I wrote about this earlier in the thread and the answer is there is no way to protect against compromised peer implementations from corrupting game play.

Then its something more like a home game where there is no rake but you need to trust the dealer. Or like in Cincinnati Kid where everyone wants Shooter and Ladyfingers to deal because they are trusted.

It would be better if the dealer is another node on the P2P network not actually playing at the table concerned - maybe the client on each machine can "vote" for trusted dealers based on own past results from the other nodes online (i.e. you don't lose twice with the same dealer). You could also do something like have everyone send their part of the random number seed to the dealer and at the end of the hand they send what it was to the other players, so everyone can verify whether or not the deal was fair and nobody got overset unfairly. I don't see a way to avoid someone having the unencrypted cards on their machine - at least not without changing the game so it would have an infinite deck.

This problem with dealers still has to be set against the 5% loss to the rake at the most popular stakes and sites for client-server model poker every single hand.

I like this idea. Hope it comes to fruition.

No, what you said, simply, was "As long as he has either picked out his orange jump for prison or decided it's ok to give up his US citizenship, move and never return."

You want to change or clarify what you meant ?

Fine, you've seemingly learned that it is the market served that is legally significant, not an operator's citizenship or residence or location.

It would have been no "more legal" for a French Canadian, operating from Montreal, to do what Micon did than it was for Micon to do so or what you seemingly assume Galfond will do.. (Less likely Nevada would have moved at the State level, but no more legal under applicable laws.)

Watch this

Watched it. He presents it as being about preventing 3 problems - central superuser, banking law violations and spyware.

The central superuser example he cites is 10 years old - but I'm now convinced this software will have a fair and secure deal (basically everyone shuffles and encrpyts the pack and they deal out encrpyted cards - people are sent the decryption keys from each player for only their individual cards). It has to be said that player collusion is a bigger issue than superusing today and that seems a bigger concern with this than with centralised poker.

Banking - well that's obviously a problem nut only in the US. In parts of the US where rake-free home games are allowed would this kind of P2P thing be legal?

Spyware - I don't see why spyware couldn't equally screenscrape someone using this.

I have other questions though:

What happens if a player leaves/disconnects taking their part of the decrpytion key for the river card with them?

How does his company make money from this?

But overall I like it. To compete with centralised poekr the rake needs to be much lower though obviously.

I don't think there's anything you can do about spyware - imo it has to be the player's own responsibility to keep his/her computer safe.

I don't know how the software would deal with people leaving/disconnection. I was thinking about ways to reshuffle the deck, but I can't figure out how one would do it without compromising security.

With regards to making money, why can't they just take rake like normal? If they can't, hopefully this is going to be way less expensive to maintain than for instance Pokerstars. Maybe they can just have some ads in the lobby and make enough money this way?

Watched it too. The basic shuffling and dealing method seems sound. The way it's set up (as described starting at 5:08 into the video), the dealer starts with an unencrypted deck, shuffles it, then encrypts it with his key and passes the deck to the next peer, who does the same...and the process continues through to the last player at the table, who after shuffling and encrypting passes the final, multi-way encrypted deck back to the dealer. For each player to see his own hold cards, he must use his own key in addition to keys for those same two cards from all the other players since each had a hand in shuffling the deck. The community cards have to be seen by all players so every player is informed of all the players' encryption keys for those cards.

What's not covered at all is how the showdown process occurs. For a winner to declared, every player still in the hand at showdown would have to be able to share his holdings with the other players so that they could collectively see and agree to who won the hand. This would be accomplished by each player revealing his key to the other players at showdown, the same as how they all reveal their keys for the community cards earlier in the hand. My only question would be how this could be done without the risk of rogue peers colluding to deny the rightful winner the pot, which they could do selectively for a very large pot (and presumably only once since the harmed player would reject continuing the game after that). For example, let's say Player A is the rightful winner of a $5k pot. Player B and C could collude to have their systems reject the outcome, achievable by failing to participate in the blockchain process that would actually transfer the money to Player A at the conclusion of the hand.

Maybe parts of the decrypt keys for the board cards could be sent to various other peers in the network (i.e. at other tables) and after a certain amount of time (e.g. 5 minutes) those peers can be requested for them if the originator has still not come through with them. Maybe it could depend on whether or not the user has previous form for disconnecting.

Or alternatively the pot could "go postal" and be played out more like a wrgpt hand if and when the user returns to the network.

At minimum if the person is intentionally leaving the table (i.e. already folded last hand, now wants to close the software) then the system should send that player's key to decrypt the board cards to someone else before closing down.

Re rake: Well if the idea is that the company gets a cut for organizing these "smart contracts" then I don't see that very much changes legally or businesswise. If it's genuinely peer-to-peer then I don't see how they make money except with ads in client.

Yes, though in a sense it's not that different to a home game where there is nothing to force the other players to let you leave with your winnings.

Oh, OK. So your prediction is that it'll be like every other poker site in the world. Gotcha

No, they don't have the power to shut it off. But they do have the power to make its use illegal and scare the **** out of the populace. Thus relegating it to the fringes. They can also tax the hell out of it. Both of which are powerful (de)motivators.

--
Kahn

Bitcoin is useless for the average American unless they are speculating on the price or doing something illegal with it. Also, it's already taxed.

The system kind of implies the potential for anyone who wants to to offer guaranteed tournaments and rake them. I'd like that more without the government exposure, but I still like it a lot.

2017!! Lets make it happen. Make America OK again. Make Poker GReat again.

I used to like the idea of smart contract poker, but ever since the DAO thing, I don't think smart contracts are very smart anymore.


Edit: I do think decentralized poker is the future

Wasn't long ago only geeks bought stuff online. Now all the recs are doing it.

When is it coming to a town near the US?

Bumping with Virtue Poker's new white paper, which goes into some of the technical details behind their software.

Looks like this is really happening?

Low rake

Can anyone copy the template once its out there? That leaves it open to all manner of shysters.

Will also be a money laundering hotbed for dark web vendors, GCHQ will be all over it like a cheap suit.

A bit like communism, sounds good in theory..

The whitepaper is very exciting.

Looks like we're at least a year out from launch.

Popcorn.gif

1) Fairly long, and fairly expensively*. From a few seconds to minutes.

2) It would be a token base system with event calls logged in a contract. Things can be done asynchronously. There is some difficulty in encrypting and making this unexploitable. There are a few strategies involved with this. A sidechain would introduce trust, though making it public would be a step up from what we have now.

There are some examples of slot machines doing this. We are talking five years of development minimum for anything reliable. This is all new, and very hard. Ethereum has many EIP (Ethereum Improvement Projects) that will deprecate many things and add new functionality to make all of this easier. It's coming, but you have to wait.

To be honest, there's not a lot wrong with centralized systems that take crypto (besides risk of them running off with it). The price for tournaments of 10% is pretty high. I wouldn't expect it to be too much cheaper with Ethereum. There is a cost to building reliable infrastructure. I think the game of poker has gone the way of MTTs, so this will be possible. I think pokerstars will do just fine for the next ten years, but its day of reckoning will come.

*Edit: It's much more expensive to transact with a contract than to just send money. This is because you have to pay for data to replicated on every computer in the world running a node and keeping an up to date blockchain. In ethereum a call to a contract can cost many dollars depending on what you are asking the contract to do. If you are just sending value (Ether), then the gas cost is the minimum. If you offer a low gas price, a miner might process for even free, but usually it's a few cents these days, and .10-.25 if you want it confirmed very fast.

The reason an event log is a good idea is because an event log is a feature built into the Ethereum Virtual Machine to log things with a far lower amount of gas. It also costs nothing to just ask a contract what the state of a variable is because it's already written to the blockchain. There are more features coming in regards to logs and the way the EVM works. If anyone feel passionate about Ethereum, I urge you to participate in the discussions on github. You can shape the future with your opinion and use case. Programmers are a funny bunch, we don't often think outside our box, but are open to new ideas that are better.

Just used it to send money to family abroad, and buy plane tickets to go see them when my debit card network was down at 2am.

If you're American, then you know how crappy and expensive PayPal and the ACH system is. I can send money to people instantly for nearly free with Dash coin and Ethereum. Of course this is just crypto friends, but the list grows every day.

I receive payments from clients abroad in Ether now, and soon I will be able to license/contract with other clients. It's very promising. It's not just for vice, but being able to play some real money poker is nice too, as is being able to make proposition wagers on random things trustlessly.

Crypto is the internet in 1981. It exists. It's complicated. Not many people use it.

awesome

Exciting possibilities, I bet Pokerstars are following this with interest. Maybe one day in the future everyone in the world can play the same internet poker tournaments. Like they could 10 years ago. That's progress!