Questions:
1) P2P subnet: Do the peers know the ips of eachother? How does it exactly work?
>>No, the peers at the table don't know each other's IPs. They are masked using the p2p communication server in our app called blabber (we may use the Whisper protocol moving forward). At the beginning of each hand the clients of each player goes through a “roll call” sending messages to each other and finalizes the number of participants in a hand. The game client is a state engine, where all peers are running the same code at the same time and are constantly communicating in the background to ensure the UI for all players displays the same thing. We do this entirely off-chain, to reduce gas costs and improve gameplay speed. At the end of each hand, the end result of the hand is sent to the smart contract on ethereum which includes a “chip counter” to update the player’s stakes.
Please see our white paper, Section 8.5, this gives a better technical overview of what is going on in the background.
A copy can be found here:
https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uplo...-DRAFT-0.1.pdf
2) No info about liquidity pools. Guaranteed turnaments are mentioned. Please explain.
>>Guaranteed Tournaments: We want to focus marketing dollars on attracting players via large prize pools and rakeback versus putting that money towards expensive sponsorships of famous athletes. After our token sale we will release our expected initial tournament schedule.
Liquidity Pools: I understand that everyone wants a global liquidity pool, but we need to be conscientious of the laws and regulations that are currently in place. In addition, a new operator needs to develop a long term growth strategy, one that can hold up, especially with significant legal scrutiny should we scale. We haven’t discussed where we will accept players from yet, because we need to continue to acquire legal guidance. What I can say is we’ve spent significant time and resources into seeking legal advisement from three different law firms from both the US and EU, and will continue those partnerships as we bring Virtue Poker to market.
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3) Can I play and stake (work as a justice) concurrent?
>>Yes. We are working on a system where Justices will be assigned to tables without knowing the ETH table address.
4) What's the logic: How to know if a peer lost connection?
>>The P2P subnet is the component of our application that handles all peer to peer communications. Messages (“pings”) are constantly being sent as the beginning and during a hand by players “seated” at the table. The P2P subnet is nothing more than a communication and synchronization tool, so the clients know what is going on at the game level. If a peer stops sending messages to other peers over a specified timeframe, the other peers know that player is no longer connected. If you’d like the precise technical explanation, I’m more than happy to tell you the actual code that is used.
5) What's the logic: How to know if a peer left the table?
>>Leaving the table requires a player to take an action in the UI (close the app // click “leave table”). What is really going on is the peer (for cash games) is requesting they both leave the P2P subnet for that table, and requesting their ETH from the table contract.
6) Do white-label casinos connect to the same lobby?
>>Yes, the lobby is a registry on Ethereum which lists table addresses. It will be customizable, so only the required tables (for example: think of a skin that should only display tables with players from Country A) show up in the UI for the third-party skin.
7) Does a white-label casino have to purchase a license from your company or is it enough to purchase a license within their jurisdiction?
>>The third-party would have to sign a contract with us to use our software. The legal requirement for third-party integration is TBD, but it is safe to say it would be satisfactory to us if an operator holds a license in their jurisdiction for online gaming.
8) "The “Justice Pool” is composed of a limited number of users that are active on the Virtue Poker network." Please explain the LIMITED wording. Is their an minimum threshold or will receive everybody who stakes his VPP (justice) receive tables relative to his stake vs all other stakes in the network?
>>Limited means nothing else in this instance than “active.” And yes, there will be a minimum an individual must stake to become a Justice. The amount has not been set. We are still actively developing the Justice System.
9) "If a Justice is caught cheating, colluding, or misreporting hand results, that Justice’s stake is seized and is kicked out of the Justice Pool." How can a justice proof that he did nothing wrong? Game-experts (centralized entioty) are the masters of the network. Is there any way to proof for a justice that they had no right to seize his stake?
>>An individual would have to tamper with their Justice client to misreport any result. All players, including the Justice cryptographically sign-off on the end result of a hand with their private key (as of now), a Justice client would have to disagree with a player client, for a hand to be misreported, and that record would be seen by our game security team which would prompt investigation. Any time there is a disagreement between players, or between a player and a Justice, our team will look at why the disagreement occurred.
The “centralized” component of Virtue Poker is our game security team. We understand there is a trust element in this, but after significant research, we decided that most players would prefer to have a game security team reviewing hand histories, versus having full decentralized poker which would open to vectors of attack via collusion and bots.
However, players can choose to participate in a game without a Justice node, but instead would have to trust their counterparties (who could take advantage of the dropped player problem, or disagree to an end result of the hand).
10) Since you are not open-sourcing the desktop-client at the beginning, from a players perspective it does not change much in comparision to pokerstars. A player cannot know if you call the random-function. By doing this you do not adhere to the vision of decentralized systems. Every pokerstars player is for good reason worried about pokerstars cheating them, by not open-sourcing the desktop-client you do not differentiate in any means at this point from pokerstars. What's your statement on that? If you look at the current crypto-market, copy-cats are no problem at all, b/c copy cats cannot learn the codebase so fast to overtake the original project and in addition they would have to have a way better dev-team to overtake the first mover. So this is not a valid argument. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o00WqRbo31U
>>First, for compliance reasons, we will certify our P2P RNG solution with a third-party verifier, such as GLI. Second, we don’t “call a RNG function” from a centralized server. If you review our white paper (see Mental Poker) you will see that every player is included in card shuffling and all players encrypt the deck of cards, so essentially, every player utilizes randomness from their machine, and is the only person who has access to their private keys that correspond to their cards. There is no possible way for us to view your cards during a hand, as there is no server you are calling during gameplay. That is the fundamental point of Mental Poker and our client architecture. The players communicate amongst themselves via the p2p subnet. For us to cheat, we’d need to have access to the encryption keys of all players, defeating the purpose of spending years implementing a Mental Poker solution in the first place.
Concerns:
I cannot disclose who wrote that, but he/she is a shief cryptographer of a big cryptocurrency.
"You need an encryption algorithm that is commutative. A few are known, including Pohlig-Hellman and SRA.
See this paper: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/S...entalPoker.pdf
Unfortunately, neither of these algorithms is considered particularly secure. I don't know of any commutative cryptosystem that is sufficiently secure. I still think you can make this work, but it would require changing the protocol so that commutativity is not needed."
Rayn, do you want to adress that concern? I saw you have 2 former computer scientist students in your team, but no specialist von cryptography, when developing new cryptographic systems, this seems to be a little risky.
I think these are questions, that everybody will for sure like to get an answerd too, who is interested in virtuepoker.
>> With regards to cryptographers -- we will announce adding two highly respected individuals and PHDs in cryptography to our team later this week. But to summarize, we will be implementing multiple p2p shuffling algorithms for players to choose from.
