In the order of closeness:

1. Readiness(and honestly the need) of the player pool for a new model. In this regard we are not only closer, we are already there.

2. New accessible means of marketing and connecting players with the decentralized project, we are also already there.

2. Technology. It is closer than ever and it's exponential nature is working in our favor.

3. Regulation. We are closer in the sense that crypto payments/gaming are closer to being regulated. We are not in terms of the legislation in the gray markets. We might actually be moving further away in that area in a sense that as legislation is created so are licensing standards/costs that might make the entry barrier into those markets too high.

But unregulated approach might prove to be a viable and best option in which case we are of course already there.

Wait for one of the projects in progress to deliver. Maybe CypherPoker gets to that point. Maybe Phil Galfond's project changes course and moves towards decentralized model in order to fulfill it's mission statement. Maybe Virtue poker comes through.

Or get proactive. Start a project the goal of which is to provide most secure and least costly game and preservation of poker as s game of skill. Then start tackling the problems that Gzesh and other experts have presented.

yes, should be put in terms of a value proposition that is clear and many players agree with. Coin and Virtue did alot of the grunt work there, though there are "ads" are misleading. Just need to copy their value props, then provide a solution that actually delivers on them.

Stateful contracts are intriguing. Side effect though beyond speed, is that the blockchain becomes self aware and takes over humanity Pandora's box.

Agree with 1, 2, 2 and 3.

also agree that unregulated is by far (and I mean a wide margin) the optimum branch. Conjecture on my part but I assume Galfond spent alot of cycles going down regulated branch before realizing its' , fun sucking, time sucking, hopeless, and expensive nature.

proactive is almost always better too

Exactly, and copying is free. You are thinking in the correct direction

I have this solved and taken care of too, don't worry

Back to the free-rider problem, unless branding matters ....

This might not be a complete and fully articulated solution, but in regard to the boycott problem, or the problem of moving a population from one equilibrium to one of a higher order or payoff, I think this observation is relevant:

You can transform a game from zero sum to not zero sum, with the introduction of "transfer of utility".

This could allow a player to unilaterally deviate with a greater incentive and expectation of gain.

Good luck creating a cartel among poker labor providers for a decentralized model.

Your decentralized poker launch would trying to compete against the asymetric economic gains skilled players already gain from playing soft centralized-site poker games, with large rec player pools ... even if those player pools have shrunk over time.

There are better ways to go about getting prospective gamblers/fish now into crypto into crypto-gaming and then into poker. The situation today is the converse of the 2013 crypto industry, where gaming dominated crypto transactions, accounting for 80 % of blockchain transactions. Different incentives should be offered to crypto enthusiasts, many of whom ARE speculators at heart, who might also enjoy gambling.

(I am not discounting that a player friendly decentralized poker operation could succeed. I thought the speed answer Noose linked to was a big step in the right direction, albeit on a journey with many perilous steps before success is achieved. FWIW, I tried to buy Gnosis' coin in their ICO precisely because of their decentralized gaming projects, including development of Virtue poker, but was shut out in the10 minutes or so the ICO lasted. Decentralized gambling is the future, but poker is the toughest row to hoe.)

Just a note to put the difficulty of launching a new poker option into context:

"Last month, ..., Nevada’s only viable poker room, WSOP.com, and the three poker sites based in Delaware averaged a combined 135 cash game players,"

http://www.onlinepoker.net/poker-new...-october/38347

But, untracked Euro sites, yo.

Pokereum: http://www.pokereum.io/

This is a project I basically thought died out long ago but apparently its still alive. Vitalik said the initial whitepaper was gameable and I agreed to an extent, but had a later insight. There is always effectively the problem of not handing in decryption keys which is necessary to verify the hand and the problem of traditional player collusion. The cryptographic problem has its own version of collusion as well especially if you try to use a jury pool to secure the underlying cryptographic problem of p2p shuffling and dealing (virtue poker also uses this solution).

Ola as pokereum's designer has chosen, at least in the old whitepaper, to use random seating to solve this problem. Of course this is a very limiting solution from the players perspective and more importantly if you set up an army of poker bots you could sybil attack this solution (ie you could own 90% of the field and therefore have full collusion ability).

But if we think about a possible rakeback standard paid to a field of mostly bots there could be a minimum viable profitability and depending on how the field bootstrapped their might be competing bot pools. This might be random and separated from private games just enough for the underlying field of bots to provide a "fair enough" jury pool to provide support for private games (ie to solve the cryptographic problem of p2p shuffling/dealing.

I'm not sure if I explained all that before, but this is where this diagram is from:

Obviusly there exists a better model than current state. The model above is directionally correct.

Several times ITT I raised the question of why anyone one with blockchain knowledge / resources would focus on poker with so much other lower hanging (and more profitable) (or more meaningful) fruit.

Here's one I didn't see coming.

https://digital.nyc/news/breed-kittens-blockchain-crypto-game

https://www.cryptokitties.co/

How long will it take for each player to complete an action? The speed difference between when I use the Tor browser and Chrome browser is vast - will that be a factor with decentralized poker as well?

Speed between actions has seemed to me a major issue, a a crucial one also. Unless it is resolved decentralized poker, as incredibly "decision heavy" as playing poker is, is a long shot.

Noose touts Lightning as an answer, and it does hold out promise.

Each player enters escrow with a promise to reveal their keys at the end of the hand for verification. The game is played via any fast messaging network. You only invoke the blockchain if there is challenge. You never expect to need it because of the penalty for losing a verification challenge.

The game flows via fast messaging based on the credible threat of the escrow.

Ideally we would have devs in this chat from the different projects.

I just spent the day trying to buy crypto kittens on ethereum and watched it basically break the network. This how you CAN'T make card games work on a block chain. But its good, this will create a drive for raiden and so we will see this type of protocol/escrow I am alluding too every soon.

The cats app, you can buy cats, breed them and then they rest, sell cats, rent your cat to sire for someone else (they keep the cat). There is zero generation and every new born cat is a level higher generation (zero is best, 10 is better than 20 etc.).

It broke the network and the cat price doubled over the day. This stuff will evolve very fast imo.

If I'm understanding you correctly I think you are proposing that the time to invest in CryptoKitties is now, like RIGHT now.

EDIT.

went to site. said to download MetaMask (chrome extension)... message popped up saying MetaMask can do all sorts of chit

among other things...

wtf ?

Meta mask has benevolent creators, I'm not sure what it does. The warning is probably about how it reads and writes your transaction data. Just expect it to be buggy, but its all open source. Never keep a significant amount of eth in it etc.

What has happened is someone proved with a meme and a very simple trading/scarcity algorithm you could create a market for collectibles and flood the network. Ethereum became effectively unusable and the demand is still far exceeding its capacity.

You could have 10 of these projects easy. It's actually socially flooded to the point where it needs to fixed. It could go on for days or weeks etc.

So what is going to happen is there will be a massive push for raiden network topology. Over the next weeks and months its going to flip into "lightning transactions" which are only secured on chain, they don't happen on chain so they can be instant.

That's when the discussion for "blockchain based poker" changes and people stop saying that lag is a problem because there will be empirical evidence that shows it is not. This crypto-kitten phenomenon just put a massive bounty on the community coming together to create a new layer.

Online poker will be the main and biggest use case as far as a killer app goes. It will be central to the evolution of that tech/protocol etc.

No shame in letting some crypto-kitty afficionado do the heavy lifting for the benefit of your poker use case.

Thats exactly what is happening: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...d-ethereum-app

Someone created what is effectively a spam attack and brought the network to a halt. I have friends that have never used crypto that are trying to buy cats, not realizing that their inability to use the broken network is the main cause of the rising cat price.

All day yesterday I had peers paying 100's of dollar for cats and driving fees to do so up.

So we can see how this will evolve and the pressure won't let up. The devs have to now talk seriously about state channels and make an emergency strategy.

They have the same problem poker faces, because they need to move the irrational equity that is intent on exuberantly buying collectibles and convince them to instead focus their network strength on the next layer technology. We get to see the planning and solution for this problem unfold in real time.

And I predict the poker industry and players community will play a massive part. After all, the crypto part of the poker industry has over 10x'd this year alone.

combining web's most popular single thing (kittens) with next big disruptive web technology (blockchain / ethereum) was just end boss smart from a biz perspective. this will reach Candy Crush level success, and very quickly. Also gets new tech out of dark hard to understand corners and into mainstream.

so noose... could you speak to Gzech's comment that the kitty blockchain developers are solving some of the initial problems ALL blockchain game designers will face?

I haven't yet installed and played with the cats. That MetaMask warning message still freaks me out.

Regulated might not be too far off.

Malta Gaming Authority is requesting comments and wants to create a test environment for distributed ledger technology and crypto projects:

http://www.mga.org.mt/malta-gaming-a...ency-projects/

Time to be proactive ...

"In this respect, the MGA is currently in the process of establishing the sandboxed (test and learn) live environment for cryptocurrency usage within the remote gaming sector, whilst also drafting guiding principles for the application of DLT and its various adaptations within the industry. Cognizant of the fact that a certain degree of expertise lies within the industry, with a number of innovative projects and concepts already available on the market, the Authority is reaching out to interested parties willing to share information regarding their cryptocurrencies and/or DLT projects. "

(This is a real interest on the part of the MGA, I met their Chairman in 2014 when he was an MGA staffer seeking to promote regulatory adoption of BTC and blockchain tech.)

I don't think this is relevant. I live in DE and the site is totally amateur hour. Bad software, no RB/horrible vip system, they don't even advertise at all. If they put in half the effort just to advertise like NJ sites do then the site would be growing. AS is I've seen 1 advertisement and NJ has endless ads for years now on tv/radio.

As far as I can tell they are trying to fail as a poker site. Looking at the site it's like a time warp back to 2004.

The crypto kitty game didn't solve anything. It highlighted the scaling problems. The network is near halted. Average fees are high. It can't handle the current load and its just one game.

You can't play these games on the blockchain, blockchains are not for "actions" and "data" etc.

You have to play them off chain and use the chain to secure the games on the open and closing of them etc.

It's open source and widely scrutinized and used by many expert and leading developers. Its unlikely they are doing anything malicious in the code. Bugs for sure.

But what it does is it reads and writes transaction data and interacts with the webpages as "dapps" decentralized applications. So that is what they are stating. Its what dapps do.

Noose is correct about the limitations of a given blockchain. Back in ancient times (2013), one game, which elegantly randirectly on the blockchain, accounted for 80% or so of the bitcoin blockchain transactions. It took a lot of heat from BTC enthusiasts at the time.

What the "crypto-kitty" effect represents either is that tragedy of the commons, where the blockchain capacity is an over-fished resource, or an unintended DDOS attack or both.

Either provides opportunity for resolution, work which "poker" as such can benefit from.

The former can be addressed by development/use of an off-chain system like lightning, I believe. The heavy lifting I spoke of was developing gamers' trust in using such a system.

The second problem,a DDOS-like attack on a given blockchain, presents a different issue. Since ancient times there has been a concern over a so-called 51% attack on the BTC blockchain. Now, we have seen a different angle, which seems, to me at least, to resemble a DDOS-like threat. The good news is that there is a pool of dev talent which can reap some rewards from addressing the issue.

I'm in dialogue with some knowledgeable players and we sometimes discuss the possibility that you could use a blockhain based gambling game back in the day to wash coins. And the way the algorithm is, for example with Satoshi Dice, it might have the same back door possibility as Coinpoker.

Nonethless we have an interesting scenario. Ether fees are now such that some software models don't even work, especially for low value users. State channels are now super important. Whats more is emerging models like virtue poker, coinpoker, cypher poker, acebusters,, pokerereum and any other project relying on ethereum even just to boostrap, are now in a clear jam.

10's of millions of dollar minimum has been invested in multiple projects that cannot realize their goals of even a minimum viable product because the network is already overloaded with one game. We can see coalition and cooperation forming out of selfish want. All it takes is the introduction of a transferable utility, a medium of exchange, a token and the game moves to not zero sum.

Assuming that is all true, then the NooseProtocol is no longer a "nice to have" or "maybe better way" to have thing.

Sounds like it (or some variation thereof) is a "have to have" type thing to make blockchain based online poker site function and more importantly scale.

Am I missing the point or is my above statement true?

"Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again in the silent water
Under the rocks, and stones there is water underground"

Noose has disclosed an underlying issue with blockchains not purpose-built.

The BTC blockchain is for transactions, ETH was built for data and can accomodate contracts, but seems subject to jamming when volume hits "gaming levels".

Not sure a blockchain can be bullet-proofed against such flooding by whatever ICO comes along next,be it crypto-cats2 or cryptocandycrushers or whatever.

There may be a built-in incentive for a developer to clog a chain, simply to get the $1,000,000 or so from ICO sales, in effect mimic a denial of service attack with built-in ransom and no proof of a mens rea (i.e bad intent)

(I am only an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, but this I know....there is a solution out there, already existing or to be developed .....but the problem may not be solvable on the sample of existing blockchains I''ve seen.)