Fencer: This stems back to the Bush era and treating the entire population of America as little children and chastising them by banning all cross border online gambling in 2006.

Whilst I am not defending PayPal, they have to show to the US authorities that they too are observing this law, for which they will need some ridiculous audit trail to show that they have carried out the required due diligence.

However, Americans can still gamble, but they can only lose against other Americans. One might conclude therefore, that the real reason for the US gambling act (other than loss of tax revenues) is that the Americans were losing en masse.

This resulted in a weakening of the US$, as the overseas winners were selling their US$ winnings back into their local currency. In fact the UK£:US$ reached 1:2 in 2007 and since then, the US$ has strengthened to 1:1.5 as we can no longer take their candy.

It would be an interesting statistic on BK to see over time how the following weightings change:
Total Win(Loss) / Number of poker players in America to
Total Win(Loss) / Number of poker players in Europe to
Total Win(Loss) / Number of poker players in Australasia etc.