on it or taking a percentage. That’s their business, but you can use Bitcoins for so many things now. Bitcoins came into circulation in 2009 and at the moment are trading at about $13.50 each – the internet has birthed a currency worth $144m, all since 2009 but really since the middle of 2010. It doesn’t seem wrong to me; it seems like something the internet has birthed and as an American I should be able to explore the technology. eGR: How big is the crossover so far between Bitcoin users and poker players? BM: Our site mostly has Bitcoin enthusiasts on it, not just poker players. The Bitcoin enthusiasts were there since the beginning and now the poker players are starting to come in, and even they are sort of the same kind of people, as they are early-adopter online poker players who are relatively early adopters of Bitcoin as well. We have an Android app coming out very soon – it is Android or Linux users who are the type of guys who were the ?rst to ?nd Bitcoin, but I was probably lucky to ?nd it myself. I found it when LulzSec hacked Sony and wanted Bitcoins for donations, and this was before they were really worth anything. After that I was down the rabbit hole. On the other hand my partner, who remains completely anonymous [he goes by the pseudonym ‘Freemoney’], takes care of the operational side of things and he’s a real genius. He is the one who actually started SealsWithClubs. Bitcoin is currently in its infancy but he looked at it preinfancy and decided to start the site. I have been helping him market it ever since, and we’ve had different people come in, in different roles, but he and I have built it to where it is today. eGR: What elements from your experience as a poker player are you keen to apply to SealsWithClubs? BM: What PokerStars has done with the Sunday Million is something very beautiful to me. Every Sunday at a certain time anyone anywhere in the world with $215 gathers to play the biggest poker tournament, and the winner makes life-changing, or at the very least life-improving money for a buy-in of a couple of hundred dollars. That’s something that’s really cool, it’s skill-based and you can affect it, but it’s something that almost every country at almost every level has tried to take away through regulation and imposing boundaries on online gambling. Maybe I just have a different view of the world where I believe we’re all in it together, we’re all humans. When we divide out to countries, cities, semi-autonomous regions and whatnot we segregate ourselves and I don’t really like that. We have these borders and rules and then we create situations where the UK gets to provide internet gaming legitimately and the United States sits here and, while I’d have loved to have set up an online gaming company, it’s wrong here. It’s wrong for Harrah’s to do something in the US that for William Hill in the UK it is perfectly ?ne to do. eGR: What freedoms does Bitcoin give you that a realmoney site would not? BM: When you talk about the 1961 Wire Act, which has been cited in online gambling discussions, and of course UIGEA, these attack online gaming at the banking level. SealsWithClubs proudly markets the fact that we don ?e???????????????]??e?????? ???????????????????e???????????????????????]??????e???????U?????M????????????????e?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????e?????????????????!???????e??????????????q??e?????????????????????() %Q
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