Political gambling is strictly prohibited in the US. However, new technologies give Americans the possibility to win money placing bitcoin bets on politicians of their choice. Under the current US laws it is completely legal.

To place a bet on the elections’ outcome, one needs to buy a bitcoin voucher, deposit the sum in an online wallet and transfer it to a bookmaker site. This procedure was used by a columnist of MarketWatch to place a $1 bitcoin bet on Rand Paul, the libertarian candidate to the Republican nomination. In his article he explained that what he did was not only easy but perfectly legal, despite the severity of the US laws on political gambling.

Before the advent of modern sociology, betting on the outcome of elections allowed to see the odds in favour of different candidates. However, it was prohibited in the US lest it influence the political process. The option is unavailable even in Las Vegas despite frequent calls to legalise it. With the growth of the Internet, Americans started placing political bets on websites located overseas. But this practice was soon outlawed and US law enforcers put pressure both on foreign bookmakers and on US banks to stop it.

However, bitcoin users can gamble without using US dollars or US banks. According to MarketWatch, “while Uncle Sam can stop any U.S. bank from allowing transactions to offshore bookmakers, there is, at the moment, absolutely nothing regulators can do about bitcoins.” Besides, as bitcoins under US laws are considered property and not currency, existing laws on gambling are not applicable in this case.

The article comes at the beginning of the presidential primaries both of Democratic and Republican parties that would lead to the nomination of two main candidates for the post of the new President of the USA who will be elected on 8 November 2016. Yesterday Rand Paul, the favourite of libertarian-minded bitcoiners, who expressed his support for cryptocurrency and accepted bitcoin donations, withdrew from the presidential race. However, the primaries stay highly competitive both in the Republican and Democratic camps, offering numerous possibilities for political gambling.

Two bitcoin users have left their comments on the article. One told she was betting on Democrat Bernie Sanders. Another declared putting bets both on Sanders and on Republican Donald Trump.

As CoinFox reported last week, the actor Ashton Kutcher declared that “the best hedge against a Sanders or Trump nomination may be buying bitcoin.”

Alexey Tereshchenko