Given the content here and what I'm going to say, let me preface my post by saying I'm not posting here on behalf of 2+2.

In other words, spam the hell out of everyone? I sure hope that's not the plan here; given some of OP's post, I can't help but wonder if it is. This thread's been allowed to run so far, and maybe it will for a long time, I'm not sure. But I can tell you that most forums and poker sites aren't going to tolerate people promoting the hell out of a site on their backs, and I'm sure 2+2 won't either. Speaking of which, OP, if you want this thread to stay open, it might be wise to limit yourself to the 30 or 40 links to the sites that you've already posted. I think we know where to find them now, thanks.

Don't get me wrong, word-of-mouth is great, and I don't want to insinuate that OP is planning to go down the spamming road - hopefully that isn't the plan.

Sweet, total information freedom. Is this another way of saying **** the authors, pirating is fine?

This probably isn't the best site on which to be promoting that POV.

So wait...bitcoins aren't just a currency one uses to pay for things, but a speculation vehicle? I mean, any currency of course will fluctuate, but this sounds a little more extreme than most.

Also, was the concern mentioned early in the thread about CC companies and others quickly shutting down their use to purchase bitcoins ever addressed? I may have missed it.

This is not a concern. The current Bitcoin can be subdivided into 8 decimal places. That's 2.1*10^14 coins. By comparison 1 light year = 10^16. That's a huge number.

If ever 1 BTC becomes really expensive, then people will switch to dealing in mBTC or nBTC (nano-BTC), ... It has ZERO affect on any potential Poker room as all coins won't be generated until 2035.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._over_time.png

And the 8 decimal point thing is not a limitation and can later be expending to be even larger still.

yeah true but paying tons of rake to pokersites is even more uncooler.

you probably know better than me but i wouldn't mind small ads as long as they didn't advertise different poker sites else that sucks.

also who rated this under 5 stars? must be pokerstars and fulltilt or something lol. Yeah maybe this idea wont work but if it did work every player wins.

constructive criticism and 5 star ratings or GTFO of thread imo

yer that's exactly what I was trying to get at. I know your not intrested in funding the site to much and you have a link showing various things. I just think you should maybe consider it. The more money you make the more you can spend on advertising to get fish in

It is a very volatile currency. Its value has only gone up though, there is a post in the forums about a guy who paid 10,000 btc to get a pizza delivered when they were just over 0.02 each about 6 months ago. That pizza today is about $2500.

There are legitimate uses for bitcoin. Someone is creating a site which orders pizza for those who want to pay with bitcoins. You use your credit card with dominos or pizza hut to order a pizza for some guy in Miami, and get the market value back in bitcoins. Roll your eyes and laugh, I know... It is a new technology, and you either believe in its viability or not. For it to succeed, there will have to be easier ways to acquire coins.

The current major exchange for bitcoins uses liberty reserve, which is based in costa rica. You fund your paypal acct and then swap liberty reserve for paypal (very small fee). I think you can also do bank wire for LR. It is not simple and straight forward at the moment.

[ ] Encourages me to rate as 5 stars.

If your a poker player why would you not want a rake free room? This idea is for us poker players.

anyway, whatever.

Kinda looking through your links, it looks like about a year til I can load up your poker software and host my own online homegame. Rakefree of course.

I am still unsure about bitcoin. If it is so wonderful, I don't see why most gambling sites don't use it.

What am I missing?

Tuff

We need testers. If there's a 10% chance this succeeds that is +EV. The more testers, the faster we can move. PM me these details:

Name
Available times
Email
Other contact methods
Preferred contact method
Notes (other skills, require advance notice, ...)
Willing to playtest?

And you'll be added to the report sheet.

Lots of people have different schedules. More people makes it easier to pick out 4 people with a shared schedule. Thanks

genjix, just an observation.

I think 2+2 has been very tolerant and fair with this thread and you have pushed it a bit. Quotes like "spammed the forums" do not help, as this is what I'm talking about, spam.

The links you've posted have been necessary in most cases but I think you have posted them a little too often.

Just to let you know I'm 100% behind this thread and am only telling you this because I'd hate to see a conflict and as good as 2+2 is about this sort of stuff, they are still a business and imo they've given, I'm sure, what they would feel like is quite a bit of leeway to you here. Let's not ruin it by over posting similar links and slip ups of the tongue such as intentions of spamming.

To try and explain, here is an example of a great thread where 2+2 took a different view and banned the poster. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...part-i-900999/

^ good thinking

Remember to give back to 2+2 if this thing goes down

So, does no one have an answer to this?

Excellent question IMO.

Exactly - I almost spite-rated this thread one star when I saw that post.

Heh, I'll take the credit/blame for that. The OP of that thread had a screen name that was the same as his site name (I changed it after banning him); it was extremely clear that he was posting to promote his commercial blog and never intended to post the other parts of the history on 2+2.

This thread's a little different; we'll see where things go. It is entirely possible that it gets shut down at some point, and the fact that I'm posting in it and it's still open shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of keeping it that way.

I suspect that rather soon most 2+2ers are going to be taking a keen interest in alternative ways to play online poker.

I don't know if this is the answer though.

But something like IRC, but more sophisticated, with some mechanism to move real money around may come to light.

I love the idea of rake free poker.

Tuff

The bitcoin aspect of all this is maybe a bit unfortunate. Not that I dislike the idea or think that it won't work; no one knows. It's definitely interesting. But it's speculative and risky and obviously a lightning rod for controversy. The real value is in the software effort. As I understand it, this is kind of a two-phase project:

Phase 1: A comprehensive fully-functional open-source poker platform.
Phase 2: Opening a rake-free bitcoin-based site using said platform.

A successful Phase 1 would have value even if bitcoins crash and burn. Having good software readily available would make it easier for lots of other people to try new ideas too, not just the bitcoin idea. Maybe some other aspiring site operator wants to try the subscription/donation model with official currency instead of bitcoins. Or set up an advertiser-supported site. Or whatever. Plus anyone just being able to set up private home game servers for fun.

It looks like there are a few other open source poker projects out there, but limited in scope (like doing NLHE tourneys only) and not really targeting a comprehensive offering. So the software side of this is definitely worthwhile; perhaps refocusing more on that could garner more support and less controversy.

What's the best place to buy Bitcoins from the USA? I'll buy $100 worth for lulz

Even rating this thread 5 stars to show other pokersites you are unhappy with high rake is a good idea.

The only reason to not rate 5 stars is if you are involved with an affiliate business or another poker site, or somehow think OP is out to scam in some way. Other than that its got to be constructive criticism all the way hasn't it? every poker player wants lower rake.

And rating low out of spite is silly, why would you care one bit about me and what i say, im in no way involved with this project at the moment. Im just some random forum poster.

When will the site be up and running etc? I wanna check it out lol.

I have some reservations about how this thread is going.

I don't need to be told that reservations don't mean **** to anyone lol. But, I think there are other 2p2ers who might be forming some of these same questions, quite possibly because they've noticed some of the same things I've seen.

So, I'd like for OP, if he's willing, to address the following specific questions about the proposed project:

What financial interest do you , and the members of your team, have in bitcoinvegas.com ? I think we're at the point where more disclosure is necessary.

How many bitcoins do you and the members of your dev team, currently own? Again, I think disclosure is appropriate here.

Please explain ( in layman's terms ) how much of your source code is based on the old game of irc poker. How is it similar? And, more importantly, apart from the GUI interface, how is it different?

Here's why I think these questions need to be answered very soon.

I think you are planning on opening a commercial site, using open source software, and you are asking 2p2 to help you with the development and testing. That's not a bad thing, but that's not exactly how it's being presented to the forum, is it?

I also suspect that you and/or members of your team already own more than a few BTCs. Those real-money value of those BTCs will skyrocket if your poker site is a success. Again, that's not a bad thing, but that's not exactly the story that's being portrayed ITT.

Finally, I went to gitHub, where the source code for your project is hosted. I spent a few minutes, and it just led me to questions about your "platform" and whether or not it's very different than the old irc poker scripts.

Unlike the ownership and the BTC questions, that would be a very bad thing. You're out here making it sound like you're developing a poker platform that could rival Stars or Tilt, but it would be more like polishing up VisiCalc and saying you've got a hot new spreadsheet product.

That's my reasoning for asking you to answer these questions.

This is a concern and it is very difficult to purchase bitcoins using credit cards at the moment. The one site I know of has a manual method of calling you and the card company to confirm your identify. Another site that used to do it got caught out with people using stolen credit cards to buy bitcoins and launder them (see http://buybitcoins.com for the story where they list the stolen credit cards and the fact they are not in operation any longer).

CC companies already lean heavily on e-wallets about gambling and many of the 'alternate' entry points to bitcoin (Buy liberty reserve dollars, use those to buy bitcoins, etc) also have gambling related restrictions.

The benefit with bitcoins being distributed is anyone can become an exchange and there are a lot of people doing personal exchanges for bitcoins using paypal, cash and other means. This works very much like the 2+2 trading thread.

Once you have bitcoins it's very easy to send and receive them without needing a e-wallet or similar. But I don't think bitcoins helps a lot for the average person to be able to use CC's to buy them since CC providers will actively shut them down.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the rake free poker room stuff, I do use bitcoin.

PM me if you're genuinely interested and I'll point you to some sites (that I'm not affiliated with) where you can buy/trade.

If you are looking for maximum lulz for your $100, I suggest https://www.bitcoin4cash.com

Just put your $100 into a greeting card, drop it in the mail, and in a few days you will have Bitcoins in your account. Easy as pie is how it works.

If the software is open source there is nothing to prevent sites from using it and charging rake if they wish right?

I think this is a very good idea. With p2p networking functionality the likely result is confederations of sites, where the player can choose between no frills no rake site a and glitzy branded promo site b, but sharing the same tables. That is kinda the case now with paynorake.com, but as with a few previous attempts the problem is it is really crappy software which in turn means very little network traffic. And most networks don't even get that far, they cap rake so their other skins don't complain. No central network solves both problems, freedom from network restrictions on policy, with sites free to choose whether to link with each other, and software which improves at exponentially greater speed.

The trust issue seems to be the same one people had with wikipedia at the outset. It's true there are more people who can **** with the code, but there are also a lot more people watching what they're doing. There will be operators who earn trust and those who don't, trust will be earned over time like anything else, they used to say same thing about ATMs.

bump back to page one, I'd really like for OP to address the questions I asked a few posts up.

OK. But next time you should consider trying to contact us as we're working on this now and not checking this thread often (too many repeated questions which we answer in our webpage here).

Sure. But as I said above, we want to fade out now for a while until our next expansion when we require more testers/community support again. (still accepting more testers- we need you!)

Financial interest? Not sure what you mean? We own the site and are writing the code. I'm not involved with the financial/legal side- other people in our team are. My goal is mostly technology.

It's hard to see with these kinds of projects, where they will end up financially. Facebook was run at a loss for a long time until they realised how to monetise it. However (this is me personally, not my team) I am strongly against any kind of "selling out" of ideals, and favour the model that a company like Canonical has with Ubuntu. Canonical uses the majority of it's funds to further better Ubuntu in a self-perpetuating self-supporting cycle (rake in funds, put some in trust for rainy-days, put rest back into project to grow).

2200 BTC or ~$600
I don't know how much my team members have (nor should I! )

Not based off them at all. I thoroughly checked out all the current free-Poker projects and they failed to live up to my standards. However we are cannibalising certain modules from pokersource to save time. Mostly poker-eval.

My big issue with poker-engine (from the pokersource project) is that the code is poorly written. There's many new Python features that can simplify the code making it easier for others not involved with the project to review the code without making it hard because it's obfuscated.

Secondly is that we wish for people to be able to make their own clients easily. poker-engine uses a custom protocol which is undocumented. We feel that it's better to use existing standards on the internet because:
- Existing technologies that have been around for years, have been stress tested independently by many people.
- Making them reliable.
- Making them secure.
- Making them easy to integrate with other technologies.
- Making them easy to understand.
- Have lots of documentation on the net.

Currently we are sending JSON objects through server robots on an SSL-encrypted IRC network. The client is a fancy IRC-client.

IRC has enormous benefits:
- Very secure.
- Fast.
- Load balances many users well.
- Federated. Means many servers can link up together to provide one poker network.

What is this about?

Our code has no relation to any other code and is written from scratch. Show me lines of code we've taken from IRC-poker or other projects you claim we're passing off as our own.

Writing code is not just how many lines of code you have written. Not more than how much a good novel is how many pages it has. Writing a good project means setting up a good base. We've done TONS of research. What is unseen, is not non-existant.

For those doubting my genuineness, here's the thread where it started:
http://www.liquidpoker.net/poker-for...e_Rake_:(.html
As you can see it's actually jchysk who proposed the idea. I signed up, offered some suggestions. People then got together and there was lots of talking:
http://www.liquidpoker.net/poker-for...m_session.html
I started hacking and posted a few screenshots (in the rake thread above) when jchysk joined up with me. There's also been help/contact with various people since then who contribute in various ways.

And for the last 2½ months that's what we've been doing. You can see a list of commits:
https://github.com/genjix/kartludox/.../master?page=5

I see myself as an artist. Debasing my work as worthless is a personal insult. Coding is a creative skill. Our team has put a lot of work into building a solid base for this. You could offer constructive directed criticism rather than a) person attacks on our character b) hand-wavy dismissiveness to the quality of our work.