Your examples are of something that is, on a global governmental scale, little more than a nuisance. In order for BitCoin to be viable as a medium for internet poker it needs to become a multi-billion dollar alternative currency. One that is untraceable and uncontrolled by any established state.

I absolutely assure you that will never be allowed to happen. This isn't pimply Scandinavian teens distributing dodgy cams of the latest Harry Potter movie. It's threatening to undermine the power of governments to control currency.

I'm sorry, but this is something hacktivism is grossly incapable of achieving.

Each swing of the hacktivist hammer makes shockwaves twice as large as the one before. Repeated shocks against the walls confining our potential. The turning points in history are the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, and the Internet. The third ocean wave is last and largest.

First they ignore you. Then they defame you. Finally they attack you and you have won.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life

A bully's use of brute force cannot gain compliance. Efforts to shutdown Linden Labs Second Life money failed. That was a centralised currency owned by one company.

No one owns Bitcoin.

^_^

I certainly am not about to deposit money in some made up currency. And neither are the kinds of people you want to play with.

Meanwhile Uncle Sam unzips his pants and jams in his jelly snake.

Excuse me?

Keep up the good work guy, nothing changes without people at least trying. I would also try this out and play some microstakes to support a great idea.

I would really love to see this work, however I am hoping someone will use the software and tie it in with more reliable and reputable payment processing similar to what stars and tilt offer.
I just don't know that I can trust this bitcoin system.

How will you deal with collusion detection?

disclaimer: I currently own a large sum of bitcoins (>1% produced) and have dedicated mining machines.

Bitcoins are not even 1 year old. We are getting a nice growth rate over at the forums, many are asking how to accept payment in bitcoin. Just today, I got a PM on how to implement a payment system for a website.

Back when the coins were 5-6 cents each 4 months ago, I urged many of my friends to purchase some, even $100. I see potential in an instant currency with zero transactions fees & anonymous payments. I am still urging my friends to purchase more at 25 cents.

Only 21 million coins will ever be produced. If pokerstars or a major sportsbook decided to accept bitcoins (why not? - super simple to do and almost zero cost) what would be the value of each coin? Would $5 each - representing $100 million in internet betting- be ridiculous? $10?

Can bitcoins go to $0 - yes, in fact a very high percentage that happens. But if anyone wants to step out and take a risk, buy $100 worth. I think it is only a matter of time before bitcoins appear in the WSJ or CNBC.

http://www.poker.bitcoinvegas.com/di...ed-poker-games

"What if every table was hosted by a different person, and when you bought in to a table, money was transferred from your ewallet account to the host's ewallet account. Then when you stood up from the table, money would be transferred back to your account dependent on your results?

This would effectively mean each poker table is its own card room, and would not be tied financially to any poker site. Anyone could host any poker game they wanted with any parameters they wanted, and allow anyone they want to buy in. We could allow or disallow people to charge whatever rake they wanted, and I'm sure there would be lots of clients where you could browse poker games being offered or offer poker games yourself, and I have a feeling that the end result would be something like a much better version of what we see now when we browse a poker lobby, but would be much cheaper and infinitely more customizable and user-friendly."

it's a good read...

This software is open source, so anyone can open up a poker room in whatever currency they want to as long as they're able to figure out a way to accept deposits and pay out withdrawals. The bitcoin aspect may or may not ultimately be a good method of accommodating cashouts, but that will be seen in time.

The important thing to keep in mind is that if someone does figure out how to cheaply accommodate transactions in USD/EUR/Bitcoins or whatever else, then you could have a lot more competition in this arena that should theoretically lead to lower prices to play and a greater number of features. All of the issues that are being broached concerning currency, security, and bot-detection are obviously issues that are going to need to be solved before any significant number of players will flock to one of these sites. Fortunately, they are all problems that can be solved. Unfortunately, they aren't issues that can be sufficiently solved in a reply on a discussion board so if you aren't convinced that problem X is solved completely right now that doesn't mean that the people working on the issue don't acknowledge the problem or don't have a few ideas in the pipeline.

http://www.kartludox.org/index.php?title=Cheaters

also... if you aren't satisfied with it. all your suggestions are most welcome. this is going to be a poker site for the community anyway.

That solution sounds nice til you think about it.

You need hole cards to be decent at catching colluders. People probably aren't going to want to play on a site where their opponents can see their cards in every hand later. Even if you made all hand histories available to all players with all hole cards exposed, you'd need someone who was willing to go through all that data and look for suspicious activity. That's not something that people are going to volunteer to do because it's boring and tedious and difficult.

Plus, most sites catch most collusion by looking at private information of players, like transfers, IP addresses, physical addresses, etc etc. People aren't going to submit to that level of scrutiny from the community at large.

I certainly would not my mucked cards made available for all too see.

This. I applaud your efforts, but I dont see how you will get a playing pool if we are gambling with macaroni noodles.

To be fair... There currently seems to be a supply of people willing to buy those macaroni noodles for some pretty high prices... There also seems to be a number of people willing to pay $1400/oz for some shiny rocks. Just happens that people have been willing to buy the rocks fairly consistently for thousands of years. And the macaroni noodles and shiny rocks are way more difficult to fake than these green pieces of paper we've been using for about 100 years.

Not really helping your cause. BTW - can you quote /credit me with the section of the cheaters wiki entry you lifted from my post?

i'm sure it will all be figured out by the programmers, the guys who run the the whole thing and of course the community.

just sit tight til it goes online.

One idea would be to make users' connection and session data more public. Give everyone a community profile page on a web site and show their login history. List their most frequent games/opponents. Don't list results or hands or tracker stats, just general information. Include a way to identify if they are connecting from the same IP as another player, or if they are changing IPs often; maybe a crypto hash of their IP shown as their "IP fingerprint" for each session. Allow comments so people can voice suspicions, and people can defend themselves and earn (or lose) trust.

People would be able to decide how much to trust their opponents. Long time player that doesn't seem suspicious? Play on. An account that changes IP every logon? A brand new account from a previously used IP? Two accounts from the same IP? Two recently created accounts that never 3bet or showdown vs. each other, and the profile shows they mostly sit at the same tables? Hmmm, keep an eye on them, maybe sit this one out, go post a comment and see what others think. Eventually the site can step in for accounts with high suspicion and look deeper into hole cards, etc.

This could help with soft collusion too. Maybe those two new accounts are in fact two friends new to poker and don't realize soft-playing is a no-no. They get shunned by the community, people leave the games they sit in, they learn their lesson, they explain in their comments, they widen out their gameplay, people see they've changed and give them another shot.

Basically just give people tools in the form of lots of information and let them decide for themselves. Just like going to a home game, if something seems "off" you just leave and don't play those players again. Just need to figure out where to draw the line in terms of info, with privacy concerns and whatnot. I understand people will instinctively dislike having a lot of this info out in the open, but it could be a necessary tradeoff if it helps the community police the games.

Seems pretty backwards - there's nothing reputable about Stars/FTP payment processors and I wouldn't call them reliable either. Not that Stars/FTP themselves are disreputable, but their payment processors are (by necessity) very shady. The only reason the players aren't getting hurt is because the sites eat all the losses.

Probably the thing to do is use the bitcoin for transactions and keep the player account balances in USD/Euros. This will also avoid possible major disruptions due to fluctuation in the value of the bitcoins.

+1 to this ideal.

yeah, this is how i understood it. bitcoin becomes the mechanism for making withdrawals and deposits and account balances represent the value of the bitcoins when depositing. if something bad happens to bitcoin other mechanisms can be sought. but... doesn't that put the site at risk from fluctuations in the bitcoin price to some extent?

If it's liquid enough you could just convert the bitcoins to dollars through an intermediary once a customer deposits them in their account, assuming they want to hold a balance in USD/EUR.

This is the basic idea for catching cheaters worded elegantly. Of course the right balance has to be striked between a) not giving out too much info publicly (IP address = security risk?) b) giving enough info to a trusted small group and c) allowing the review process to operate smoothly. I'm not going to go into these platonic derivatives arguing how things should be. Instead lets provide the platform for the community to figure out and respond themselves to where this balance lies.

One proposed solution is allowing a period (say a week) after which your nickname can optionally be changed. Cake Poker does this and it's stopped PTR from tracking players. At that point all of the players HH's one day old would be made public for review. If any suspicious activity is suspected then a privileged community-elected/trusted group is given the green light to further probe more private data. Once malign activity is found, we connect the dots and carry out any punitive action.

Your second point- we don't expect people to sit there reading through every HH one by one! Instead bots would probably comb the HH's quickly and search for anomalies. Then a person becomes alerted and does a manual review. Because everyone is free to search for cheaters, everyone has an incentive to protect the games and so newer better methods will rapidly be found for detection of cheaters.