The Swedish Consumer Agency Konsumentverket (KO) has published a report on loot boxes and other gambling-like features in games.

The report states that loot boxes or other gambling-like features in games could be regulated under the Swedish Gambling Act (2018) when prizes from in-game features constitute money or money’s worth.

If the in-game features have a monetary value from being able to be traded for money or money’s worth, then there is a real risk that loot boxes or other gambling-like features in games could constitute gambling and, therefore, would require a licence.

The Swedish courts have yet to decide whether loot boxes and other gambling-like features in games fall under the Swedish Gambling Act or not. If they would be considered to fall under the act the KO deems the act to provide wide protection for consumers.

The report shows that there is not, at this point in time, sufficient research to be able to establish a connection between loot boxes and gambling. The KO cannot motivate or recommend any further measures to be taken due to the lack of sufficient research. However, the KO still encourages the gaming industry to continue its self-regulation.

Despite the lack of sufficient research, the KO deems there to be grounds for further investigation with regard to children and adolescents, which is considered to be a particularly vulnerable group of consumers. For this reason, the KO believes that further regulation could be justified, if supported by research, in order to protect the wellbeing of children and adolescents.

The report is perhaps the first step in the process of adjusting Swedish consumer regulation to the risks posed by the blurring of lines between gaming and gambling.

The recent results of Watford disappoint the fans of the club, because even the last season the team participated in the final of the FA Cup, and now it has almost no chance to stay in the Premier League. To get excellent benefits and various promotional offers, you should pay attention to the proven betting site: 1xbetbd.com, which provides many opportunities for confident betting.

The first victory of Watford was only on November 8th. The team defeated Norwich in a battle of outsiders. The match against Manchester City turned out to be very painful, as Watford lost 0:8. Later the situation improved, but not much, which was confirmed by the poor match against Everton in the English League Cup, where the Hornets lost to the Toffees 1:3. All interesting offers, advantages, various bonuses and gifts can be found at https://1xbet.sn.

The disastrous results of the team are caused by the following factors:

1. Disgusting form of the strikers – all six of them managed to score only 5 goals, while before the start of the season Gerard Deulofeu promised the fans to score even more so that the team got into the Europa League zone for the next season. The Spaniard is far from fulfilling his promise, and so does the club from the Euro Cup zone.
2. Injuries of Troy Dini and Tom Cleverly – the players are considered the leaders of the team, but the season began with injuries, which led to their poor shape.
3. Injuries of defenders – Adam Masina, Sebastian Predl, Jose Holebas, Daril Yanmat are now in the infirmary.

On the proven and reliable betting site of 1xBet company, you can bet and enjoy watching high-quality video broadcasts. What is even most interesting is that the effectiveness of Watford is so poor that none of the defenders could hit the opponent’s goal. This can be rarely seen in the top 5 leagues, but what else can we expect from the team that scored just 9 goals in 17 rounds.

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Recently, the legendary tennis players have been gradually leaving the female division, and they are being replaced by young and hungry for victories athletes. In men’s category, everything also leads to this, but so far Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and even Roger Federer don’t intend to lose their top positions to other players. Thanks to the excellent tennis betting lines that are available in the 1xBet bookmaker, everyone can choose the best deals for them. Final matches are accompanied by good lines and high coefficients.

Gambling is a human institution and has been for millennia. It has been there along the way with religion, relationships, and sports as a regular institution in our lives. Many hopes and dreams have been validated and destroyed on the whims of a game of dice or roulette wheel. There is an explanation though – The Gambler’s Fallacy. This logical premise is cemented in the human psyche and is why gambling continues to thrive as an industry today — the same as it did in Babylon.

Today however, gambling is a much different phenomenon than its ancient predecessors. Americans bet $149 billion illegally on sports in 2015, and digital casinos rake in profits that compete with their physical counterparts on the Las Vegas strip.

Internationally, gambling havens like Monaco and Macau thrive on the same predilections for gambling that enabled hotbeds of underground casinos to emerge in the first place.

But the digital world is where gambling is poised to continue its rapid growth. No longer can fortunes explicitly be made and lost at a physical card table. Poker celebrities continually arise out of vaunted online poker circles to hit the floor at world championships hosted by the likes of MGM and The Venetian.

And cryptocurrencies are positioned to become an integral component of the proliferation of digital gambling.

An Already Changing Landscape 

A cursory glance at some of the leading online gambling venues (e.g., Bovada), reveals that these platforms are already embracing cryptocurrencies.

For example, before the emergence of bitcoin, online gambling platforms typically had to pay out winners via cashier’s checks (delivered by snail mail) or chargebacks to the user’s credit/debit card. A cashier’s check is about the slowest route to pay someone and is, obviously, not ideal in 2020. Chargebacks to cards were admittedly popular for a while, but they exposed Americans (illegally online gambling) to the whims of their banks and formed a trail of breadcrumbs for authorities investigating online platforms.

Enter bitcoin.

Nearly every popular online gambling site that earned its stripes in the early 2000s is embracing bitcoin. It reduces regulatory exposure on the part of the bookie (i.e., the platform), and makes payments quicker, more anonymous, and less costly. Bitcoin is naturally congruent with digital gambling.

And the second-order effects on bitcoin’s adoption are important to recognize.

Gambling is an Adoption Crutch for Bitcoin

People who gamble, and are not familiar with bitcoin, will progressively be exposed to the legacy cryptocurrency as their presence on digital gambling platforms increases. It will progress out of necessity and convenience too, not out of some ideological loyalty to bitcoin.

If you’re gambling on an online platform, what’s the better option?

1. Risk problems with your bank and not receive your payout by using the card chargeback method.

2. Wait for 2 – 4 weeks to receive a check in the mail.

3. Download a bitcoin wallet and use that for instant payouts for the remainder of your gambling voyage.

Option 3 is clearly the most convenient.

Bitcoin adoption based on convenience is also a unique adoption curve for the cryptocurrency. Outside of online gambling, bitcoin is primarily “convenient” in the context of stashing funds from oppressive governments, circumventing capital controls, or sending lucrative sums to another person/entity with strong security and speed assurances. Outside of those contexts, bitcoin is not well understood by the public and is inconvenient to use.

The user-experience of wallets in the bitcoin market is rapidly improving, but gambling may be the crutch it can lean on in the near future.

For example, digital casinos aren’t solely emerging as competitors to Las Vegas casinos, they’re arising exclusively as bitcoin casinos — like Bitcoin Games. These digital gambling platforms emphasize the speed of payouts, transparency, and privacy. Not to mention they’re populated with new types of games and (in many cases) open-source code on a blockchain to enable gamblers to verify that they’re not being taken to the woodshed by the house.

And once these casinos start embedding more advanced sportsbooks? Lookout. Especially considering the NBA’s recent warming to the idea of enabling legal gambling on its games.

Digital global gambling statistics are challenging to coalesce due to fragmented regulations and the illegal nature of its existence with many private bookies, but what’s evident is the massive scale of the industry. Online gambling has grown virtually linearly over the last decade and the industry as a whole is projected to expand by a CAGR of 8.7 percent through 2024.

With an estimated 26 percent of the world’s population gambling at some point, that’s an enormous opportunity to onboard more users to bitcoin — an adoption crutch often overlooked as we enter the 2020s.

By Ray Sze, Head of Games at Bitcoin.com, who has extensive experience in the gaming industry that stretches back more than a decade.