Idea

[agnoke10]

Now let me start and acknowledge that I am a very new "poster" on this forum, I do read it quite often, and I am also nothing more than a decent poker player. Feel free to bash this idea, but I think it deserves some consideration. The future of online gambling is dependant on bad players being able to get money onto the poker sites. The legislation makes this much more difficult. However, if it were easy for "donks" to get money onto these poker sites, then in theory, online poker would at least not take as big a hit.

As an avid eBay brower, I have noticed that at times, there are people who sell "money" on a pokersite for "money" on PayPal. The description reads something like this "the winner of this auction will recieve $5 on PokerStars". Now these "items" are usually not too popular because the starting bid is usually significantly higher than the amount you recieve (on that particular one, the starting bid was $8). I think that if the "exchange rate" was lower, and these "items" were more prevalent on eBay, this would be one way to cut online gambling's losses. Some of the bigger players could use this as how they cash out, by "selling" their poker money for PayPal money on eBay. I'm sure that there are several flaws in this idea, but it's simply an idea for how to keep new "money" coming into online poker.

[DrewOnTilt]

Much as I like your enthusiasm, eBay has shown that they are not our friend (see their response to the UIGEA). A large-scale operation such as this would get shut down in relatively short order.

[JoseGonzlez]

Ebay is very anti online gambling.
I beleive Paypal received a large fine for transfering funds to gambling sites many years ago.

Hence, they actively promote anti online gambling, most likely so rival payment processors not based in US could get a competitive edge.

So it would basically be shut down pretty quick if done on a big enough scale to matter.

[Lego05]

Ebay's against online poker. At least in the U.S. when the original owners couldn't take the [censored] law suits from the government anymore and sold it to a group who made a deal with the government, which included no gambling transactions. E-bay since has lobbied hard against online gambling in an effort to shutdown e-wallets such as neteller and firepay, which began to compete with e-bay owned paypal. This is of course only in the U.S. that e-bay has protested online gambling. E-bay Europe has been engaged in negotiation with many of the world's largest poker sites.

So....wouldn't see this happening.