GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 36 - October 2016

Store larger amounts of bitcoin in your offline wallet.” She also suggested coindesk.com as a good source of information and news about digital currencies. Affiliate programs themselves take several security measures to prevent theft, fraud and other losses. “We ask for triple confirmation: One through the system, one through e-mail, and one via live chat,” Slankamenac explained. “You have to have a triple match on the cryptoaddress, because if one letter or one number is different, it’s a different address and it goes to a different person.” “When accepting bitcoins, it is very important to have the majority of bitcoins and all player funds stored in a cold wallet,” Garber said, explaining the operational procedures at BitStarz. “The smaller amount of bitcoins used for daily operations like cashouts are stored in a hot wallet. A poten- tial hacker could, in the worst-case scenario, attack and steal coins from the hot wallet, but that doesn’t represent a huge business risk. The biggest challenge is making sure that there are always enough coins in the hot wallet, so we can assure instant payments.” VOLATILITY MANAGEMENT Managing the volatility of bitcoin’s value is another area of concern for those who depend on bitcoin income. “This is a currency that has some pretty wide fluctuations in value,” Walters said. “So if you are not one who is accustomed to that kind of risk and watching the value of your wallet fluctuate substantially from day to day, you should consider immediately cashing out into some fiat currency that you’re comfortable with.” For those willing to do a little more market-watching, Slankamenac suggests another tactic. “We try to stick to paying it at the moment the client asks. But the fluctuations — what we’ve seen is as that quickly as they go up, they do go down, so you can wait a few days to balance it out,” he said. “It’s not like where a currency goes high and then you have to wait weeks or months for it to go down.” “If you are new to this, keep perhaps 20% of your bitcoin income in bitcoins as an investment, and forget about them—don’t check the price of bitcoin every day, as it might put you in a badmood sometimes,” Garber advised. “Sell most of bitcoins everymonth.” This is similar to how BitStarz operates — in addition to splitting its business between bitcoin and other currencies, it sells off a portion of its bitcoin every month, and keeps a certain amount a long-term investment. Garber believes that eventually, bitcoin’s value will stabilize. “Bitcoin won’t prevail above all other currencies, but it will become much more respected, stable and trusted in the next years to come,” she predicts. Garber has one more piece of advice: “When people scream and write everywhere that bitcoin is dead, keep in mind that bitcoin has already ‘died’ 41 times in the past five years.” Clare Fitzgerald got into the gaming industry by copy ed- iting in several different fields until she found one that was interesting. She graduated from Clark University in 2010 with a degree in English and Creative Writing. You can find her making bad jokes on Twitter at @EditressClare . Illustration by Sentavio/Shutterstock COVER STORY ‘Bullish’ on bitcoin W W W . G P W A T I M E S . O R G 26