​Costa Rican based Ignition Casino & Poker is no stranger to helping players whose countries have not allowed online gambling to get their action at their site. The operator formerly known as Bovada has only served players in the United States, but is now moving to another market where a government has left players with few other options. This time, it is Australia that will be given the opportunity to play at Ignition Casino and Poker.

Australia had its ability to play online poker taken from it thanks to the Interactive Gambling Act of 2016, which banned players from online poker among other forms of online gambling. This led to many worldwide poker sites fleeing the country by no longer allowing Australians to make deposits or play for real money. Fortunately, Ignition's experience in serving players in similar situations makes it easy for Australians to follow a similar path.

Uncle Finney’s Poker is a new poker app for Android and the first to use ether, a cryptocurrency based on the Ethereum blockchain (https://www.ethereum.org/). How does it work? Ether can be traded using ‘smart contracts’, independently executable open-source programs that can serve (among other things) as escrows. Rather than handling player funds directly, as other online poker rooms do, Uncle Finney’s Poker uses a smart contract called E4ROW, which charges a 2% escrow fee on all distributed funds, to handle player’s ether. This means that you will never have to deposit or withdraw any funds. Uncle Finney’s Poker does not charge any rake – in fact, it can’t, because it never has access to player funds. What’s more, you don’t even need to register an account: just head to Uncle Finney's and click “Download Now” to get started.

Bitcoin is a digital crypto-currency system launched in 2009 by an anonymous person or group known only as Satoshi Nakamoto. Unlike the traditional flat currencies, the system isn’t centralized and doesn’t depend on traditional financial institutions and payment processors. The overall bitcoin market capitalization exceeded $10 billion by January 2014, while the price of a single BTC approached $500 by April. Bitcoins are easy to exchange for traditional money and perfectly safe to use.

Each bitcoin transfer is protected with a special encryption key, which identifies your wallet and ensures that other members of the network won’t be able to alter the details of your transaction. In addition, bitcoin transactions are pretty much completely anonymous, as identifying the participants is pretty much impossible for an uninvolved third party. Consequently, using bitcoins is arguably safer than relying on a e-wallet service or bank wire transfers.

The Legality of Traditional Banking Methods In The United States

As you probably already know, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 made it illegal for financial institutions to process gambling-related transactions. The UIGEA specifically prohibited gambling businesses from accepting credit cards, electronic fund transfers, checks and drafts or “any other form of financial transaction involving a financial institution as the Government may determine.”

However, what very few people realize is the fact that the US Department of Justice clarified that the UIGEA applies exclusively to online sports betting sites, which means that processing poker-related transactions is perfectly legal. Unfortunately, many states still haven’t explicitly legalized online poker, so most payment processors have opted to ignore the DoJ statement and still refuse to cooperate with offshore poker networks. In practical terms, this means that American players simply can’t use e-wallet services like PayPal or Neteller to deposit to or withdraw from online poker sites. In fact, even credit card transactions don’t have a 100% success rate, which ends up confusing many people as far as the actual legality of playing the game online is concerned.

Bitcoin Is Not a Financial Institution Hence Is Is Perfect For Online Gambling

Thankfully, bitcoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer crypto-currency system and not a financial institution, which means that it has never been covered by the UIGEA. Consequently, using bitcoins to conduct your gambling-related banking was perfectly legal for all the involved parties even before the 2011 DoJ statement. Furthermore, the US regulators aren’t realistically capable of targeting the bitcoin system or individual users for hypothetical gambling-related offenses, which means that any future changes in federal or state law shouldn’t really affect bitcoin poker sites and their customers. Unlike the traditional financial institutions and payment processors, the bitcoin system will never decide to hedge or opt out of the market.