I found this old screenshot showing how players used to gamble in full Bitcoin units. As you can see, bets were in the hundreds of BTC, win or lose in just one click.
At that time, 160+ BTC might not have looked insane. But if you think about it today, that kind of stake is already worth tens of millions of dollars.
Stories like
Nakowa’s, where someone won or lost 11,000 BTC, would now be worth over a billion USD if those coins had just been held.
It just proves how different things were back in the early days.
Back then, gambling sites didn’t use decimals or sats, it was whole Bitcoin bets.
The value wasn’t as “precise” as today, people threw around BTC the way we throw around a few bucks now.
Now that Bitcoin has grown so much, gambling in full BTC is almost unthinkable. Everything is already calculated in fractions (mBTC, sats).
So for discussion purposes, Do you think the players back then had no idea about the future value, or they just didn’t care?
They actually knew that Bitcoin's value would increase in the future, but with the advent of various gambling platforms offering Bitcoin betting options, they naturally enjoyed it because it wasn't as difficult to acquire BTC as it is now. Their goal was, of course, to increase their Bitcoin holdings, but after calculating the amount they'd bet, it turned out to be quite substantial, especially considering the current price. They knew the value would increase, but once they placed their bets, they didn't care how much they'd lost.