Scratch Inc.

What is Scratch Inc.?

All nine of Atlantic City’s casinos agreed to new labour deals this summer without a strike, although its union opted for just one-year deals instead of the typical length of three or more years. This was in response to increased uncertainty related to looming competition from both New York City casinos and New Jersey’s own online gaming industry.

In Las Vegas, the Culinary Union has unionised the entire Las Vegas Strip and secured historic wage increases during the last round of negotiations. Those deals are about halfway done now, and Culinary is no stranger to strikes, having used them as leverage to secure new deals in the run-up to the inaugural Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023 and and Super Bowl the following February.

Jess has covered the global gaming industry since 2022. A native of Reno, Nevada, he’d like to note that it’s Ne-va-da, not Ne-VAH-da.

How to play Scratch Inc.

It’s happening. The monetary insanity that the world’s central banks have sunk us all into is turning into a wholesale monster. Corporations are actually considering replacing some of the dollars on their balance sheets with a useless digital token called BTC, as a “value preservation” tool.

Uhh…sure. Replacing fiat dollars with BTC for “value preservation” is like speedballing heroin and cocaine as a valuable tool for maintaining emotional balance. Yeah, you’ll be balanced, on average I guess, except you won’t feel that way ever when you’re swinging between wild extremes and your pulse varies from 40 – 200bpm every other minute and you end up in cardiac arrest. But hey, I know, the world has gone completely and utterly mad, so what else is new?

Just the rumors of this had spurred BTC past $58,000 a token, but then whoops, it crashed again by about $10,000 in a matter of minutes. This is what corporate America wants to put on its balance sheets? A pseudo-asset that they won’t even know the value of any given minute? Speedballing by comparison seems quite the mild, conservative habit to engage in. But the BTC crowd certainly has one thing absolutely right. Having extra fiat money on your balance sheet, especially U.S. dollars, at this point in monetary history, is extremely dangerous, even suicidal. Corporations are going to have to get rid of them real soon, because the U.S. dollar is about to completely implode. And with the U.S. dollar, will go every single other fiat currency in the world in real purchasing power terms.

How to play Scratch Inc.

“They challenge us both from an academic side and a more practical side. We try to develop our rules as we go along but you have to prove every single day that you’re doing all that you need to do on responsible gaming,” Petra notes.

The Netherlands online gambling market has been the subject of many column inches and much speculation thanks to regulation that has been largely described as heavy-handed and perhaps a little short-sighted – even by the country’s own regulator.

The triumvirate of Netherlands, Germany and Sweden is often held up as an example of how not to regulate, with all three countries haemorrhaging players to waiting illegal operators. So what is public sentiment like towards operators? “My feeling is that if you look at public sentiment, they don’t see really the difference between online and land-based,” says Petra. “If you look into what they’re saying, they’re primarily talking online. But for the general public, there is no difference [between the channels] in that respect.”