Is bitcoin gambling a geek only area or a worldwide industry

So you might be a heavy sports punter or a recreational casino player, you will still ask: is this a real industry or just a bunch of geeks playing around with their software toys? As you might know Bitcoin appeared like a geek-thing a few years ago, but now it is something that you probably already heard of from CNN, Reuters, Digg, Reddit, etc. It is on the way to become mainstream already. 

But we are specifically interested in bitcoin gambling industry, not bitcoins in general. So where can we place a sport bet using bitcoins, where can I use my BTC to play some online poker or which is the best casino that accepts bitcoins. 

First we need to understand the size of this industry, and for this I recommend a very good Forbes article written by one of their editors who is also a member in the Board of Directors for Bitcoin Foundation (!!!). Also note that the article was written in January 2013, before the big bubble from March-April so back when bitcoin was even smaller (in terms of awareness) than it is today. The article talks about the size of bitcoin gambling industry in 2012 and it can be found here.

I'll try to summarize some of the main ideas from it. By far the largest bitcoin gambling site is SatoshiDice which is the leading bitcoin gambling site in terms of amount wagered. During the last 8 months of 2012, players bet a total of 1,787,470 (BTC) in 2,349,882 individual bets at an average monthly growth rate of 78%. At the current price of a BTC (1 BTC= 130 USD) that's more than 230 million USD turnover. Now you see that the bitcoin gambling industry is not a joke and the volumes that you can find here can match your local bookmaker/casino/poker site anytime. 

The other two gambling websites that use bitcoins that are mentioned in the article (a bitcoin casino and a icelandic bitcoin poker room) also made turnovers of over 500k BTC in less than an year.

This being said you can see that bitcoin gambling is here to stay. It's so easy to open a new gambling website that accepts bitcoins that it's clear that more and more good ideas will come to surface. But also a lot of scams, so this is why you need to know where you gamble with your bitcoins.