Playing casino games can be a lot of fun. However, if you’re also looking to earn some money, you need to find a real money casino. Seeing as how you will be putting real money on the line, you want to ensure the casino you decide to join can be trusted. Here is how you can find a reliable online venue in South Africa.

What are real money casinos?

Simply put, a real money casino is any casino that offers you a monetary reward if you win a game. So, you will have to make an account with them and, in most cases, deposit some cash on the account. Therefore, with these venues, you place a wager with your money and if you win a game, you could also win more money. To maximize your chances of winning, it’s vital to pick the right online casino. Keep the following tips in mind when choosing the casino you will join.

Look into their licenses

First and foremost, you need to ensure the casino you’re thinking about joining is licensed. While South African authorities only allow online betting through licensed bookmakers, players can still look for foreign platforms that offer casino games to South African residents as well as some that are licensed within the country. When picking a casino, you want to see if they are licensed by any of the leading online gaming regulators such as Malta Gaming Authority, UK Gambling Commission, or Curacao Internet Gambling Association. To ensure your security, you want to check the bottom of a casino’s homepage, as it usually displays logos from third-party authorities that regulate and check it on a regular basis.

Check out their game offer

Once you’re sure, you’ll be safe, you can check out the range of games that a website offers. For starters, if you prefer table games like craps, roulette, blackjack, and baccarat, you want to see what kind of options and variants they offer. If you want a live dealer game, look for that option as well. Then, if poker is more your style, there are surely different alternatives you can choose from. Lastly, as slots come in thousands of themes, you want to ensure there are at least a few that match your interests.

See what kind of bonuses they have

In addition to games, you also want to know what sorts of deals they include for their users. For example, many online operators offer generous welcome bonuses that double or triple the first deposit that players make. Then, there are also free spins on registration no deposit in South Africa that allow players to take a number of free spins in a game before putting real money on the line. Other casinos reward their regular users with free spins or some other promotions on a regular basis, so it’s essential to look into the various deals that are being offered for newbies and frequent players before deciding which casino you will join.

Make sure they support your favorite banking method

The next thing you should look into is the supported banking methods for deposit and withdrawal. This is crucial if you prefer or only have one payment method. With that in mind, some offer debit and credit cards only, while others also include various e-wallets such as PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, and ecoPayz. Moreover, bank transfers are also available in some cases, and you can even get a prepaid card. Besides the payment options, you also want to see how fast the transactions are processed. There is a big difference between waiting for a few minutes and a few days.

Read a few reviews about their customer services

Something else that you want to look into is an online casino’s customer service. You want an operator that you can contact 24/7, especially if you like to play games all day long. See if they are available via email, phone, live chat, and social media, and do some research that will help you determine which way of getting in touch is the most efficient. While no one expects problems, you never know when there might be an issue with the processing of your payment or a game bug. Remember to cover your bases, just in case.

Go over the terms and conditions carefully

Lastly, as we all tend to not read the terms and conditions that we easily agree to, it’s recommended that you actually pay attention and go through the agreement carefully. As you are playing with money, you want to understand when you are entitled to a bonus, when your winnings might be nullified, and similar scenarios that could happen. That way, you will not be surprised if some extra charge goes through or it turns out you don’t qualify for a promotion.

Playing for real money in South Africa is easy. Just remember to follow these tips in order to find a reliable online casino.

By mid-2021, the cryptocurrency industry was eagerly counting on bitcoin’s Taproot correction, to bounce back from the market’s decline that wiped off billions of dollars, depleting the market’s value by half.

The correction was billed to take place in November, and has now come to pass, introducing new features in bitcoin technology that are believed to be key in the leading cryptocurrency’s future growth.

Part of the features of the Taproot update are greater transaction privacy and efficiency, the ability to unlock the potential for smart contracts, which can be used to eliminate middlemen from transactions.

“Taproot matters, because it opens a breadth of opportunity for entrepreneurs interested in expanding bitcoin’s utility,” said Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark.

The last time bitcoin underwent such a significant upgrade was in 2017.  But the upgrade was called “last civil war” because it divided bitcoin adherents with its controversial ideas. But unlike the last civil war, Taproot was generally accepted, partly because ‘the changes involve fairly incremental improvements to the code.’

Besides volatility, bitcoin’s other challenge has been the growing concern about its carbon footprint, a large part of reasons for its plunge earlier in the year. There was expectation that the Taproot upgrade would in some way, address the carbon concern. What really changed?

What is changing according to CNBC.

A big part of bitcoin’s makeover has to do with digital signatures, which are like the fingerprint an individual leaves on every transaction.

Right now, the cryptocurrency uses something called the “Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm,” which creates a signature from the private key that controls a bitcoin wallet, and ensures that bitcoin can only be spent by the rightful owner.

Taproot will add something known as Schnorr signatures, which essentially makes multi-signature transactions unreadable, according to bitcoin miner Alejandro De La Torre.

It won’t translate to greater anonymity for your individual bitcoin address on the public blockchain, but it will make simple transactions indistinguishable from those that are more complex and comprised of multiple signatures.

In practice, that means greater privacy, because your keys won’t have as much exposure on the chain. “You can kind of hide who you are a little bit better, which is good,” said bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi, who now runs Meow, a company that enables corporate treasury participation in crypto markets.

Smart contracts

These souped-up signatures are also a game changer for smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements that live on the blockchain. Smart contracts could theoretically be used for practically any kind of transaction, from paying your rent each month, to registering your vehicle.

Taproot makes smart contracts cheaper and smaller, in terms of the space they take up on the blockchain. Killeen says that this enhanced functionality and efficiency presents “mind blowing potential.”

Currently, smart contracts can be created both on bitcoin’s core protocol layer and on the Lightning Network, a payments platform built on bitcoin, which enables instant transactions. Smart contracts executed on the Lightning Network typically lead to faster and less costly transactions.

“Lightning transactions can be fractions of a penny…while a bitcoin transaction at the core protocol layer can be much more expensive than that,” explained Killeen.

Developers had already begun to build on Lightning in anticipation of the upgrade, which will allow for highly specific contracts.

“The most important thing for Taproot is…smart contracts,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. “It’s already the primary driver of innovation on the ethereum network. Smart contracts essentially give you the opportunity to really build applications and businesses on the blockchain.”

As more programmers build smart contracts on top of bitcoin’s blockchain, bitcoin could become more of a player in the world of DeFi, or decentralized finance, a term used to describe financial applications designed to cut out the middleman.

Today, ethereum dominates as the blockchain of choice for these apps, also referred to as “dApps.”

So the Taproot upgrade focuses more on identification and security, which in an era when DeFi, NFT and EFT are becoming the blockchain’s cashcow, have become subjects of concerns. But this means that the concern about bitcoin’s carbon footprint, which has soured the coin’s relationship with cheerleaders like Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, who is promoting environmental friendly ideology through his electric vehicle company, will linger into the future.