I was playing with crypto as balance for a while and found it very tiresome and demoralising. Tiresome because I found myself calculating all the time what it would be in "real money" and demoralising because I was doing it at one of those times where the values would just plummet, so even if the slots would keep performing real well, my balance's worth would only keep dropping. This can go both ways of course, but for me it wasn't a good experience. Maybe if I was playing with the mindset that 1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin.
Licensing isn't such a huge factor for me, good casinos can have worthless licenses and vice versa.
User reviews is an invaluable tool even though 80% of them aren't worth the paper they're written on. You just need to separate the honest ones from the bogus ones and this you will learn by visiting the same review sites over and over. For instance, if you come here to AG and find a review written by @Blackjax, @Fiekie247 or @Afi4wins you know this will be an honest review, based on a real user experience.
Every single casino will have unhappy players, sometimes rightfully so, sometimes just because people tend to get unhappy when losing money. How the casino responds to complaints, both unfounded and legit ones, is a huge factor and fortunately several sites, including AG, keep open records of the complaints history and dialogue. The tone of the casino rep is very often make or break for me.
I also like to check who they are related to and look at those casinos' complaints history as well. Several sites list their related casinos and here on AG, if you go to a casino review and look under "affiliate program" it will give you an idea of the casino's relations.
Litecoin down 27% since I bought a bunch. Fortunately most of it was deposited at various casinos already.
You can maybe use USDC if you're concerned with price volatility.
that is a thing with landbased slots too. if you play on $1 denomination it will give you better RTP than with lower bets.. it says in help file on those machines. I dunno how exactly that applies to online tho.