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Calvin Ayre on ‘Hashing It Out’ premiere: Operators will drive gaming industry’s transition to blockchain
This article was originally published on CoinGeek on April 26, 2021.
Gambling is all about being innovative and having interesting content offerings, but let’s face it, innovation in the gambling industry has slowed down in the last couple of years—something that blockchain technology can help with.
In the premiere episode of Hashing It Out with Becky Liggero, Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, talks about the closure of CalvinAyre.com and how the gambling industry fits right in to what’s happening in Bitcoin.
“My prediction is everything exciting that’s going to happen in the next 10 years in online gaming—other than the games themselves—but everything else, in the running of business, the operating of the business, the payments of the business… that’s all going to be done on the blockchain,” Ayre said. “But the decision to shut [CalvinAyre.com] down was really my realization that there’s no need to have the other site anymore because all the fun stuff that I’m attracted too—of course all the innovation and craziness—that’s happening on CoinGeek.”
The transition to blockchain—the original Bitcoin (BSV), in particular—is going to be operator-driven, according to Ayre.
“How it’s going to work is operators are going to wake up to the fact that they can run their entire business on it, and it’s the cheapest way to get money in,” he said. “I think also this year, you’re going to see that there’s more gaming sites that are going to wake up to the fact that BSV is the only payment platform that makes sense as well because it’s the cheapest one out there and it’s the safest one, and you can scale it and it gets even cheaper.”
Ayre and Liggero started discussing Bitcoin as early as 2012-2013, when the gambling industry was exploring the technology for payments. But the technology—as designed following the original Bitcoin whitepaper—is capable of doing more as “it’s fundamentally a data management evaluation platform.”
“BSV is this platform from 10 years ago that was originally launched that was then killed and so the one’s 5 years ago didn’t work and we brought the original platform back and it actually works again like it did 10 years ago. Everybody that says blockchains don’t work hasn’t checked out what BSV can do. This technology is actually ready for enterprise adoption today,” Ayre said. “We’re building real businesses that use the data management powers and we’re solving real enterprise problems or companies that aren’t even in this industry that have a data problem that this technology is uniquely able to solve.”
At the moment, there is still a lot of misinformation around those “crypto speculative casino nonsense stuff” that are leaving a lot of people confused about the true capability of the original Bitcoin protocol. Ayre believes there will be tipping point where people will realize that BSV is different from the other protocols, and that’s when the gambling space—and other industries as well—will jump on board with the technology.
“My fundamental prediction is with all these, looking back in hindsight at this whole kerfuffle over what’s the real Bitcoin, what’s best and all that, it’s all going to look stupid because scaling is the only thing that matters. It’s not only important, it’s the only thing important. All of them that can’t scale will disappear, and this platform is going to penetrate everything and everywhere, and it’s going to disappear. Ten years from now, everybody’s going to be using it and nobody’s going to even know what it is,” Ayre said.