Some people hold bitcoin because it is sound money. Some buy it because they want to speculate. But there is an old connection between investors and bitcoin that you might have forgotten.
One of the biggest sports, entertainment and betting events of the year is always the Super Bowl. Some of the first services in the world to accept bitcoin were online sportsbooks and casinos. And with the number of sportsbooks that accept bitcoin, as well as the price of bitcoin itself, rising exponentially since those days, Bitcoin and Super Bowl betting have never been more closely tied[1].
That’s why this year, for Super Bowl LV, it’s worth remembering an old connection between football and Bitcoin that you may have forgotten, to think about why bitcoin makes sense for gambling online and to evaluate the most interesting bets that you can make on the big game.
The Bitcoin Bowl
This year, the Super Bowl will return to the place of the first and only Bitcoin Bowl. Yes, you read correctly: The Bitcoin Bowl was held in 2014, sponsored by BitPay. It was a college football bowl game that is now known as the Gasparilla Bowl.
Much like the commercialization of soccer cup games, such as the Emirates FA Cup and the Carabao Cup in the U.K., many of the college football bowls have sponsors. Long before the SegWit wars, BitPay sponsored the Bitcoin Bowl to spread the bitcoin gospel and promote “mass adoption.” The event took place at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida — just shooting distance away from where this year’s Super Bowl will be held in Tampa. As the price of bitcoin suffered an epic dump at the end of 2014, so did the sponsorship budget of BitPay and
