Each Poker site can run on one or multiple servers. From the point of view of the user, it is one Poker site. Because anyone can modify the client then you use whichever one you want (like MSN Messenger, Pidgin, trillian for chatting on MSN). The website for that Poker site will offer their own branded client to download though- however you can still use your own client.

A skin is just a different client software for playing at the site. Anybody can make or modify their client however they want.

Anybody can setup their own Poker site, but the playerpools will be separate.

If two sites agree to share their playerpool then they can connect each other together. But they must trust the other side not to be a scam.

Apart from siteowners, brick and mortar casinos and affiliates can we agree that everyone else is in favor of a 'rakefree' site if it works?

Thought so.

Does not matter if you are SNE on Stars or playing an hour of micro every day on some small site. If a rakefree site could be made to work it would be good for all players.

There's a ton of problems, thus this thread and all other discussions, but even if every other problem is solved the big one is still how to build enough traffic. You have to be around long enough for word of mouth and all the other avenues used to find new players to work.

So how about trying to get ALL current online poker players to promise that they will play at least 10% of their hands on this site? Everyone should be willing to invest that little. It won't really cost you as a player anything and it could be the defining factor in making a site like this a success.

So as you come closer to launching try to get all players aware and make them wanna participate. 10% of their hands. Could even be on much lower levels than normal so you could add tables while playing your regular site without risking much. The important thing to give this a shot is to have traffic on the site at all times. If you could get say 25% of all players to play at least 10% of their hands for a number of months it would give the site time to grow and for there to always be plenty of tables when new players check it out.

OK, I'm on board with this. I've seen a ton of idiotic ideas similar to this, but this is the first one that could actually work (despite some idealistic maths).

However, it seems like bit coins are still in their infancy and buying them is anything but straightforward. What is an honest and realistic timeframe for having easy and instant bitcoin purchases?

Will a bitcoin trading entity need to be setup to by the community,or will each individual site buy & sell bitcoins? I guess what I'm saying is (if the former), if this takes off, online poker/gambling could easily be what takes the bitcoin mainstream. In order to take off though, a suitable trading site will need to be created and I'm wondering if this is something that we, as a community should be working on in parallel. It would suck to put all of this time and energy making this awsome software, but then realize there is no bitcoin infrastructure to support it. I apologize if I am misunderstanding how bitcoins work.

I don't see the problem with charging a very small rake instead of going rake-free. It doesn't make sense to go rake-free and then put in a lot of unnecessary effort trying to figure out how to scrape up piddling alternative revenue sources (donations, vanity tables, etc.) when you have a built-in revenue mechanism that can be as large or as small as needed to cover expenses.

Other companies resort to these "freemium" models because of the difficulty in getting people to pony up the money upfront. That significant hurdle is completely absent in online poker. They've already crossed that bridge and sent you money to play on the site. You don't have to hook anyone like a free MMO or make any heartfelt pleas like wikipedia, you already have the money. Just take a small amount of rake, don't nickel-and-dime them with additional donation requests or premium purchases or whatever.

For example, if a typical rake is 5% with $3 max, say you take 0.5% with $0.30 max. That's an immediate 90% rake reduction, no sign-up restrictions, no volume requirements, no tiered vip crap, etc. Anyone who's rake-aware enough to be attracted to a rake-free site is going to be just as interested in this, and this way you still have some guaranteed revenues to apply toward expenses. Whether it's enough is another question, but even this tiny rake probably brings in more than a freemium system would.

Either way you still have the way-more-important WSEX/Paynorake/etc. problem of how to attract players in a competitive market with a limited budget, why add the stress and financial burden of an uncertain revenue model on top of that?

The way I understand it, it doesn't really matter what medium you play in or hold players' account balances in. If somehow someone discovered a way to set up a payment processor that handled USD transactions with US poker players with minimal costs that wouldn't be harrassed by the DOJ, you could simply use USD as your currency; but if that were easy to set up, I doubt the effective rake would be so high at current sites.

I think if this has any intention of being serious it needs to be a little less idealistic and a lot more pragmatic.

Right now you are saying it is going to be free to play and no rake and no advertising and open source and public servers and no bots and no ptr and use bitcoin and cater to grinders and have lots of fish and there will be a pony. It is just not going to happen this way. You have to decide what is important and not worry about things that conflict with that.

If any substantial part of the system is open source you are going to be swarming with bots and dataminers. You are probably going to have that anyway, most sites already put a lot of effort into bothunting and they can't keep the bots out.

The absolute #1 thing you need to do is maintain security. Open source works for security in the Linux world, this resembles something like Counterstrike or WoW more closely, how good is their security? Not very, and it isn't because of closed or open source. It is because their architecture depends on running code on untrusted systems. With poker (as it is currently) the untrusted code is limited to output a decision of how much to bet so the damage is limited. Nevertheless it is enough for bots and PTR to be a huge problem. Don't trust the user. Don't trust the user! What I'm reading here so far is, there is a lot of trusting the user going on.

This whole no-rake business is just not worth getting into. Seriously there are just going to be a ton of expenses to pay for, so just collect the rake. If you want casual players to play, you need your site to be polished. It needs to look nice and seem professional or they will not trust you with their money. Joe Fish doesn't care how Bitcoin works, he's just happy if it makes depositing easier, but he does care that the site looks smooth. That means you have to hire graphic designers and web developers, if your site looks like it just beamed in from 1995, no one will play.

You only need to be the best in one area to succeed. Bitcoin is an obvious choice because no one else is doing it and the potential is huge. It is not like an e-wallet. E-wallets are like Napster and Bitcoin is like BitTorrent. The RIAA/MPAA killed Napster but they can't kill BitTorrent, because there is just not anything to shut down.

If major sites start taking Bitcoin then you might look at competing on rake, or you could just say, hey, we achieved our goal, let's play some poker.

This is pretty much true. Bitcoin is same as cash. You don't keep thousands of dollars of cash sitting around on your desk (well some people do but not many), so you shouldn't keep thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin either.

You would use a Bitcoin exchange to convert it to your real-world currency of choice, or, if Bitcoin becomes popular enough, there will be Bitcoin banks that specialize in dealing with this stuff.

+1 to the idea of an open source pokerroom. Also more faith ppl, wtf. It's been proved open source is more secure than closed source in many aspects (linux vs windows for servers - best example). Stop talking about it being not secure if it's properly done. Open your eyes. Tons of big companies run unix/linux and guess what - it's open source. So please accept this obvious fact and don't say a word about security if u have no idea what you're talking about. Just start thinking and connect simple facts. Have faith in ppl not socialism. It's like saying European Union is great (according to all great governments) without seeing that country after country is going bankrupt there or beliving in American dream and thinking everything is ok nowadays but it's never been worse in reality.. yet ppl still think government cares about ppl and deny obvious facts.

Open source isn't a magic solution to security.

Open source works for security when you are securing the computer on behalf of the user.

To prevent cheating in a game, you need to secure the computer against the user. It is the totally opposite problem and unsurprisingly, open source not only doesn't help, it makes the problem much harder, possibly unsolvable. Any poker site with open-source client code will have undetectable bots and dataminers, period. The only way it wouldn't is if there are not enough players to make it worthwhile.

Open source code on the server side might help prevent attacks because again the security is going in the "right" direction - for the system owner against outside attackers - but even this only works if enough people actually look at the code.

If we donated even tiny % of the rake to the programmers who look at the code we'd get super decent platform imho. Don't know how much money was donated to linux development but let's donate daily (genjix said what 1mln or sth $) rake to the developers and they're going crazy ;0.

As for datamining/bots, whatever. Bot's wouldn't be able to play for rake and datamining isn't that big of a deal. It also helps in discovering scandals (AP scandal etc.) I don't want to go into it more though, cause it's a different topic. Minor problems overall imho (not to mention they exist in closed source sites now, lol).

Quote a post that said that.

Anyone who wants to help in any way- testing, ideas or vision, send me your email

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If you look on the right there's a box called 'Topic Central'. Read your favourite articles, make any additions where you see fit OR click the Discussion tab at the top of the page and start a debate.

On the left of the main page is a link titled 'Recent changes'. At the end of the day I'll check what you've written and respond to any discussions (and show others on the mailing list too).

Just curious...

If bitcoins would work, why haven't the mainstream and even not so mainstream gambling sites started to use them?

Your problem is the same as their problem - access to the US banking system. I am still fuzzy as to how I make a real money transfer from my poker dedicated checking account to bitcoin and back again. And do it without my big name bank saying "no no".

Not to hijack this thread but I would think that bitcoin would be the answer to sports betting, casino games et al as well as poker.

The DOJ will try to shut you down just as quick as any online casino. If you can slide by, so can any casino.

Maybe a separate thread for bitcoin is warranted. Stars and FTP should seriously look into them. Maybe they have, I don't know.

Despite the fact that you seem to want to create grinder heaven with your poker site, I fully support and urge you to proceed forthwith.

I will log on (microstakes) as soon as you go operational. In my opinion, if you start with microstakes, folks will be less concerned about security. As you gain a solid reputation, you can increase your stakes.

Thank you for your efforts.

Tuff

Thanks. Our thoughts exactly.

I'd rather play against people who aren't really in the "poker community"

Forums to debate topics:

http://poker.bitcoinvegas.com/

poker community can work towards bringing in new fish

Hahaha, there goes my brilliant plan to independently develop online poker software after reading about numerous sites plans to 'license' their software to regulated casinos in the US. A juicy spot given developing reasonable software is not exactly a herculean task.

More seriously, this sounds like a great idea. Looking for feedback on 2+2 is going to be hit and miss. Tons of users here are involved as or with affiliates or directly with the sites themselves so feedback is going to be incredibly biased against anything that would upset the current system of player exploitation.

I'd definitely love to try it out. Keep us updated!

Consider:
- Sending me your email
- Joining our chatroom at http://pastecoin.com/cgi-bin/irc.cgi
- Signing up to our forums on http://poker.bitcoinvegas.com/
- Editing the wiki at http://www.kartludox.org/

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.

This was a fairly informative post.
I'd like you to know though there are efforts to have some fairly big and well known companies accept bitcoins for their products which will not only help stable the BTC economy somewhat but bring a higher sense of legitimacy to the currency. Keep watch on how things progress over the coming year ;-)

Adding a 'verify' your client functionality to the main site would be trivial. Just offer some sort of hashing software, user downloads it, gets the hash of the users client, compares it the list of 'verified' clients, boom another layer of authentication. And given the app itself could be like 2kb in size the entire process could be more or less instantaneous and transparent for most users and have negligible bandwidth requirements on the site that hosts it.

Don't really want to go down this rabbit hole... You probably need some way of authenticating the hashing software as well... Or you could provide the client binary download on an https url and develop a level of trust between the user and the site... The point here wasn't with the challenge of authenticating the software - more with the fact that the big sites don't seem to take basic steps.

Ship a branded CD to their house.

Guaranteed fail with real money. There is absolutely NO WAY IN HELL the governments of this world will be ok with an untraceable currency and/or one that is outside the control of an established State. Absolutely not going to happen with significant amounts of money. Never ever ever, no matter what.

Get your head out of the poker and mmorpg worlds. Think about things like terrorist financing, drug money laundering and tax evasion. NO government will ever allow this, and they will use their considerable arsenals of weaponry to stop it if necessary.

I am flabbergasted that anybody could honestly believe that they will be allowed to move around vast sums of money in an unregulated, untraceable way. Patently silly.

Short of banning the internet, there is no way to stop distributed crypto-currency. It is the same technology that brought you bittorrent. Sure the government can shut-down ************.org after a lengthy back-and-forth period. But then a whole bunch of other sites will creep up behind you.

They can shut-down bitcoin exchangers. Maybe even shut-down forums which allow people to buy/sell bitcoins amongst themselves. But they could never stop black-market trading of bitcoins. And shutting down Bitcoin? Impossible.

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