Lately, I’ve started noticing that on various Bitcoin-related platforms, advertising is dominated almost entirely by gambling businesses. Other types of advertising have almost disappeared.

This came as a surprise to me. I remember when Bitcoin was primarily used as a means of payment on darknet markets. Later, the main use case shifted toward trading on cryptocurrency exchanges, and their ads were everywhere.

So does this mean that today Bitcoin has become primarily a tool for gambling and betting? That question got me curious, so I decided to dig deeper. I looked through the “Gambling” section on Bitcointalk, and it struck me that not all companies discussed there are actually Bitcoin-oriented. In fact, I even found some threads that had no real connection to Bitcoin at all. There are gambling services being discussed in the “Gambling” section that neither accept bets in Bitcoin nor pay out winnings in Bitcoin.

This really distorts the picture and makes it harder to understand whether Bitcoin itself has truly become mainly a gambling instrument at this stage.

Perhaps it would make sense to create a dedicated section called Gambling (Altcoins) inside the “Alternate Cryptocurrencies” forum?