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Interesting concept, poker as a Dapp. The software would run on a decentralized computing network, so there is no one entity that can regulate it or interfere with it, and the code is all open source and governed by the community.

Still in it's infancy, but raises some questions as to the pros and cons of operating outside of any sort of regulation or gaming commission, and operating with totally open source publicly available source code.

Is Ethereum legit? My only experience with it is on reddit and it has horrible, horrible ****ing spammers. Anybody who comments even once in any Bitcoin subreddit will get endless PM Ethereum spam.

Cool video. We've already seen the start of this with all the major U.S online poker sites now using bitcoin as a payment method.

I don't think it's scammy at all.

Here's a good site explaining the basics:

http://www.ethereum-101.com

I'm admittedly biased, since I own a fair bit of ETH, which is how I came across this video in the first place.

ethereums block time is around 15seconds so you have to wait that between each poker transaction and wait longer if you want more confirmations and security.

also I don't think it has any real benefit over a trusted 3rd party database until there is a usable mental poker implementation out there which seems unlikely. What are you going to write all poker moves to a blockchain while still relying on a 3rd party not only for escrow of funds but also dealing the cards? seems stupid.

basically wrong tool for the job. smart contracts in general seem useless to me tbh.

Your first point is valid, and the issue carries over to Ethereu's blockchain from efforts to use the bitcoin blockchain as a poker platform. Same problem. However, there are some DAPP projects listed on Ethereum related to poker. I wrote to one and have had no response.

I would not dismiss the concept of smart contracts so readily, even as to application to poker. (As far back as the Ethereum White Paper, the utility of smart contracts for betting was clear. As I do not code, I have been waiting for the development world to tcach up,which it basically has done.) There are a number of prediction markets being built to use ETH as fuel, not all of them sports .....

FWIW, I bought some ETH pre-sale and believe it will be useful for powering decentralized gaming, but perhaps not poker. That said, poker may be susceptible to structuring, using smart contracts in an innovative way. Not sure the likely marginal returns from doing so, and offering it, will justify the market, especially considering the validity of your second point. However, if smart contracts take off, poker will be subsumed in a sea of transactions and may be priced out of the platform.

Re your last point, I happen to be certain you are mistaken as to smart contracts being "useless".

Good analysis for discussion however.

One of the strengths of blockchain technology is that it is all irreversible - you have a public record that can't be edited/changed after the fact.

However, poker as we currently know it requires (sometimes) there to be reversals and retrospective editing. The most obvious case is one where there is cheating. That seems like an important challenge to overcome.

In this world who/what insures the software is safe, secure and honest?

We use only the most advanced encryption techniques, so there are no bots or superusers.

Bitcoin was a good concept , but had many flaws that where exploited by the greedy and bitcoin is certainly subject to governmental control. Hopefully Ethereum will have a better fate.

There comes a point where the -EV risk of cheats are less of an impact than the operators cost of doing business. You might have the finest software available, with the utmost security - but if you increase the rake such that even the top players are no longer able to beat the game, it's cold comfort.

For a timely example, playing an "honest" game with 5% rake might be fine. Expensive, but fine. If the honest operator decides to up this to an 6%, perhaps "due to market conditions" or some other excuse, if a "crooked" game loses on average only 4% to cheats, well then.

People would play on Absolute and UB right to the last minute.

re: Blockchain - An irreversible public record of cheating could be pretty damn useful when combined with the ability to blacklist users who you're willing to play with.

tl;dr - cheats are a rake like any other.

You can make refundable transactions with the code. It is especially easy on ethereum and I have done it many times myself.

You are correct though, the irreversibility is valuable for the industry.

"Cheating" in nearly every fashion is dissolved with a mental poker implementation. Collusion, gets dealt with in the same way. I'll never understand how we can't see this. The whole industry is going serverless in regard to the infrastructure. This doesn't necessarily completely wipe out 3rd party security in one shot. It simply lowers the cost to provide games. The only argument is whether this saving will be passed onto the players, and time will make a fool of anyone that suggests it won't.

Also I have seen the code for the implementation of mental poker. We have it. The problem was solved quite some time ago, but you need smart contracts to be able to meaningfully implement it. (bitcoin is getting smartcontracts as well but ethereum came first)

Not keen on explaining in depth but ethereum's blockchain time has nothing to do with the speed at which hands can be played.

Good points. I play on a site with only 2.5% rake with a cap of the lesser of 3BB or 5 chips (0.005BTC) and I get 11% Rakeback, so that gives me a great deal of flexibility in some other things. I do feel it is my responsibility to keep track of which players to be extra careful around, for a variety of reasons. At some point, the cost-benefit curves intersect and things that were not possible become possible.

I look forward to decentralized poker (maybe), but until it arrives I find that lower rake and minuscule transfer costs help tremendously.

Bitcoin wins and it is obviously the winner

I respect that, and people who back then or whenever who saw it or get predictions right. Bitcoin was one for some. The idea that society would accept a little something different if given another option, that others feel comfortable with too..

1 step ahead of the game

hype, hype, hype.. i looked into ******** and the devs are clueless. not much to talk about until theres a working client.

I'm traversing the code right now. This dev is not clueless. He has implemented the solution to mental poker. And it is quite clear he is capable of bringing it to market.

Very happy to know this person is doing this, he has a specifically auspicious background.

Also there is another dev on a project called nxtpoker who is also not clueless. The rest seemed meh though.

What I am looking at is in its infancy, but the solution is there. It will be up to most of the posters in this thread to understand it.

I was also explained the encryption process, of how to shuffle and deal cyptographically secure, I'll clean up the presentation and post it for players that are interested eventually.

Hows it handle players dropping out? Is it only a heads up implementation?

Do the devs expect to profit off this software somehow? If so, how do they prevent someone from just forking the code and removing the rake?

I remain highly skeptical that these devs have anything usable in the real world. It's a toy to show investors that smart contracts can do something and aren't a useless concept. I think they bit off more than they can chew.

There is a relatively recent paper called How to Use Bitcoin to Play Decentralized Poker, online.

In it there is the proposal for what they call function(claim or refund). The basic idea seems to be every player puts a deposit down and can only claim it by revealing their secret keys. Perhaps we can explore this solution together.

This particular project has some ideas as well I think the above should suffice for some dialogue.

Yes but it isn't a concern for the players. I think you mean to allude to the idea that there is no incentive for development or something but I don't really feel like this needs to be addressed. Certainly the project can and probably will have a proprietary nature, at least in the beginning. But there is also a clue here I think to the nature of how to best make this work, it really is only the players that have mass incentive here to support such a project.

So if you keep up with current events you can really see an interesting story unfolding in regard to unfavorable changes and options. A tipping point is on the horizon (and its not PS entering the US!).

I don't mean to disagree with you here. For me this toy is far more than just a novelty. It's simply in its infancy. It is the toy I have always been interested in because it is a prototype. This is why I don't want to get into things like the speed at which it can be played on ethereum. Speed is something that evolves over time, but simply being able to play on a mental poker implementation is a massive leap imo, so I am excited about that, but fully concede we do not have a useable system yet.

But we are about to see a change very soon. These projects like bitcoin, when successful, and when bootstrapped with the proper minimum components eventually divide in parts and teams and take off. You get an explosion of interest once they get a certain momentum going. It will become a self sustaining organism in this way.

We should be thinking of it as an infrastructure though, we still expect 3rd parties to provide solutions, but their role and the solutions they provide will be different than today. And like bitcoin the industry will have to evolve to reach smart contract technology just as much as the smart contracts and their language will have to evolve to become relevant with the industry. This evolution takes time but the advent of ethereum and the implementation of mental poker even as a toy are massive leaps.

i reviewed the paper. i still don't understand the bolded. i read all 9 times where the word 'escrow' was used but still don't see how the escrow works.

where does that money go? i know i don't have it and the other parties don't have it and it's decentralized. ok. but where is the money? lol it's just floating around in bits and nobody has it?

Do you have a link so that we can see what you've read ?

I 've expressed reservations about the likelihood of adapting blockchain technology to a competitive offering of online poker. However, the "escrow" functionality is a pretty minor matter among other technical issues in my view; locking up a stake until released upon a certain event is hardly something new to online poker.

You're concerned "its just floating around in bits"? You do know "they put the internet on computers now" ?

Forgive me if I am talking down to your understanding of bitcoin. The "money" is represented on a distributed ledger system, so all the bitcoin computers (miners) have a copy of all the bitcoin transactions ever made. When you set up an escrow like this you are effectively telling the miners that they cannot change the owner of the bitcoins without certain conditions being filled. So the money doesn't go anywhere.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/ranjit/papers/poker.pdf


This is also related to the the observation that what has been developed so far, or what seems to be presented is more of a toy than a functioning replacement to the current centralized server model systems that exist today. Gzesh is very practical I think (and suspect) when he expresses reservations. But I think we are not properly understanding the full picture.

The two paragraphs above start to highlight the real life implications of a realized mental poker implementation. Bitcoin is an effective solution to what is called the byzantine general's problem, and realizing this solution was a MASSIVE leap in the technological capability of mankind. Realizing mental poker is going to be an equivalent leap, as it allows a type of secure transaction that we otherwise cannot secure without extremely costly measures being utilized (3rd parties). For this kind of solution there is not the need for a poker game that is a reasonable implementation for the players. So first and foremost the proposed solution is not necessarily about playing poker.

Nonetheless, people generally get stuck on the block times, and one project is even trying to code a 3 sec block time for their blockchain. This is not how the implementation of mental poker will work. Calculation's, bets, dealing, shuffling, etc, all work off the block-chain. Essentially and effectively for this conversation we should understand that the block-chain is really only used for the escrow setup, that forces players to reveal their secrets.

The escrow system is a little too complex for bitcoin right now, and I believe the paper mentions that there are changes to the protocol needed for the "function (claim or refund)" to be implemented. But ethereum doesn't have this limitation and there is at least one full implementation that is coded.

What people are stuck on it seems is that they are envisioning a new "site" or "skin" that will be p2p and will take over the industry, something that is basically not plausible. Putting together the quotes above and my explanation we can start to understand the ethereum provides a new infrastructure for the industry, which will bring with it massive cost saving innovation from the PLAYERS perspective.

Please explain how collusion is dealt with.

So the blockchain escrow is only used to incentivize players to agree on the outcome of a hand and the mental poker protocol is its own thing.

This makes more sense but still a bit worried about people spite quitting. It would be the rational choice to lose 100bb instead of 100+100escrow but tilted people aren't rational. Hopefully you guys can make the client handle this stuff under the hood so most people aren't even aware they can screw the other guy over.

You quoted the explanation but didn't understand it, and perhaps my semantics aren't clear. Collusion will be dealt with in the same way as today, 3rd party solutions. The difference is the barrier to entry of innovative ideas (ie competition for today's status quo) will be nearly completely removed. That is the change. It's different than what you and others are thinking.

If we know the history of bitcoin, the equivalent is how Satoshi solved collusion of exchanges. At one point bitcoin's price was massively manipulated by one exchanges. But now there are many such exchanges that keep each other in check with liquidity. Satoshi didn't "solve" this, but rather it is a natural (and foreseeable) result from the nature of the implementation of his solution he provided. This is security against collusion, and for poker players its very related to the profitability of the game we are offered (intelligent players would rather play a more profitable game whether it had colluders or not!).

Yes, this is how you want to understand it.

Yes this is correct to say as well. The solution is conjecturally secure, which is important. What you are suggest is very related to bitcoin and the byzantine general solution. The fundamental idea is that if you pay people more to hold up the security of the network than they might gain by attacking it, then you have a secure equilibrium based on greedy participants. This is by far the strongest security solution we have at our disposal. But as a conjecture its not very helpful, this is why there is an anonymous (peer review!) experiment going on that does in fact have an academic whitepaper attached to it-people often miss this point about bitcoin.

In regard to poker, profitability and security are synonymous and players are starting to understand this because of changes we are observing.

Incentive to not be malicious is really the best solution we have available. There can still be some 3rd party solutions, but basically you are complaining that someone is giving you money

Nonetheless such attempts at destroying one's own escrow simply to disrupt the game, cannot last long (economically they will run out of money), and we can still choose 3rd party solutions that separate us from this type of behavior.

In reality, such irrational behavior will nearly never happen, and certainly far less than, for example, any disconnection or negative experience players have from ddos attacks etc. Also on that note ddos attacks are to be effectively rendered non-existent. They have been a massive cost to the players in the last few years (think of all the dissatisfied recs!)

if collusion detection is going to be relegated to 3rd parties, in what way is that functionally different from the system we have now? we pay pokerstars rake to ensure compliance with laws, game integrity, etc. the only potential benefit is that it might be cheaper because the 3rd party solution is going to be smaller and have less duties than a company like pokerstars.

another issue is that such collusion detection would require changes to the game (e.g., making hole cards available for public viewing after x days) that would make it too different from the existing way poker is played and therefore too difficult for it to catch on.

1) the fact that there are many exchanges now is not a conscious effort to provide liquidity in order to protect the market from being manipulated. ultimately they're there because they can still profit.
2) despite there being many more of them, there is still no way to know whether there is collusion between them.

satoshi didn't solve collusion of exchanges and his protocol in and of itself does not preclude that.