Quote:
Originally Posted by White_Gatsby
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?
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.
Last edited by Virtue Poker; 12-04-2019 at 12:49 PM.
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