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.

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?

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: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-marr-b21b9539/?ppe=1 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.

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.

So how much is the rake going to be then?

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.

This is where future discussion and questions specific to Virtue Poker should go.

Thanks!

Props to VP rep for a detailed response. Will be watching for the product in 2018 and decide upon the release if I would participate.

yeah props, rooting for it to come through

Hey Marc, when you gonna pay back what you owe? Scumbag.

P2p poker shouldn't be thought of as a specific site or project but rather as a protocol. It allows for serverless gameplay and so we should expect all future sites including today's legacy sites to adopt the protocol. It reduces the cost to provide secure gaming and therefore will be mutually beneficial to the players and the providers.

Those that ask about policing of games and other security concerns should understand that all of the existing security solutions would still be used. There will be additional security created as well such as the separation of the gameplay matchers and the custodians of the players bankrolls (players will hold their own money).

It will create an environment comparable to the effects of free banking as well, where the most trusted sites will evolve to be the most transparent. This will give players access to intricate data that historically they haven't had access to.

This could allow for a rake structure that fluctuates with the actual profitability of the games.enticing sites to create a fairer rake schedule than the current legacy models.

I just wanted to add this image to perhaps dispel some myths and perhaps inspire some dialogue on the subject:



The basic premise is that the industry COULD be arranged such that the core protocols needed to provide games like poker (which are slightly different than other casino games from a technology solution standpoint) are shared among all the competing operators.

This would increase the security and transparency of the shuffling/dealing and game play functions and more importantly it would decrease the cost of provision dramatically.

All of the traditional security infrastructure for policing the games would remain completely intact.

This is effectively the model that bitcoin presents where a small team of open source decentralized contributors around the world work on the core protocols and different business or non-profit solutions arise around the core layer.

It might be difficult to imagine how we get from today's environment to one like this, but it should be easier to understand the benefits in regard to the security and the efficiency cost wise.

great diagram and explanation.

Though this model is arguably superior on every level from a technology standpoint, I feel like that any serious discussion about the potentiality of a decentralized model, technology discussion takes a back seat to #1 barrier to entry for this type product.... market acceptance.

I just gotta believe that the market for players willing to play on a site like this is a sliver of the current market. there are just too many other options available.

I can imagine trying to explain this to one of my rec friends..their head would explode as I talk and they log into stars or party or 888 or bovada or ACR or WSOP etc...

From a tech architecture discssion standpoint, this is very interesting.

From the standpoint of an operating poker offering with any kind of meaningful liquidity, just dont see it happening any time soon (by soon I mean almost never )

The diagram was meant to dispel your misconception. Allow me, please...

This is a backend change. The customer doesn't see it, expect for the increase in profitability of their games that is the result of the competitive environment created when anyone can spin up games that they feel others would want to play. Each provider can create their own front end solutions and use the common backend protocol.

So poker stars, full tilt, 888, party etc. would ditch their server based models and migrate to this common protocol. The incentive is that reduction in cost that comes about from having all significant operators sharing the same core.

If a casino could have infinite space for rooms in which people could gamble, would such a casino allow gamblers to occupy such a room and gamble amongst themselves however they wished such that the casino takes a standard cut of each bet?

Or...

Would the casino fill infinite rooms with slot machines, or whatever form of gambling is most profitable to the casino?

I don’t see the incentive for the holders of valuable market share to do anything other than squeeze more money out of the public and make excuses for it, such as Stars Chests.

If Stars does not offer open faced Chinese poker, it is because they want less sophisticated players, not the other way around.

If the legacy sites choose to participate and use the protocol or not, it doesn't effect the ability of anyone else to use it. This could be individual players or emerging business ideas and solutions.

Furthermore the cost reduction is enormous so it would be shooting themselves in the foot giving themselves a crippling disadvantage to not use the technology while a flood of competitors enter the market with a greater scalability, better security, more evolvablity, and a significantly cheaper product for the customer (ie more profitable games)

I get the sense that you are not discussing this from the perspective of an alternate, hypothetical tech architecture but from that of a model that could actually come to fruition in todays marketplace.

From that pretense I still see some insurmountable barriers that would preclude this from happening.

The incentive you mention above would be akin (using an extreme example) to Ford and Chevy getting together to operate a single plant to mfg the F150 and Silverado pick up truck , cuz you know the fixed costs of one plant is less than fixed costs of two.

Yes, the architecture is superior to server based, yes cost savings would be material for all sites that joined, but no I dont think they ever would find a way to cooperate and share / outsource / jointly develop their core technology with any or all of their competitors.

They each have significant cheeseburgers invested in their current server based tech. Unless there was a material and immediate ROI for them to ditch what they have and move to this individually, I just don't see it happening.

You still haven't fully understood, but I appreciate the dialogue.

Rather, it would be like Ford and Chevy using the same contractors that make their buildings and physical infrastructure which makes sense in some aspects but not in others.

Keep in mind that this resides on the internet, and already each of Poker Stars, Party Poker, 888 etc. all do share the internet technology and they all "co-operate" on it.

What we are talking about it simply a protocol upgrade, that allows them to ditch much of their hardware and physical security mechanisms as well as some of their software development efforts and (especially scalability) problems.

It equals immediately more profit for each of them.

I'm confused on how you think you could argue a self interested self serving business model could/would pass up on that technology.

Remember a cost that secures a net profit is not really a cost.

I guess I over emphasized your statement that their financial motivation comes from shared costs savings.

looking at this from the perspective of an indivudual operator, this is arguably a better and less expensive architecture much the same way corporate computing moved away from client/server to web based apps years ago.

So I am back to where I started... player acceptance.

I guess to some degree they might not know or realize.

for discussion purposes, Im gonna assume they will

888: "we are the same as we always were."
Poker Player: " cool"

Party: " we are migrating to this new decentralised model where we
dont control the RNG and stuff.
Poker Player: " huh wtf you talking bout willis"

Party: " no really its better for you"
Poker Player: " huh I dont get it, you mean game isnt running on your
servers? "

Party: " well no its decenctrali zzzz ed. it sort of runs all over the place . this is good for you."
Poker Player: " huh well where the hell does the game run"

Party : " um its kinda of complicated... can I send you a white
paper"
Poker Player: "nah. the 20K gtd is about to kick off on 888 gtg k thx bye"

Yes there are two things players primarily want. A game in which they win more in, and a user experience that is more friendly.

This change does what bitcoin does for our centrally banked fiat money. It puts the issuers of money (or chips in the poker industry example) on a stage of competition.

So we would expect to see mutually beneficial gain between players an operators in regard to profitability.

It also facilitates scalabiility, which I believe to be a hidden reason why some major sites seem very lacking in their ability to evolve their software. SECURE scaling is very difficult and the complexity of it grows in a non linear fashion. Bitcoin faces this problem and it is being worked on by the worlds best engineers in this regard.

But separating the front end development from the back end core would greatly facilitate this process, allowing for an exponentially evolving user experience.

Consider ventures such as phil galfonds rio poker and luckychewys play money site. Phil is blogging about how much he under estimated the work and cost involved in launching a site. This is not a reference weighted to front end development. Making a site look good and the buttons work is easy.

But building the infrastructure for a poker site that is secure from the legality and regulations to the software through the hardware is very expensive and/or difficult.

Having a common backend reduces this difficulty and cost enormously in a scalable fashion allowing emerging ideas to bypass the incredible barrier to entry phil galfond is just finding out and confirming exists.

In luckychewy's case he would be able to offer games with a software that doesn't reside in any jurisdiction based on a token that doesn't either.

Its not perfectly cut and dry legally but it definitely changes the landscape by decentralizing the aspects that are illegal in the eyes of the law and cutting them away from the parts that aren't.

ok lots to unpack in your last few posts as I feel you have merged several topics into original assertion that existing sites should migrate to dectralised model en masse and as a group because it benefits them.


crypto...
Are decetralised / crypto and server based / fiat mutually exclusive? I dont think so. Not sure why you introduced crypto above, its a a separate topic all together

Start up sites vs existing sites...
A start up a site would be in better positioned to introduce decentral model to the market (See: Innovators Delimma). I think they would fail thought due to player acceptance.

legality/regulatory...
this is an entirely different discussion. unless there is no company, entity or person managing/organizing/promoting the decentralised poker site, it really doesn't change legal/regulatory issues. If there is no company, entity or person managing/organizing/promoting then hard to understand how it ever gets off the ground.

I'll go back to my original assertion and what I thought we were discussing.

Decentralised poker model will not find its way into the marketplace because existing sites are not motivated to ditch their current server based infrastructure and player acceptance headwinds would be substantial.

I agree to an extent that the launch of such a common grounds for a shuffling/dealing protocol would have a better chance with a few emerging poker sites than trying to get the legacy dinosaurs to evolve out of compassion for the players.

I think then its not irrelevant to point out that projects like RIO poker would greatly benefit from the ability to define an inverse commons where SOME costs are shared between other promising emerging projects.

A good idea cannot easily launch in today environment, but a common grounds for development and deployment of games would reduce to the cost of entry enormously.

Secondly, and more importantly, you intuitively see a problem that I think can be slightly more formally defined. Players can't really unilaterally deviate from the current equilibrium.

This is easy to understand if we think of the extreme where players are boycotting unfair changes in the face of a de facto monopoly.

If the most intelligent and savy players lead the boycott, then the games get dramatically more soft. This increases the profitability and so rational self interested players will take advantage of the soft games and not participate in the boycott thus defeating any possible momentum.

This would apply to a new poker site even if we knew it would eventually offer superior games with favorable profitability. The transition and migration would be natural as the games filled up, but it would be very difficult, perhaps near impossible, to start the wave in the first place.

Does this seem like I captured the problem?

yes, you did.

I'm still learning about but intrigued by all things blockchain, crypto currency. The surface isnt even scratched yet on the collective understanding of the impact these technologies will have on business, govt and society as a whole over the next 10 years. I continue to think about 1993, the first time I touched what is now the internet . It would have been impossible to forecast at that moment, the impact that simple protocol would have. these emerging technologies are up near that zip code of potential impact imo.

Regarding the discussion about a start up building a new site using decentral model, that would seem to to be the most likely way this solution gets in the market, as we have both stated reasons why this prob wouldnt come from legacy sites.

From a biz development standpoint, maybe an entity could build the infrastructure then offer it to any and all under some sort of skin model (as you mentioned above), but not actually try to operate a site themselves.

Which leads to the final challenge.... opportunity costs.

If one had the financial and technical resources to build a decentral model for online poker, wouldnt there be dozens of more lucrative industries / markets to focus their biz development efforts. you know, no money in online poker, everyone solid.

If what I suggest above is true or at least "directionally" correct, I'm back where I started....

I believe that decentral online poker model has all sorts of barriers that will it make it difficult to ever see the light of day.

Good, because I rendered the problem in such a way that I believe it is solvable.

I think a proper mental poker protocol, that allows for secure multi party computation, will be integral in the new world of tech and finance. It's a well studied subject that that poker serves as a great metaphor (and a good test case). Its the ability for multiple parties to share computational power in such a way that there can be inputs, processing, and outputs, but without any party knowing some or all of the inputs, and yet the results are verifiably correct.

I realize its a fun quote on this forum but there isn't much truth to it, especially in light of this solution/proposal (p2p poker protocol). It seems quite obvious the cost savings would breath great life into the game. I'd be willing to argue it would be exponential and I think I could make a convincing argument based on math and economics.

I don't see these barriers, I'm still defining the problem with you before I explain what I think is a full solution. When you render the problem and solution in the direction I am painting, the core protocol, as a demo or proof of concept, is quite relatively small. Think of bitcoin, all of the experts are adamant that it was done by one person, and that the person wasn't a very good programmer (comparatively).

A core poker protocol I expect to arise much the same way. An unfunded hobby project by someone or some small group that is interested in changing the world.

If we consider the startup costs in today's environment, I would like to say maybe a million, (perhaps you think that is outrageous and might say 100,00?), the savings would be multiplied by any projects that used the protocol. This savings can now go straight into launching the business model which includes marketing and rake back programs.

The easiest part of making a site is the front end, and a setup like this would make it such that the emerging sites need only to really develop a front end, and have an idea. Eventually you would have a development grounds for making front ends, but a reasonable competent group today could make a nice looking front end in a week I would suggest.

It's like taking 80% of the problem phil galfond faces in building and launching a working business model and setting it up as a free-to-use backend protocol which costs him nothing to make or use. I'd actually be willing to wager that the way galfond is approaching that 80% (back end, payment processing, regulations, hardware, security) is in an unsolvable infinitely costly manner and something like this is the only hope for him or any other aspiring emerging sites to get into the market with any hope of competing in the existing environment.

And what do you mean by opportunity cost? What is the greater opportunity missed you are pointing to? All sites, existing or emerging, would stand to increase their profits substantially if they were to move to a decentralized protocol.

Do I not understand "opportunity cost" or perhaps you are using the phrase differently than I understand it?

Legacy sites just wont ditch their server based model for all the reasons we already discussed.

Emerging could but with all the other challenges of launching a site, going decentral would just further slice (and slice deeply) addressable market of potential customers.

#1 issue for emerging site is of course building liquidity and attracting initial players. So prob not the best move unless they want to be some sort of very small niche for the foreseeable future or are more interested in the technical challenge of building something very very cool moreso than generating profit.

What I meant by bringing up opportunity costs, was that a person or entity that had the talent and resources to launch a decentral poker site would have the talent to launch alot of different things in blockchain / crypto world ( or really lots of various industries).

If they chose to launch online poker then they choose to not do alot of other potential things having nothing to do with online poker.

The potential profit from the other ventures they could have pursued but decided to forgo in favor of poker is the opportunity cost.