casinos on the UK market and also review for each and every one of them. Exactly what you are looking for!

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Welcome

Welcome to Auroracoin.org, a financial blog devoted to economics news, business and startup trends, stocks and currency trading!

Before I go any further, I’ll take the chance to share with you some personal information and tell you more about my living. I live in Dagenham, Greater London and I work as a high school Economics teacher. I’m also a member of a local non-profit organization whose mission is to help improving the quality of the financial knowledge and the economics education in Britain. As you might have guessed, my job responsibilities now take up much of my time. Still, I decided to start this project and steal some of my free time to run this personal blog.

Apart from Economics, my hobbies include watching movies, listening to music and hanging with my friends. I’m also an avid fan of fantasy literature and after years of reading other authors, I finally started outlining a plan and putting on paper some of my ideas for creating my own fantasy novel. Well, since I already have my own place, where I can share updates about my personal projects, I will keep you updated with the progress of my first book.

To get back to the topic, I’d like to let you know that this blog will accent on the latest trends in trading, economics and financial markets. I plan to serve easy-to-read analysis of the financial news, so I can be helpful for all kind of readers, whether be novices in the field or niche experts. My mission is to share my knowledge and tips with my readers and being helpful will be my reward. I don’t want to give any big promises but I aim to deliver the latest financial trends in simple and easy-to-understand manner that will help you improve your personal knowledge. I’m also open to receiving some critics and I’m willing to listen to new ideas and different positions.

I wish you enjoyable reading and I hope you find something useful here!

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