Quote:
Originally Posted by genjix
The bitcoin economy is worth $1 mil making it the most successful virtual currency to date. I don't mean to sound like a promoter, but your criticism of bitcoins is unfounded.
$1 = 4.65 BTC
Traders are actively using bitcoin currency right now, so it's proving itself. It's not unreasonable to use them for an online Poker room.
Calling the bitcoin economy the most successful virtual currency to date is simply untrue. Digital Gold currencies with much larger floats have been taken down. E-Gold's stats claim about $80million in gold alone. Even Pecunix currently has over $4mil in circulation.
All of the digital currencies at one point or another were used for gambling (and porn). That's part of why the DoJ went after them (and went after exchangers first). Just remember that the exchanges are the weak link in this chain...
Also, consider the economics of money being created from thin air without being backed by productivity output, military force or a physical asset with intrinsic value. Bitcoins currently have value because of speculation. Speculators offer a double-edged sword.
All of this is kind of beside the point, mind you. The approach of an open source poker platform is a good one.
With regard to the suggestion that open APIs / communications protocols will enable collusion, I think it's fairly clear that these lower the barrier to entry to unscrupulous folks by some amount. I disagree with commentators, though, who suggest that open APIs enable collusion in a way that isn't possible with closed systems. When the fundamental problem is preventing an individual who has authorized access to some piece of information from sharing that information with another, the problem is going to affect both closed and open systems. Reverse engineering of protocols and applications, while not trivial, is certainly achievable if the incentives are right (or wrong, depending on your perspective). Encryption is not going to solve this. After all, the client software needs the key because it needs to be able to interpret the data.
With regard to the (supposed) increased likelihood of trojaned / backdoored clients... How sure are you that the client you downloaded from another poker site actually came from them? Was it downloaded using a method that authenticated its legitimacy (think SSL)? PokerStars, Full Tilt and Cake all use non-ssl links for the initial client download...
It is, I believe, instructive that it seems to be primarily detective controls (post facto statistical analysis) rather than preventive controls (blacklist of running processes, etc.) that have proven most effective in finding and punishing colluders on the closed networks. The perceived intractability of the problem seems to suggest that the solution likely involves changing incentives. How to go about doing that, I don't know.
With regard to botting / SnGWiz / stove / etc... I find it vaguely ironic that among the first machines likely to pass something similar to the
Turing Test will be poker bots. That said, tbh, I have a problem with the amount of effort spent crying about (non-collusive) bots when compared to the minimal concern expressed about sweatshop gold-miner style operations (or nitty RB multi-table grinders). Which does more harm to the poker economy? Which may actually contribute to our understanding of the theory underlying the game? Fundamentally, though, here - as with collusion - it seems statistical analysis is more effective than preventive controls at detecting and eliminating bots from the games.
As regards PTR and your site's control of disallowing observers... The impact of this is likely to be players "supplementing" their income by selling HH's to the miners.