It's a sneaky way of getting the word decentralized into the whitepaper. But there are bigger issues. Josem sold significantly unfavorable changes to the players as the Pokerstars PR rep (https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...anges-1485671/). He sold the idea that you can take from the profitability of the game in order to make it better.

From the PLAYER perspective, that wants to play a skilled game, a game in which you get paid for good decisions, security MEANS profitability.

Look at this from the player perspective:

Would you want to play under this pretense? I wouldn't.

It's fishy to me, that pokerstars ex PR rep, is now head of security, and they prescribe a model that "protects" recs from pros. This is the opposite direction of bringing the skilled game back to the players.

That's poker stars' model with the marketing strategy as their "security"

confused. you are pro bots?

also how would blockchain help fight back bots? They say it does as fact, but don't describe how.

No, not "pro bots".

Thats what they are alluding to Josem for.

Bots cannot be stopped en masse. Myself, I start with the basic philosophy that a game WITH bots that is more profitable than a game WITHOUT is more favorable than the latter.

But if the model doesn't guard profitability then you have a promise to fight bots and a giant black box that blocks players from actually being able to tell if any progress is made in this regard.

In poker this has been traditionally acceptable. In crypto its laughable as a security model.

well from my interactions with him and other's interactions with him that ive read (and again its several different people). i disagree. he takes a condescending tone often. maybe that's because he's right all the time and it gets frustrating having to explain to the intellectually inferior the way the world works all the time. i get it.

i don't mean to derail this thread please continue posting your thoughts PTLou.

having hands stored on a blockchain would make them more accessible and easier to analyze and therefore detect bots. (i think)

I don't think we are yet referencing projects that store the hand on the blockchain. The blockchain contains more of a verifying reference. You can verify the hand, but its not stored on it as I understand...think of the size of the data

wouldn't require much data at all to store a hand if its encrypted. i don't see why that information point wouldn't be included on a block along with who won and who lost how much. am i not understanding this???

Encryption is obfuscation not compression. Bitcoin is under civil war to expand a 1mb blocksize. I'm not the technical persons, but its not feasible to store every poker hand played, not without incentive.

no interesting questions to ponder and discuss of late ITT.


I think I posted earlier that it would be silly for someone with blockchain biz and/or developer experience to focus on poker because there are dozens of other better markets to attack. Blockchain dudes and dudettes are in huge demand right now. a good developer/technologist can easily bank $250k/year. 10's of millions (prob 100's) of investment dollars are pouring into the space.

But after thinking about this some more, poker is an interesting first step for at least one reason. It hits on alot of important areas and could quickly grow a base of sufficient size to bullet test and perfect a variety of innovative solutions for blockchain applications. It also forces one to dramatically improve the response time issue. The need for speed is i believe the current footrace in blockchain development.

Those blockchain software solutions designed for poker, could easily be adapted and marketed to other more lucrative industries..

This thread hurt my head and I thought why am I reading this I do not care.

funny.

crypto / blockchain is mind numbing at first. im still in infancy of my understanding, but like The Borg on Star Trek I am assimilating quickly.

Rest assured though you will care about this stuff increasingly in the future in much the same way you care about the internet now (assuming you care about the internet)

Breaking News:

"Old Dog Learns New Tricks"

ha... to put it mildly.

actual selfie I took yesterday.

If I suddenly stop posting it will be caused by either my human form being fully assimilated into some blockchain based neural network or more realistically my head literally exploded and I died. Noose's fault 100%

We've only touched the tip of the iceberg

There are a couple new site/projects that have emerged in the "internet poker" sub. There are also two notably missing projects that deserve at least some scrutiny if not awareness. However, both of the projects did exactly what I explicitly told them not to and they started to talk about their projects without first paying for advertising rights on 2p2 (I'm pretty that's true).

One is Acebusters. They already have a crowd sale going and you can sit down on their tables. They also do not have a mental poker protocol. But they seem moral and with good intent. They are mostly not poker players but I would expect that to change as they grow. They are quite transparent about what they are doing and very accessible as a group (they use discord for their chat/project). Their team is fresh out of comp sci school. They do lack experience in the industry though.

The other mention is Cypherpoker. Patrick made the mistake of haste and innocence and thought he could talk about his work here openly because its not proprietary. I hope with the other emerging projects and our growing understanding of this new age for poker that this can be forgiven. Patrick is the most moral project leader of all the projects I have seen so far. He refuses to ico because he wants to build something everyone can use and develop on for no cost.

This why I hope we can discuss cypherpoker especially. Patricks is apparently a proof of concept that the other projects don't have. He's got a working mental poker implementation as I understand and none of the others do. The idea is that he developed layer 1 and all the other project naturally provide a layer 2 with the rest of the solutions they provide.

Acebusters has talked about building towards Patrick project and I think/hope that other projects will consider working towards a common core set of primitives as well.

I'm going to post something about Cypherpoker and how/why it works and hopefully it is allowed.

Here is what cypherpoker is. Its a development grounds. I'm not even sure that this is the actually software that will evolve to be used or if its just a concept. I've talked to Patrick lots, a lot of philosophy of the design and I think perhaps both of us are still considering what can work and what can't. Nontheless this is a good example.

Patrick worked for Pokerstars I beleive (or amaya or whatever), but hes not a poker players. Here he's been thinking about device based game play and new ways of do the betting controls. The aesthetics isn't important here I mean to call attention to the functionality (aesthetics is up to the operators/projects):



But I know that to sell the idea to players (not profit but just to sell awareness etc.) the legacy controls must be in place. So I took his project and modified the gameplay gui to better represent what players are used to.



It was a seminal moment for his project because I'm not really a coder. But the way he designed the project was such that someone with minimal programming skills could teak the front end really easily.

He's creating a development ground/sandbox that is an expression of the core protocol for decentralizing the industry. It's quite interesting imo.

calling flop bet OOP with 24c, gut shot and back door clubs was kinda lame, but OK. I can see why you are looking for another profession outside of grinding

more seriously, how feature rich is current project?

only heads up?

only NLH?

only cash or MTT and SNG, too?

No he's been working on the backend more so than any front end work (other than basic hu poker play). Making sure the contracts work and the communication etc. It uses state channels, most people know them as lightning. You secure them with "ether" which is the money ethereum uses and the game play is done via any fast messaging. You cryptographically sign IOU's that can't be reneged on or forged otherwise.

There is still optimizations to be done but the game play there was reasonable already. That video I think is 6 months old also.

The actual poker is not developed, but the way he built the project was so it can evolve in a modular fashion. This is much like bitcoin, it was very very primitive and purposefully so. Satoshi didn't integrate wallets or exchanges etc in his proposal. Just the barest of bones.

I'm not sure if Patrick succeeded. But of all the projects he is the only one that had a truly decentralized vision. All the other project are centralized models that are using the word decentralized to pass the scrutiny of non crypto investors.

Those projects won't serve the players, they never do, they make policy promises to serve the players and ultimately they just end up raking the skilled money out of the game and never giving it to the recreationals they promised to.

It's quite an obvious scheme, you can't take the skilled money in name of protecting the recs, and expect games to be sustainable.

As far as "features" the idea is Patrick has provided a sandbox for developers. You can add widgets easily that do things that help development. So you have programmers that come in and do that, while you have front end poker site developers creating better skins etc.

Different teams can work independently over each other. Uts all setup to be evolvable in a modular fashion, just have an idea and add it to your build. That which is universally wanted gets merged into the core of the project. Thats how bitcoin works, and thats the spirit of decentralization (for real).

Again I don't know if he did it, if it will work, but I do know fairly reputable programmers have said he is good. I also really like how he laid the project out as an interface which other projects can connect to. It's perfectly what I envisioned and I'm quite pleased to have come across his work.

I figure he probably set out to spend 500k and had a million total. Wild guess, but he already admitted he grossly underestimated the costs and time involved. There still is no working software for testing even.

We know he's having problems launching. Can call it what you want, not enough money, not enough product. But if he is so far on his course he cannot change to align it with emerging tech then plodding further on the same path can only make it worse. If riopoker ever ends up going live it won't be able to provide games at a competitive cost.

youve made this assertion several times with no basis or evidence or even back of the napkin analysis

I asked you earlier to estimate total hardware and support costs for legacy site presented as % of total opex.

Or ask another way, what specific costs categories are eliminated for a P2POperator vs legacy operator?

Your assertion is that the savings are material to the point of being competitive advantage. I'm not so sure

We looked at video of the isle man headquarters. All of that, the hardware, much of the personal etc. The real estate. Many of these emerging sites are not getting licenses etc. Many sites exist like that today. The estimate Patrick gave for the software and too bootstrap was in the millions. He worked for stars. I'm reading another thread and the software development is estimated at a million. 10 devs for a year.

Much of the security systems and personal can be completely eliminated. We already went over this. Perhaps there is someone with authority that can convince you (or show me I'm wildly wrong).

Who knows how much startup costs are?

Remember Galfond is super smart, he underestimated wildly and has given an indefinite launch date. Are you sure you are properly considering the cost of startup?

this probably has been mentioned before, but how would you deal with cheating and keeping amoral behaviour out of the games in a decentralized platform?

The model I described has a core infrastructure that is effectively shared. Different projects would use that core to create their own business model. So any legacy solutions COULD be implemented. It wouldn't necessarily be different. If we are asking how we can go beyond the provision of legacy security solutions that would be a new evolution. There aren't really solutions to these problems of bots and identity etc. They are basically unsolvable. But that makes the security for them costly as well.

As a basic philosophy for a solution, I think that if a site is more profitable to play on from the players perspective then it could be said the problem basically doesn't exist. Some players would accept that and some wouldn't. What we really want is the competition to foster its own new ideas, where as recently the industry has been more geared towards protecting the existing models and serving the operators short term view rather than the long term customer relationship.

Players are always asking about bots and cheating, but never seem to consider that the games have gotten less and less profitable over time. This is the same end, really profitability is the worry, not bots or cheaters per se.

1) not competing in a regulated market is independent of p2p vs legacy decision. Bovada and ACR are legacy sites, operate in the US and have no regulatory / licensing costs.

no savings

2) Your assertion is that the code needed for a full P2POperator just writes itself. Will it be less ? Yes, because TheNooseProtocol provides a piece of the backend. But it will be offset by other things.

Have you tried hiring any blockchain developers ? I'd guess they are getting 3-6x standard c++, or .net type developers. So even if code development effort is cut in a third, whats left to do requires developers that are 3x more expensive.

UI/UX progammers will be same or more .

no savings

whats next?

i don't know if you are aware of this, but all the unregulated online games are unplayable at high stakes due to cheating.

also sites get a benefit from large pools of players (more ease finding games etc). shared sites, as you call them, spend nothing on marketing i assume, which is not necessarily good for the players, even if they are not incentivized by making money.

and lack of regulations makes it more insecure for the players.

not trying to be negative, just would like to understand what benefits decentralized poker would bring. because there are many cons.

I just explained you can assume the exact same security model the existing sites provide. I don't understand how you miss that and restate the question?