I was watching what could be coming in the future of bitcoin and they were saying that stock exchanges could be on the horizon in a decentalised p2p stock exchange.

This made me wonder if p2p poker could be a possibility. We could then play for minimal rake and all those in countries where poker is illegal, will be able to play and they'd literally need to bust into your house to catch you.

The money problem could be counteracted with bitcoin so you don't even need a banking system to play on it.

I think it can (and will) happen in the future.

Those lawmaking crybabies shouting "omg money laundring!!1" can suck our bonanzas.

There will always be ways for playing online poker. Unless of course internet gets censored to death or the mice eat all the cables or something.

The thing you want to research is called "Mental Poker"

You can already play poker with bitcoins. I didn't think that site restricted by geography. I'm not sure how to make p2p poker where you don't need trust.

I think there is no way to make "Mental Poker" robust with more than two players, because the third player can simply disconnect/refuse to reveal his decryption, leaving the first two players with no way to determine who won the pot.

On the other hand, regular internet poker is also not robust with more than two players, since there is the possibility of collusion. If you are willing to accept a game that uses a trusted third party, then of course this is possible, but it becomes less and less P2P.

Separate from the issue of determining a winner (normally what people consider in Mental Poker) there is also the issue of escrow: both players can agree who won the hand and that it was played fairly, but one player can renege on payment. An interesting project would be to encode the two-player game in the bitcoin scripting language, so that the money is escrowed in the blockchain.

I think a another problem is that an implementation wouldn't be very real time.

I don't see why not, is it because there are too many encryptions to be performed? I think that problem is pretty tractable.

If you are talking about the idea of putting the game into bitcoin, I agree that the most naive approach does not allow real time settling, because it takes some time for the blockchain to come to a consensus on what happened. I think that problem can also be solved, though. You play hands and pass chips in real time, but escrow the maximum amount you could have lost. You don't need verification until you 'cash out'.

I still don't understand how you can have it work with more than two people playing.

Yeah, I was thinking of a bitcoin cash game.

Not unless you had a currency which had almost instant confirmation times. Also, you would need to have third party script (dealer) to transmit the winning hand evaluations to the network somehow.

I think a good compromise would be to have a limited-trust dealer that escrows the dogecoins on the table without being able to cheat with the cards.

I'd probably worry about implementing the actual gameplay over p2p before wondering about handing the currency.

It's probably not that hard to bust you, either if all you do is a torrentlike approach. Torrent "busts" (letters from a lawyer asking for demages) happen regularly here. Basically some company seeds a movie/TV show and if you upload through that torrent they can contact the ISP and find out who the IP belongs to.
If a well funded government did this instead of content-lawyers that are just fishing it would probably be fairly easy to scale.

I somehow missed this post. Pretty cool, wasn't aware of this (obviously don't trust the R,S,A gang much anymore). In case anyone was wondering this is not a poker site but rather research about distributed crypto/trust:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

I am working on a project that is not far from Free real money P2P poker. see my progress on github at https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki that discribes my present progress on using the new fast cyrpto engines including Stellar.org and Ripple.com that allow speeds to play realtime poker with crypto currency or other real money using P2P methods. It will be just as unstopable as torrents to be able to play poker any place in the world for FREE. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4p...ew?usp=sharing

Since this was bumped. Cashier and money transfers/ring game/tourney buyins via blockchain should be pretty straightforward. Seems like exactly what it was built for (distributed ledger).

our front-end from SC had a proposal similar to mental poker - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=362901.0

we concluded it would be too much work for the likely pay-off but he may still be interested in discussing it if you need it.

looked over your github and doesn't seem like you're going with that model?

gl

pokerth_accounting is ready for testing today not tomaro!! The Mental poker upgrade is mentioned in my wiki as in a future addition that would not be hard to add. The Mental poker c++ libs are already published and tested as seen on another github project that shows times to shuffle well within reason on todays computers. At this point my project is ready for testing. In it's present state we use Stellar.org testnet STR and a trust line generated coins we call CHP (for chips). CHP are a worthless crypto currency that we will us just to keep score at this point and for testing the concept that are distributed to member players of pokerth from poker.surething.biz site in a one time 100,000 to start money. As far as other matters that can be a concern like collusion, With the Stellar uncentralized money system were all transaction can be seen by the public. We can track who was playing with who and when on every game ever played to research the possibility of collusion. From this information you can decide weather you want to play on a table with possible colluders or not. I've also added a primitive website that displays all the active members account ballances so you can compare you skills with others at http://poker.surething.biz . This site also contains the database to share your Stellar.org account numbers with other pokerth players. The pokerth_accounting program that runs in the background on your local system does everything invisibly without any added effort from the player of pokerth. After or durring the game you can analize your accounting with an sqlitebrowser to view what you paid who and when. Sqlitebrowser is also used to make changes in the configuration of the system allowing you to change currency or network to real money on a different network like Ripple or other. The software for the most part is completed ready to run but I'm sure we will be finding bugs to fix soon. That's why I need testers. There is no way I can test every function without realtime play involved. So if your willing to help us move this along take a look at our present evolving code at https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki and https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting. If you have any question you can find me at #pokerth IRC or even on pokerth game chat as sacarlson or leave me a note on github. Oh and again on the mater of Mental poker algorithm, the present game uses servers that no one ( should say not many) people have access to. So until we start playing with big money I'm not going to wory about it. Remember with Stellar.org that even in real money we can play with very small pots of even less than 1 cent worth of crypto currency of say STR. Transaction costs are so small even in real money (non testnet) the costs would be less than $3 for about 100 years (more than a life time) of play. On testnet in it's present default settings is completely free. I should note that the next upgrade we are pushing is implementing the built in escrow system on Stellar.org. With that and Mental poker added it should be about done. So give it a try and find out for yourself just how close we really are.

You can't make p2p poker or have poker without fees.

The reason is practical. The host takes the rake so that they provide the means for the game to be run. The rake is their fee, which pays for the deck, the staff, the shuffling, the chips, the environment, the resolution of problems, ensuring fairness and so on.

In the case of software-based poker the rake covers development for a large part.

In other words, even if the project works, who would fund the developer to keep it going?

If there isn't rake, some other fee should be applicable if this project is to realistically keep going.

What is the post?

Real mental poker seems way too ambitious but it seems like adding a trusted 3rd party for limited things like revealing an agreed upon hole card to a single player is simple. The only real benefit of this would be some deniability of running a gambling service, ie "I'm just running a service that holds private keys for clients and decrypts text when queried".

Then maybe throw in a separate escrow service that matches a reputation score to an account. If both players don't both send requests to the escrow service in x amount of time, the funds are returned. It can be abused obviously but at least a scheme like this puts all the poker/gambling related stuff into the p2p domain. In addition, you can charge some small "rake" to provide the escrow and decryption services.

Does AES in CTR mode have the properties needed for the encryption of the cards (commutative, whatever)?