Bitcoin and Online Gambling: Revisiting a 12-Year-Old Prediction

Exactly 12 years ago, Michael Saylor wrote on Twitter that Bitcoin's days were numbered and that it would suffer the same fate as online gambling.

That view of Bitcoin's future has never surprised me. I personally believe that Bitcoin could indeed fade into obscurity if humanity invents a way to reliably store and freely transfer value that is clearly better than Bitcoin. Markets are markets: in that case, users would gradually move to something superior, and Bitcoin would be left behind.

I know there are people who believe such methods of storing and transferring value already exist today. Some see stablecoins as that alternative. And judging by how often users on rabbit.io swap Bitcoin for stablecoins, this is a fairly common point of view.

But do you understand what Michael Saylor actually meant when he talked about online gambling? Did he really think in 2013 that online gambling was a thing of the past? It is interesting to ask what led him to that conclusion back then.

On this point, Saylor was clearly wrong. Online gambling never went away. And if it was ever fading, cryptocurrencies have played a major role in bringing it back to life.

So in the end, it was not Bitcoin that suffered the fate of online gambling. Rather, online gambling found itself riding the same wave as Bitcoin.