sorry, i'm on a long session so haven't had the time to read all your posts but going through some now. your whole point is about a decentralized shuffling protocol in which "public tables" can be accessed from any site that adopts the protocol, i assume. i suppose that the benefits from this are 1. no superusers, fake rngs etc 2. funds are safer. none of these are a big problem these days.

the sites would need to agree on stuff like how much timebank, anti grimming policies blah blah, correct?

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"The reduced cost would allow the p2p based sites to operate at a significantly increased profit margin. "

why? existing sites would need to migrate, which is probably very expensive. as for new sites, isn't this a very similar concept as the skin business? i'm not convinced that every party has an incentive to adop the protocol. the biggest site won't have an incentive to join the network, so all the other sites would need to beat them before they enter. so the protocol either grows big enough to capture the entire market or ends up failing quickly, right?

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"but all nations are working on their own crypto fiat."

care to expand on this? you mean cryptos backed by fiat, right?

also relevant: https://qz.com/1072740/mario-draghi-...he-government/

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sorry if i'm missing something, only read a page and a half so far. gonna read the rest tomorrow. interesting stuff.

"It's obvious the increasing trend will be poker players seek the most profitable sites."

well, historically you are wrong

"My motivations are on my sleeve sir, you are just skeptical in general."

nah, you do come off as shady. no offense

yup thats the idea. Stuff like timebank would be adjustable.
Yup you've got it, there's a problem there that is reducible to a game with a few assumptions etc. Much like the proposition of bitcoin. The creator explained in a few years it could be worth nothing or a lot. But there is more to that problem and I think it will probably be interesting to discuss.

Yes, it will be an interesting possibility for things like pegging and inflation control, and what it means for a central bank to make a policy promise (automated irrevocable smart contracts).

Historically there is a cost and time associated with transferring ones role. Regulations and payment processing restrictions have effectively created a monopoly. So I make the conjecture that if players could move from site to site instantly and costlessly this would put a different kind of pressure on the industry. You might be right the big dinosaurs might not move to the new network, but there are now a lot of up and coming budding sites and new models with them. And they might be open to a coalition to break through the current setting.

Since each of those projects often will come with its own crypto coin, there is the possibility for the players who pick the best sites, to gain from that "game" too.

How do they prevent it in centralized?

You're missing the bit where one merely writes a white paper and thereby wishes a piece of p2p software into existence at zero cost - it thereby works out cheaper than developing conventional software where you have to pay developers etc.

Naive perhaps, not shady.

very true.

thenoose is correct in that it is likely a superior technical solution and is quite likely the future. But I could say that about blockchain and just about anything that connects two or more people via the internet ( just about anything on the internet)

His assertion that one of the key motivations is lower opex for P2POperator is imo flawed and as of yet not supported in basis, fact or even an back of the napkin examples. The stars server room video is just the stars server room video, nothing more.

Any savings (and there likely are some) will be rounding error compared to increased player acquisition and market education costs. Player acquisition/marketing is a meaningful part of a sites opex, server rooms, not so much. multibillion, multinational companies need server rooms. ones that are in online gaming business admittedly need bigger ones.

Meaningful, new things usually start with someone taking alot of arrows in the back. So it is a good discussion for industry to have and to move toward /adopt some of its principles to the advantage of sites and players.

"How do they prevent it in centralized?"

By having some dudes decide what is allowed and what isn't. Some stuff can't be automated or is too expensive to do it so people just manually study the cases. It works wonders. Take a look at stars. I'm pretty sure there is very little cheating going on at high stakes (and I know this because I personally know the top players and I'm close to 100% sure they are not cheating). Grimming, softplaying, etc. is not a big deal either.

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"Naive perhaps, not shady."

It's just that the altcoins/ICOs bubble is obvious and real and everyone wants a piece of the cake while it lasts. So many shady guys offering unnecesarily-hard-to-understand services that don't really provide any competitive advantage. So when someone is so outspoken for something containing features like decentralization my alarm bells ring.

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I can kinda imagine a group of poker guys interested in the blockchain that would develop the protocol for free just for the kicks, without expecting any earnings in return. i would probably participate if i knew how to do it.

so one problem seems to be how to motivate existing poker sites to migrate to the existing platform. once the platform is big enough this is not a problem anymore because the incentive would be accessing a larger player pool.

one solution could be to take advantage of a new site that brings big money into the table to try to gain the monopoly. it should be cheaper for them to integrate the protocol. they might still say no to avoid risks, though. and maybe it will be 10 years until a new big player joins the market.

just thinking out loud

Unless the poker community starts banding together more (yes i know we are naturally lazy or so is the stereotype whether its true or not) I don't think we can do it, if people start banding together then yes its possible.

For example, i just made a thread announcing ignitions spin problems and not one reply, i was trying to give a heads up to the community and not one thanks or any reply so yeah it kind of shows the lack of support in the community at the moment.

If wgcrider made the same thread it would have 100's of replies, i understand i don't have the best reputation and don't want my xxxx sucked for making a thread, but merely trying to help the community out and getting nothing for it, really shows the lack of community there is here these days.

the thread im referring to is the fact i was told ignition spins are experiencing tech issues, i got refunded all my missed games last night that i didn't play a hand in last night, they said it should be fixed with an update today and now say i should not have continued to play those games, after giving me 9 x 15 spin tickets in his words "30's were the only ones that seem to be affected"

anyway just saying if there is no love for me trying to help the community like ffs where are we at these days.

lloyd

This is what software does for us. It gives small groups or individual minds great leverage. It is what Satoshi did, whether one person or a group, and its a 100 billion dollar software now. Also it wasn't very well done they say, they say its obvious he wasn't a software engineer. Szabo, the number 1 contender for being Satoshi, also speak to the importance of this leverage.

I think we should be cautious to call me naive. I built this vision off of generalizations of some great minds and their ideas. Its difficult to get out and translate it in dialogue, but that's why we have software because we can make and observe some tangible conclusion together.

That said, Patrick is the one that has coded my vision, just by chance, but I knew that there would be at least successive attempts by different projects. His just happens to be the correct direction. We've had chats over a couple years and I've loosely helped guide his direction (some of it he is steadfast on in his own direction ).

The idea is that the software basically needs less and less intense maintenance and building/growth overtime. If multiple projects are working off of the infrastructure then it wouldn't be a problem to incentivize a few hobbyists to maintain it. Bitcoin works much like this. The benefits are indirect rather than direct.

It's something I have thought of for quite sometime, and so has Patrick. If I am shady or not forthcoming, its simply that I think his project is key and the best. But its not proprietary, so I have nothing to sell. And I am clearly interested in any project that means to serve players and the game. His might only end up serve as a proof of concept, or nothing at all, and it might be a completely different next evolution that actually bootstraps.

But there is more than just naivety and wishful thinking going on. That time long passed imo. We have something to discuss now.

I think it would be best to open this aspect. Talk about how things might unfold if we already had a p2p protocol and core layer that multiple projects were considering using it.
Consider this this landscape that there is the difficult of barrier to entry and a few emerging projects enter a loose coalition in order to break the bubble.

To me this is a plausible reality, and we already have a bunch of p2p hybrid icos poker projects announced. I know of more. There are more coming. And there are players like galfond and luckychew (perhaps he abandoned his project) and others that are interested in both making profits and hopefully lending their names to sites that mean to serve the industry.

But we still have the problem of equilibrium. This goes back to the boycotts. As intelligent players move to a new network/equilibrium, the profitability of the game they leave goes up. It's an equilibrium, one cannot unilaterally deviate as a rationally self interested actor. There is a stickiness or gravity that holds the current status quote together.

That's a problem I've been trying to think about and define, and I think if we define well then it might become solvable. This is the problem of the cost of marketing and player acquisition.

This is the correct line of thinking and discussion I think we should have. Hopefully others become interested too. It's very related to crypto, not just "a cool new thing crypto" but network science, and the "force" it takes to move a population from an old standard to a newer better one.

It's pretty clear this problem could be thought of as a complex game. There are 2 equilibriums one is better than the other, but there needs to be enough jam to get enough of the population to move within a small enough time frame for it to be successful (escape velocity).

The relationship between pros and recs is important. Pokerstars model has always claimed you have to sell the recs and then the pros will come. I don't think that's rational. I think its a blatant lie Daniel Negraneau and other poker stars reps used to sell unfavorable changes to the players.

The observation can be rendered as game theory problems and the players can leverage themselves with emerging projects in order to provided reasoned strategies.
What's changed now is that the game is more simple, there are operators that can be viewed as players, there can be coalitions or cartels etc.

I havn't read this whole thread nooseknot but i did read your last few posts, and I definitely think you are on to something, i will read the whole thread and try and give a constructive opinion on the matter in the coming days.

One thing that I will suggest (or add/or whatever the term for it is) is that exceptional customer service is what will drive customers to any site, companies trying to save a $ here or there are shooting themselves in the foot hiring people from say "second world countries" to run their customer service, as well as having people that have know knowledge of poker in general act as support agents that are the first ones in touch with a poker player through live chat.

if it was decentralised, and run in a similar way to how bitcoin works for eg who will provide the customer service? perhaps would that be outsourced to exceptiional individuals who understand poker.

I hope it does come through though and I am on board and happy to share advice on this in the near future

A lot would also change if there was already free (up to date) open conventional poker site software and multiple sites considering using it.

Just saying "p2p" doesn't make it more possible to wish software into existence.

@26sk8er I appreciate your participation and enthusiasm, I'll let you catch up the threat so I don't repeat myself for others

I think this is further along than you are imagining. It's also important as game theorists/poker players to consider the ultimate end-like considering a GTO strategy. We might consider poker COULD move in this direction and we might decide its should-or that we wish it would.

Then with the same end in mind it might be possible to design a clear path that is tangible and plausible in the minds of a relatively influential set of players (here players can also refer to the co-creators of emerging operators looking for a player acquisition strategy).Years ago, talk about the end goal would have been not so useful or enticing, but things have developed since then and its a more relevant topic.

Players already have the option now on which site to choose to invest in and play on ( these are now simultaneous choices in the crypto/ico world). Some of these projects are going to sell the Stars model/marketing scheme where they rake out the skilled money and tell players its for the good of the game.

I don't think this strategy will work in this environment though. I think its comparable to moving from a central banking monopoly on money supply environment to one of free banking where only the fittest money and banks can survive the liquidity of the markets.

When the customer truly has a choice this can have a dramatic effect on the quality of product that is being offered in relation to the price. In poker's case price simply refers to profitability of the games. Or it could be viewed as if the chips themselves have a value and could be viewed as "good" on sites that are profitable or cheap to play on (or "bad" if seen as otherwise).

regarding on how regs choose where to play: every site you add into your gameplay adds potential tables but also adds costs. these costs are mostly due to sites not being fully compatible with one another. examples of problems:
1. different table settings. for e.g., some sites require fast action, in others you have up to minutes
2. people making mistakes due to not knowing the software
3. playing worse on new sites due to the UI, playing dynamics, etc. being different so intuition being out of whack

also if you have beaten the games on stars for 500k hands, you are likely to beat them in the next 500k hands. but you are less likely to do so in another site, mostly.

every new site required more attention which is taken away from the players focus.

the moving bankroll around problem is also an issue.

also they might pick one site over other because of their performance on it on the past or because they like the software more, etc.

Yes you've highlighted a type of friction associated with changing sites. We might say something like if site A was more profitable than site B, and transferring rolls was instant and cost-less, it still might not be enough to create a migration (of course there is some level of profitability that would probably be enticing enough).

You could also look at two sites with equal user experience and observe what level of profitability is required to have a player overcome the transaction friction if it wasn't costless or instant.

Doing this there is the possibility for an objective framework for valuation. From a pure profit view these things aren't as relevant (ie user experience) but from a general player perspective they are.

Also some things mentioned like a tendency "mislick" COULD be factored in as part of the profitability. So a site that is wildly different than Poker stars might not be as favorable for a 20 tabling pro. Of course if we are a rec or a pro we are more or less interested in user experience versus profits depending on how we define our players classes (and of course there is always some form of overlap).

It could also be that the historical relationship with the players comes in to play or the future prospect of one.

We might move along and I think there is enough of a loose group of followers that it could be seen as useful to do so. There is value in a sort of mathematically inductive approach (ie painting a likely future and extrapolating a possible line of strategy). We might all loosely agree there is an obvious general direction and a growing environment of emerging projects that may be able to compete with the status quo.

Some of these projects involve reputable (or at least experienced) poker players that aren't unfamiliar with the unfavorable environment that the industry has grown into (sadly some of these new projects clearly have intrinsically inherited the old "sick" model but maybe they can be convinced otherwise).

What would it look like then, to players of the greater community, if different representatives from different projects started to enter dialogue on the possibility of a coalition? To discuss a common core set of operation principles (and software) that could be used to break the current status quo.

These different projects all share the same problem of player acquisition and to solve this problem they need to bring GREAT awareness to the new movement that new technology makes possible.

And I would ask, Is there way to increase the force of migration, to focus it such that there is a network effect which can allow the emerging movement to hit "escape velocity"?

These are questions that probably haven't been previously asked because they weren't (technologically) relevant.

Can we get players like Galfond, Polk, Luckychewy, Josem, Mercier, Rast, Coleman, etc. to this table for dialogue? What would be the immediate effect and response from the status quo?

build it and they will come

Are any of them willing to code it / pay for someone else to do it?

Otherwise you don't have a product, just talk.

We already have the crux of the code that would be needed. You don't need to "pay" for the code. That's an old model. The whole purpose is the "code" is very minimal by design. A very small open source community could maintain it.

What they WOULD want to consider is having a dev that works on the core or hiring a core dev to work with them.

This is how bitcoin works and it works well because of the setup, I'm basically just generalizing the model and fitting it to poker. There are many examples of this.

thenoose is correct in that this would be good conversation for thought leaders in this space to be having.

he's wild eyed optimist though (its millenial thing, not digging) as all poker games and some biz issues are zero sum game so hard to get people to cooperate / dialogue.

Galfond... ship sailed. forgot to load blockchain.

Polk... would be great choice to start a public convo via a podcast thingy.

Luckychewey.... at Kundalina style yoga class. cant be bothered.

Josem.... dude is afraid to even post ITT, wtf? also, bets placed on Coinpoker. He/they want you to go away.

Mercier... huh? why?

Rast Coleman. bets placed on Virtue Poker. they want you to go away too.


Lots of other don't want you to go way.

Dont go away.

As we are able to render complex problems into simpler forms it COULD be that they can also be transformed from zero sum to not zero sum. So I don't necessarily agree with your assertion:

I don't agree these projects necessarily want a scrutinizer to go away, if this is the vision of the new industry. These projects have crowd sales that will likely flop, other than big investors they can convince. They have a difficult problem of moving a significant portion of the industry to their emerging models and to do so takes tremendous energy because of the equilibrium problem I previously described. If they are smart they realize this, and if they are willing to view the problem game theoretically, I'd argue a coalition is a no brainier.

In others words, opening a sincere and serious dialogue with "thought leaders" could really cause the general population of online player to get behind the general movement. Dialogue in itself could be key to spread awareness.

For that, I think they are notably missing. Yet I have it on good word many of them are aware of it