our token sale starts April 25, and we want to grow our community of alpha testers to build out our decentralized poker platform. We are giving away (5) $13,000 WSOP Main Event packages in a random drawing for token buyers. More information on the token sale at https://virtue.poker/, and more info on the WSOP packages https://medium.com/@VirtuePoker/buy-...p-141141f01a97

at the launch of token sale in discussions you mentioned and also in intro videos that the platform is already built and is functioning 6 months before the token launch sale.

Why is the usage restricted to those that have contributed VPP and not for general public, do you fear that the public may come in and steal a share of the VPP, convert to ETH and that value lost?

Why is it looking like a private fish party, when software systems were ready 6 months back I was expecting it to open doors for public and have some good freerolls, then came to know its all delayed till November.

But if ETH crashes like BTC is crashing, BTC could go well down below 1000dollars, and ETH will be toast, ....

what is backup plan for the storm?

bump to see if this site is functioning

1 year with no input from the Virtue Poker Rep. I'm glad I avoided this turkey.

Anyone else received their email to join beta testing?

I did, and was wondering if players from the US are eligible for beta testing?

Yup

Been beta testing away. Apparently, they also have a beta test contest with a seat for the Main Event up for grabs based on play/leaderboards. The game's hella clunky atm but, as per their marketing guy, it's just a placeholder to test out the blockchain and shuffling components.

Question for those that understand blockchain tech - isn't Rootstock in a more advanced state right now with far better scaling prospects that Ethereum and wouldn't it be better for Virtue to migrate from Ethereum blockchain to BTC? Especially since it's still a big if that Ethereum will ever be able to scale?

Looking for a purely technical answer and not ideological BTC v ETH debate..

Rootstock is definitely not in a more advanced state right now.

In terms of scaling it's a big if if any blockchain will be able to scale. I'd say Ethereum is further along the scaling path than btc is. BTC is a rock. It doesn't even try to scale.

Ok, thanks.

From what I understand about Rootstock is that since it's a side chain of BTC its' scaling solution does not depend on scaling capacity of BTC itself. That's why I thought it potentially might be a better option.

Just got an email to test the beta and they have prizes paid out in Ethereum for raked hands and some other stuff, check it out : https://medium.com/@VirtuePoker/virt...s-eee0c2896f7b

Why has no one from the team, promoted it on this site?

I going to open an account and try it out. Online poker is joke on across all sites, I truly hope crypto poker becomes a real thing and hopefully will reunite the US and rest of the world player base, so we all go back and enjoy 10k player sin the sunday million!!

Team Virtue, I just tried to open an account but you are asking for address and name.

Is this a decentralised poker site or not?

Lol

The rep hasn't signed in here since April 2018.

No, absolutely not. There is no such thing and their solution relied on a something which is quite refuted and the team "concensys" is afiak not extremely reputable in the space. I haven't looked into this project for awhile but unless things have changed I have been taking caution with it.

I'll take a look and see if things have improved.

Hey guys -- sorry I've been MIA. We've been heads down building out our platform and focusing on our Malta Gaming license application.

In our original architecture, a transaction was sent to the blockchain when they: deposit, join a game, at the end of each hand (reporting the result), and when a payout occurs.

This was too costly for players to have that volume of transactions all done on the Ethereum blockchain as the gas cost would be too great.

So we employed a hybrid solution. We have two Ethereum main net contracts for "deposit" and "withdrawal" -- one for VPP (our token) and one for ETH. I put deposit/withdrawal in quotations because those contracts are just relayers that send your VPP/ETH into/out of a sidechain. When you send your deposit - you are simply moving funds into our sidechain. When you withdrawal, you are removing the funds from the sidechain.

The sidechain is then used for players to join games, report hand results, and table payouts -- all without any fees to the players (no gas costs).

This hybrid system still allows players to always be in control of their funds, and allows players to view transparently on the blockchain/sidechain how their funds are moved throughout our system.

I'm not sure if I've posted this here before. But I'll describe how we work. Also FYI -- I'm the CEO and founder, so if you have any follow up questions please feel free to ask.

When I first sought out to build a fully decentralized p2p poker platform, I did about 2 years of research in the online poker industry, read all the 10k and annual financial statements of current market incumbents, read academic papers, and scoured poker forums (including this one) for months seeing the issues players had with online poker. Actually, the thread "bitcoin for online poker" was part of the reason why I thought this could work: it seemed using cryptocurrency as a deposit/withdrawal mechanism at the very least was a desirable feature for online poker players, and I was impressed of the level of understanding online poker players already had with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. This was back in 2015.

Originally -- I wanted to build a platform that was autonomous -- that had no central authority overseeing table creation, of who could/could not join. And I spoke to more law firms than I could count on the topic.

It became clear to me there were two problems with fully decentralized poker, one for the operators, one for the players: (1) Operators: the builders of the software would always be held liable if it was every abused for laundering money -- think napster for copyright infringement (2) Players: players would never play on a site unless it had an adequate mechanism to combat player cheating: multi-accounting, bots, bumhunting, collusion, account sharing etc.

The first issue could be resolved if we released the software anonymously, but we were interested in starting a company, not releasing potentially illegal software. Trust me, it was not an easy decision to move away from fully decentralized poker.

The second issue, led us to decide to centralize a few things while decentralizing others. We centralize player registration data, and player hand history data. We do this so we can provide multi-account prevention/detection, and so we can detect when players collude and run bots. This isn't to say we prevent all these things -- no poker site possibly can. The best we can do with bots/collusion is detect patterns based on running algorithms across hand history data and punish players who cheated, and repay players who are cheated.

We decentralize two things: how the deck of cards are shuffled (the "RNG") and leverage a transparent and trust-less payment network (the Ethereum blockchain and our sidechain).

All players shuffle the deck for each hand played on the platform, as opposed to having a single non-transparent server be used to shuffle the deck. Its a fully p2p shuffling mechanism called "Mental Poker." I believe we are the first and only site that uses such a system. This is to address "The great online poker is rigged debate."

The second solution addresses the concern of how your money is secured when you play online. Instead of having the "central banks" of online poker, whereby players must trust a single entity for securely storing all your funds, we employe a solution whereby you are always in control of your funds, and you can always see how your funds move into, around, and out of our platform.

Do I think these two value propositions fully solve online poker's issues? Of course not, but they are two things I know no one else is doing in the industry, and there have been very few new market entrants into online poker since its inception, with the exception of Run It Once, which I'm thrilled is doing so well because it shows its possible to start a new poker site successfully.

I'd appreciate if people on this forum keep an open mind, check us out, respond to bugs, provide feedback, and features you'd like to see, as we want to configure the site to be successful: where recreational players can have fun without being bumhunted and cheated, and where professionals/semi-professionals can make some $$.

And now a quick promotional plug....

We are now currently in an Open Beta, our site is free to play currently as we continue to develop and work out bugs and improve performance. You just need to visit our website, virtuepoker.com, download the app, and register an account. You'll receive 50,000 free test VPP tokens (similar to play chips) and we are giving away 250 ETH (around $40k in prizes), 5,000,000 VPP tokens (our token) and will be launching our "Piece of Ivey" campaign where we will buy Ivey into a large televised tournament event, and give away our share to one of our players. You can read more about the initial promo's here: https://medium.com/@VirtuePoker/virt...s-eee0c2896f7b

Thanks for taking time to check us out.

Hey, I'm interested in beta testing the software while grinding my usual stakes, but I was concerned by one of the rules:

Have there been any known instances of the software damaging a user's computer, or is this just in there for the lawyers?

Lawyers...

No -- the app has crashed a few times on players, but never resulted in any damage to a players computer whatsoever.

Ok thanks. excited to check it out

When it says 1,000 hands to enter the weekly drawing, is that cash game hands, or do SnG hands count as well?

All hands count. Thanks for checking us out!

Thanks for the promp response, I’ll download and check it out tonight.

Thanks for building the network! Really hoping blockchain based poker will take off in the near future.

So you took several mil from investors promising decentralized Poker. After 4 years you came up with a shitty 2nd iteration of CoinPoker. Is this serious?