poker rooms caught cheaters w/o the help of users, but these cases never got public. so claiming the users did most of the good work, is a bit of a stretch, if there are no numbers available.

that funds are not held by the poker room is quite intriguing, but is also a huge benefit for cheaters since they can risk playing higher stakes. i'm also not sure about, how they verify their customers. will they have the same standards as uk licences rooms or will this be a multi account fest? another concern seems to be the rake.

also keep dreaming about a big room covering all (black) markets. China already tackles crypto currencies and the last years have shown, that bitcoin and co might be untraceable, but at some point you have (want) to convert to 'real money'. so i doubt it will be a huge success within the USA (if it would get big, the DoJ would do something).

the biggest problem however is the simple fact, that a good poker room needs tons of depositing-happy recreational players. ppl telling us for years, that cryptocurrencies are the future and there will be a boom, but so far most average joes don't use them.

tl;dr: positive development, but waaaaay to go

I don´t know if this could work, some things in their whitepaper are just impossible to realize I think. But maybe I am wrong...the whole blockchain thing will be the future anyways and it is going to be awesome. There are a few startups coming up with this idea recently.

I read the white paper and would like to say these guys are super knowledgeable of the online poker situation like most of the veterans here.

There is mention of unfair rake structures on pokerstars and other talks about rake disparities but no real mention of a virtue rake chart.

The whole point of crypto poker is to have as close to zero rake as possible and decentralized admin with what could 'possibly' be only 1-1 games to prevent collusion.

Huge problem: Ethereum is NOT an accepted currency on the dark net. Also, there was a trap set on h/ansa two months ago. People are scared of cryptos.

Watching football with my nonpoker friends today and as someone who plays poker for bitcoins nearly every day I asked them, "What is your problem with bitcoin?"

"It's shady and only used for things like gambling and drugs... but no offense lol"

Yup.

Now, how do I get them to buy ethereum which is even shadier because I know even less about it than BTC.

I have so much trouble getting action with BTC poker but at least most of my opponents are drug users who just want to punt $$.

From a "hacking" perspective the idea needs a ton of work.

The rep has one post.

I kinda disagree. The online poker community makes deposits with bitcoin all the time already. Sure the average joe doesn't know alot about cryptocurrency but that will change as time goes on.

Honestly if they deliever a good system than that will be enough to sell people and get them interested imo.

Reposting this here:

Hi All,

I've put together some responses to your comments and questions. Thank you to everyone who has taken time to review our white paper and provide feedback.

1 - First with regards to Mental Poker:

All players have an RNG in their machine that is used, and all players are involved in card shuffling using the protocol. The issue with Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet was that their software was designed such that their were administrative accounts that could see all private cards for all players. This was a flaw in their software that was exploited by a company insider. This is impossible on Virtue Poker because there is no all-seeing server, and all users private cards are private to players using encryption (see Mental Poker in our white paper: https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uplo...-DRAFT-0.1.pdf).

Virtue Poker however will utilize our Justice System to store hand histories for player accounts on our platform so that we can provide anti-cheating provisions such as collusion detection, bot detection, multi-account prevention, and account sharing. We will own the hand-history data for compliance reasons and so we can provide these player protections.

2 - You state that there is age and location verification parameters built into the game but if it's fully anonymous how can that be done?

Our system is not going to be fully anonymous. We use the self-sovereign identity application called uPort to do identity validation/registration. Please see the identity management part of our white paper.

[b] 3 - I'm still not sure how you would make money on this endeavor. I realize you say that's not yet decided but is the expectation that after each game the winner would contribute some of their winnings to a company wallet as a form of rake? Rakeback Mechanism - Based upon ongoing user testing, Virtue Poker will implement a tokenized rakeback mechanism using VPP. Will these actually have value? How will staff be paid? [b]

We will be charging rake through the smart contracts on the system (fees will go to Justices). We are a company, based in Gibraltar, and are doing our token launch to raise money for our application, we will be paying our employees from that raise. Yes our tokens will have value based upon the market price determined at the end of our sale.

4- How exactly is this different from the myriad of other BTC poker sites that seem to be offering online poker with bitcoins?

BTC poker sites are centralized, they have servers that host their RNG that is used for card shuffling, and players have to deposit BTC onto a centralized site that owns their money, and players still have to request to withdrawal their money.

Virtue Poker is fully decentralized, and uses a P2P game engine using a Mental Poker protocol that involves all players in card shuffling. We also don't store your money. Players fund digital wallets that they control, and join games by sending ETH to a smart contract on Ethereum which escrows games buy-ins and autonomously distributes payouts based on game outcomes. The money is never stored or owned by us, funds are stored on the blockchain, so we remove the risk/trust players must take when depositing onto any other poker site.

5- I'm still unsure about Virtual Player Points and Virtual Dollars. If these aren't really Ethereum then where is the value in them? I also read this on 2plus2forum. Please explain to me where the poster is wrong:

There isn't such thing as Virtue Dollars. Virtue Player Points can be used as chips on the platform. Players can wager using VPP. Also VPP can be staked by users who can become Justices. See more information about the Justice System in the link below. These tokens aren't worthless, their worth is determined by the market.

6 - well they will write a long and confusing paper about why their technology is the best possible way to play poker online. i couldn't tell you why it would be better or worse than using BTC to play on WPN. i highly doubt it will be better, but that's not my problem. the token sale is my problem.

Apologies if our white paper came off as confusing, we tried to be very thorough. Please check out Mental Poker and how we use Ethereum smart contracts. We put in visuals to help illustrate our solution.

Also, FYI -- WPN partners with DCExchange who handles their deposits/withdrawals using bitcoin. Just like any other poker site, your money is still under control of the operator, it is not fundamentally different than depositing with FIAT, besides the fact that you are using cryptocurrency are charged a 5% conversion fee.

Virtue Poker is fundamentally different. We use smart contracts on Ethereum to escrow buy-ins to games on our platform. A smart contract allows developers to insert computer code into transactions on a blockchain. On BTC, you can move BTC from Address A to Address B. It is great as a store of value, but you can't include any other parameters in that transaction in moving money. Ethereum takes this concept of a decentralized ledger one step further using smart contracts. Think of a smart contract as a "cryptographic box that only unlocks when certain conditions are meant." So instead of moving from A to B, you can say, I want to move money from A to B if and only if condition X is met. For Virtue Poker, a smart contract represents a poker table, essentially it functions as a short term escrow account. All players send their table buy-in to this contract on a blockchain. These funds aren't owned by us, or any individual, they are stored on the blockchain. This contract includes the players stakes, and includes game parameters (buy-in amount, game type, # of players, payout %'s, min bet size, etc). When a game is over (SNG) or when a player leaves a table (Cash), the contract automatically pays out the player back to their digital wallet (see blockchain.info, or myetherwallet for an example of a wallet). Therefore there isn't a traditional deposit/withdraw process on Virtue Poker. You are always in control of your money, and payouts from smart contracts happen in less than 30 seconds. We can't run off with your money, misappropriate it, or misuse it in anyway.

7- i skimmed the white paper and read the part about game security which is obviously one of the biggest issues. instead of hiring a staff to monitor game security, they're going to farm it out to random people online and reward them with VD.

This is untrue. We've hired a game security expert already who currently works with our team, see Peter Marr: http://igamingops.com/experience/ He's previously worked in game security for major operators such as Full Tilt. He has an account on 2+2, i'll let him respond to this thread and reply to your questions about our game security.

Also, hand histories will be stored by Virtue Poker. We will use our team of game security experts to review that data to detect patterns of cheating. The Justices are a means to log game-level data for all players and all hands played on the platform. We also recently hired a former PokerStars dev to our team who is helping us use machine learning to set up these systems to detect cheating.

8 - what they really need these people for is additional nodes on their network (like miners for bitcoin), pretending they will help catch colluders is a clever way to disguise it.

See the how the Justice System will work here: https://medium.com/@VirtuePoker/info...r-3cac71e8bbcb

We will be storing the hand-histories and having our team of game security experts (including Peter Marr) review this data to detect patterns of cheating (including collusion). At a high level this is done by using uPort to verify each individual players identity, then using the Justices to store all of the hand-histories for all players on the platform. Check out https://www.uport.me/

9 - the idea of a poker room using a blockchain and smart contracts is a great idea. i don't want to crap on that idea. but the fact that they're using a token sale to fund their business is where it becomes a quasi-scam.

Over $1.8 billion dollars have been raised this year via token launches on Ethereum. Ethereum itself was a token launch. It is a means to fund decentralized applications built on Ethereum.

10 - they're going to create VD, virtue dollars, but they won't sell all of them. for example, let's say they create 1 million virtue dollars. they might sell 300k VD in their token sale and then keep 700k in a piggy bank. once a bunch of people pump real currency into VD, the 700k VD they created out of thin air now gains actual value.

Our token, Virtue Player Points will be sold during our token launch. The unsold tokens from the sale will be used to grow the platform, and acquire players via guaranteed tournaments and freerolls where we will be giving away tokens to our early users. It is not going into our pockets, we are going to use our tokens to reward our players and retain our players.

11 - a token sale is a form of fundraising but they sell you a lie. they pretend they are selling you an item that has value but it's an item that might have value, 10 years down the line, if the best case scenario plays itself out. in the mean time, they will use your real currency to fund their business, and you may or may not hear from them any time in the next 3 years.

$1.8 billion dollars (more money than has been raised via Venture Capital), has been raised this year using token launches. The SEC has condoned the activity, and governments around the world have approved token launches. Major venture capital firms such as Union Square Ventures have participated and supported token launches on Ethereum. Andreessen Horowitz helped fund Polychain capital, and fund created specifically to invest in token launches.

It is a mechanism of fundraising that was created by Ethereum, and has helped fund 100s of projects with new ideas all looking to build decentralized applications and new technologies using blockchain technology.


12 - they do it this way because nobody will give them money via the traditional methods because they don't have anything close to a functioning product, proven idea, or apparently, a full staff.


This is entirely untrue. We have had million dollars worth of private funding offered to us over the last few months. We have been funded by a company called ConsenSys for over two years. ConsenSys was founded by Joe Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum, and ConsenSys is over 350 people. Virtue Poker is one of many projects that has been funded by ConsenSys over the past 2 years. Over $2 million so far has been invested in our project and our team.

We chose to do a token launch to raise money for Virtue Poker because we believe it gives us the best chance to build a successful business.

13 - Gas cost discussion

As of now we currently use 1 smart contract per table. And we send transactions to Ethereum when a player joins a table, at the end of each hand, and when a player leaves a table. We are working on optimizing the app to only require transactions when you join or leave a table to reduce gas costs.

14 - Other blockchain poker sites

I know there have been a few other concepts pop up, but if you give their white paper a read it becomes apparent that they haven't built any code or thought through any of the difficult challenges in building a decentralized poker application. They misuse Mental Poker, and toss around buzz words such a provably fair gaming.

We have been building Virtue Poker for 2 years, and our app is 13,000 lines of code. Our MVP is done, we have been playing games internally for the last 6 months.

Our parent company, ConsenSys, is the leading blockchain development company in the space. We are 350+ people in 20 countries with offices in NYC, London, SF, Berlin, Toronto, and Dubai.

-----------------------------

Peter and I will continue to respond to your questions. Thank you all for taking an interest in our project, and we appreciate your feedback.

The topic of rake is an important one, and to properly answer your question, we are not yet sure. We expect to launch sometime in the second half of 2018, which gives us at least 9 months to decide on a structure. We feel it would be unwise to have anything concrete this far out from launch. During this time we will be running alpha and beta sessions, testing out different formats of rake and as well as rakeback. We will be consulting with numerous iPoker industry professionals about this subject, along with discussing with our lineup of pros - who so far include Brian Rast and Dan Colman. We will also be taking feedback from a variety of poker outlets, such as 2+2, on the matter.

Should anyone wish to contact us with feedback on Rake, please email us on feedback@virtue.poker using the word “Rake” in the subject.

Please do not take this as us trying to skip over the topic. We know how important it is to get it correct and want to intelligently use the time available to us.

If you really want exposure for launch week be the first site online to have NEGATIVE rake. Probably works out cheaper than online advertising. Tonybet ran rake-free cash games for a while at launch so there is a precedent for it.

We will be able to save money both through eliminate payment processing costs, as well as server costs. Also, one of the benefits of a P2P system is that the upkeep is minimal compared to centralized systems. A good analogy is think Bit Torrent compared with Spotify.

As for marketing, we intend to use the tokens reserved for the company to help grow the platform. This will essentially be us giving them away to our initial users via prize money (large guaranteed tournaments, freerolls, etc).

Exactly how much cheaper will this actually be? I mean if you are still going to pay for marketing, security, customer support, developers etc - it seems to me that the only advantage in terms of cost is that you don't have to pay the payment processors (like VISA) a small fee for all deposits made to your site. In reality this cost is probably less than 10% of all the costs associated with running a buisness. Am I missing something?

Also, there's question about legality. All companies these days have very strict regulations to prevent money laundering. How will you be able to enforce such strict regulations on money handling in a P2P network? Another regulation is that you have to be able to detect "problem gamblers" and make the necessary efforts to help them. And how are you planning on getting a gaming license? And those are just on top of my head, I'm sure there are a million other regulations that any company in this industry have to follow...

We eliminate server costs as well. In addition, yes we've already begun speaking to regulators in several jurisdictions and are aware of KYC/AML requirements. Thats part of the compliance necessary to obtain a gaming license. GIB recently came out with their distributed ledger framework, and will be putting that into law shortly. Also Malta is moving quickly to adopt legislation as well, see: https://www.coindesk.com/malta-unvei...tegy-advances/

We will use uPort (another app on Ethereum) to do our identity validation, and will be storing hand histories using our Justice System.

Also, we will be leveraging tokens for marketing costs, and can bring this platform to market with a relatively lean team.

Then all I can do is wish you good luck.

If you guys can address/prove you can solve the 3 biggest issues I feel hurt / limit the future of online poker you'll have me as a participant in your ICO (pump & dump) form of funding.

1. Segragated Markets because of government interventions. (seems you've already solved this issue thanks to the decentralized nature of the project

2. High rake making games long-term unprofitable. (I feel since you're likely to raise so much free money from the ICO..that you could grab a very large customer base if you're willing to offer bare bones low rake)

3. Bot / AI detection. (Demonstrating that a large portion of ICO proceeds will go towards bot prevention/game security will go a long ways in getting serious poker players to participate in your initial funding (saying you've hired some former FTP game security person holds very little weight and would rather hear of a team of machine learning data scientists instead).

Clearly outline your long-term plan for these 3 areas and I'll be in from day 1.

yea but those pesky investors are always asking for things like equity, results, accountability...pretty annoying stuff. easier to just sell a pocket full of bottle caps to a bunch of suckers, just call them tokens.


you don't get to call yourselves "decentralized" if you're going to employ a team of experts to lord over the games. you are just throwing around buzzwords.

presumably, your team of experts will be able to take some sort of action and levy a punishment against cheaters. by definition, that is centralized authority.

there's no other way to run a trading game that's so open and prone to exploitation. there must be an authority. if everyone is in charge, nobody is in charge.

LOL. why on earth does a decentralized poker room need a gaming license from anyone? i thought you weren't running games on servers or holding anyone's money? you aren't a financial institution. why do you want anyone to regulate you? what happened to decentralized? or are you just throwing around buzzwords?

i see no reason why i can't use uPort to create multiple identites for myself. in fact, here's a quote from the uPort whitepaper:



yes, i too am amazed at the amount of dumb money that's flowing in to this stuff. i understand why you want to scoop some of it up.

the SEC also has no problem with me selling augietokens (my pocket full of bottle caps).

the one single thing this idea has going for it is that virtue poker can't misappropriate player funds. i'm fine with assuming the RNG is a wash either way.

in almost every other way, you're just a regular poker room, except with highly questionable game security and KYC protocols.

seriously, i admire the fact that you intend on opening a poker room by asking for my real currency in exchange for your play money. i admire everyone skimming from the top in the crypto game. the entire thing will come crashing down eventually so get it while it's hot. i just have a moral obligation to warn my fellow 2+2ers that you want to fleece them.

honest question: in your estimation, how many years will we have to wait for an exchange who is willing to trade their real currency for my VPP?

ah, ha! now i see how such a bad idea gained so much traction.

virtue poker = ConsenSys

ConsenSys = Joe Lubin

Joe Lubin = Ethereum co-founder

Ethereum co-founders = printed 90 million coins, sold 60 million coins, kept 12 million coins for themselves

Value of 12 million coins today = 3,480,000,000 USD

gotta use that 3.4 billion for something.

When is release date? That's all I wanna know

Hi,

i read in the whitepaper that you guys are sending transaction to chain for each hand? how is the playing out in terms of cost?

Why do you hate crypto so much?

crypto slept with my wife bro what do you expect

glad I stumbled on this thead (but so did augie so we;ll call that a wash jk you make some good points from time to time )

anyway three things

1) consenys is the real deal. just look at their team.

2) you all come off as highly organized, professional, and intelligent. good combo. wish you all the best.

3) regarding your poker project. all things being equal, without question a blockchain centered poker site is just better. a blockchain center lots of things would just be better.

selling poker as a product is different from selling most anything else because of liquidity stuff. If cryoto currencies were ubiquitous like paypal or venmo then your life gets much easier, but they arent anywhere even remotely close yet, and wont be for 5 years ? 10 years?

So your addressable market shrinks

1) Everyone

2) Everyone that wants to play poker online

3) Everyone that wants to play poker and in 2018/2019 wants to take the leap into crypto

4) Everyone that wants to play poker and in 2018/2019 wants to take the leap into crypto, and doesnt have a current alternative to play poker that they like.

Your addressable market gets pretty damn small. small segmented markets and poker eco systems are not a good mix.

Do you agree with above?

How will you address?"

How low would be Virtue Poker rake compared to biggest sites right now?

Read the White Paper; it talks (with stats) about the relative higher rake at lower games, meaning we can expect the micro and low limit rake caps to decrease. And indirectly and because of bitcoins related currency (or gas), the rake overall. It is peer to peer, but I don't know anything about that but that the shuffling is done by our own machines.

Couldn't agree more

they'll let you know just as soon as they've sold a few million of their new currency

I have a problem with this project. Making transactions using smart contracts is not fast. How are you going to solve the speed problem?

If you make a transaction using smart contracts every hand I don't see how this is going to work.

As someone who is new to bitcoins and crypto currency I can't help but feel worried about the money I put into Ethereum/ decentralized poker. I have little clue how this all works but I so have some questions:

1. What happens if I buy Ethereums to play on your site and the stock goes up or down? Or it goes bust? Do I lose my poker money? This just looks like a recipe for disaster, unless I am missing something here.

2. Can we play with a hud? Can we run Pokertracker?

3. Will your software GUI be comparable with Pokerstars? Will the user have a great visual experience, will the app be fluid, fast etc?

4. Will you be offering 6 max games? Pot limit Omaha? All the games we get from a centralized poker room?

5. Are you going to offer a better product than we already have? Great if we get to play poker for a lot cheaper but will the product be as good? No point trying to compete with Apple when all you have is some cheapo 5inch Chinese phone to work with.