ALL IN ON BITCOIN

Working out how best to use bitcoin was something of a parlour game played within its small community back in the day. Who would be willing to accept bitcoin for goods and services? Who was interested in integrating BTC payments into their website? Sometimes these conversations didn’t gravitate beyond the Bitcointalk forum where they started. But occasionally, they would reach escape velocity.

In March 2010, forum user BitcoinFX decided to pair his two passions, Bitcoin and Texas Hold ‘Em, by creating the first poker game powered by BTC. The virtual game would take place on March 20th at 3pm ET and was open to anyone with the knowledge – and coins – to participate. 50 BTC was required to play plus a 5 BTC buy-in.

As an added incentive, BitcoinFX graciously elected to fund the 1,000 BTC prize pool. Despite the generous offer, the nine spots available proved surprisingly hard to fill. In the event, just four players including BitcoinFX took part, with forum members dwdollar, theymos, and DannyM completing the contingent.

dwdollar proved to be an influential figure in Bitcoin’s early scene; three days before the BitcoinFX-hosted poker tournament took place, he had launched the first true Bitcoin exchange in Bitcoinmarket.com. On March 20th, however, his attention was fixed on the game that was unfolding between his fellow Bitcointalk poker fans and the six bots that completed the 10.

As BitcoinFX recounted in a forum post later that day, “The "Worlds First Sudo-Anonymous Online Poker Tournament" was played with much success,” adding that “dwdollar was 'un-stopable' for most of the Tourney after taking out 3 computer players in one hand and gaining a monster chip lead.”

dw dollar walked away with the 600 BTC top prize, with theymos claiming second spot and 325 BTC, though as he later conceded, “I hardly ever play poker, so it was mostly just luck that I got second place.” The tournament’s organizer finished third with 175 BTC, while DannyM was awarded the 100 BTC fourth-placed prize – despite finishing behind four bots.

“At the time, we were all really excited about Bitcoin's potential, but the bitcoins themselves were nearly worthless,” recounts theymos. “They were like WoW gold or arcade tokens. So the early community was always trying to come up with anything at all that we could use bitcoins for, in order to bootstrap the Bitcoin economy.”

In spite of the modest level of interest in the first bitcoin poker tournament, curiosity was sufficiently stirred for a handful of follow-up events to be organized through the Bitcointalk forum or on IRC. But none matched the momentousness – or the prize pool – of that first tournament.

The Slow-Burning Poker Payday

At that point in time, of course, bitcoins were almost worthless in dollar terms, albeit still precious to the individuals who owned them, and who valued BTC at the cost of power required to mine it, which worked out at around $0.003 per coin in March 2010. That was the last time coins would ever be so cheap, and any of the players who held onto even a fraction of their poker winnings will have been rewarded years later with a payout that even poker pros can only dream of.

What those intrepid early adopters of BTC for a real-world game were unaware of at the time was that Bitcoin’s association with poker went back much further. An early version of the Bitcoin codebase contains elements of a virtual poker game. It’s something Satoshi appears to have started, perhaps in an attempt to engineer an initial use case for bitcoin, before abandoning the idea.

Perhaps he decided it would be better for the community to work out ways to use Bitcoin, or maybe he simply never got around to it when there was much more important work to be done. Whatever the case, the later discovery of Bitcoin’s pre-release code has strengthened the association between Bitcoin and poker, and added heightened significance to the now-famous game held by forum members on March 20th, 2010. In retrospect, it feels like this event marks the end of Phase One of Bitcoin’s evolution: the last time BTC would be traded as buttons.