Flooding attacks cost money, and since there is real utility for some people they end up willing paying more to gain priority against the nuisance transactions.

Provided there is want to use bitcoin for higher and higher value transfers that might exceed the cost of spamming the system then you have a basis for security:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2017...alability.html

Bitcoin was designed with this type of scaling problem, it is the paradigm that allowed it to exist as a solution to the double spending problem. There is a faction going around with campaign and speaking agenda that is convince people bitcoin is broken because it doesn't scale as a highly transactable low cost money (ie cash).

The have not understood.

It's not really an issue though, unless you developed a business model with low fee assumptions.

The spam attacks cannot bring the system down, they can only raise it to cost level in which the fees are too high for low value users. Atm I am told the average tx fee is 35$ (I haven't checked), so someone moving 10 million dollars would happily pay that.

The layer two lightning topology will roll out extremely fast and will fix this from the users perspective.

1. The fee in May for "next block" participation topped $28.00 I recall. Given the price increase in a single BTC, it likely would be much higher today. That is per transaction. The number of transactions required to play even a heads-up poker hand on the blockchain would be cost prohibitive. So, yes, in order to have a shot, a game likely would have to be played off the particular blockchain used for settlement.

2. Consider, even with lightning, the cost of making an initial deposit to play a game, the cost of settlement after each hand played or upon entering or leaving a table.

3. Poker is a multi-transaction business where your centralized competition may have a much lower cost structure than a decentralized model saddled with fixed BTC % fees unrelated to transaction amount. (Yes, miners effectively "rake" every transaction.) How competitive would that cost structure be versus a trusted centralized provider's game, one that caps a 5% rake per hand at say $2 - $3 ?

Players demand a low cost game model.

True,a $10 million value transaction will pay a $35 fee, but such are not the size of poker game or player transactions.

Explain to me, as you would to an unfrozen caveman, how launching a crypto-cat game had a different network speed effect than a "flooding attack".

If a "benign" flooding attack simply takes the form of an ICO, for say crypto-puppies, netting $1,000,000 in proceeds, wouldn't a flooding attack make money, not "net cost" the proponents anything ?

It's really the miners that benefit. And by now I think you are not so caveman and it shouldn't surprise people are following these things well-we can see a massive game here...

Shouldn't the miners want to flood the network in order to increase the fess paid by users that value the transactions high enough? We might worry they are developing these games (or think about bitcoin's spam attack problems)

The crypto kitties users, who are caught in the "neo-pog" gold rush bid up the cats and make the creators of the game wealthy and a bubble is created. As the cost of making kitty transactions increases, this must be factored into the price. There is no utility here, you really can't even play games with the cats, it is speculation on a booming price.

But the price is a function of the fees paid (that are increasing!). So the profits from the users perspective decline, and the game is far less fun. There is an equilibrium. The users get more savvy and demand better games (and perhaps more profitable) and somewhere the fees to make ethereum transactions stabilizes in relation to these games/attacks (ie they stay high).

The games still have to overcome the increased transactions fees. The transaction spaces are scarce resources.

I'm not sure the owners got rich though, it could be likely, but its just as likely they pumped in a ton of money initially and so going forward this plan might not really work.

This is what I am alluding to as layer 2 topology. I suspect its to complex to design beforehand and must evolve. But its not woo. You wouldn't settle like this, so we can imagine a player has an account with the casino and only settles on change say once a month. Of course that isn't practical so I think we could think of having a bank card that we uses and only settles once a month etc (which requires the casino to be connected in channel with the bank).
There is a problem with paradigms. The centrailzed model I call "server based" sometimes and the decentralized p2p. But this isn't the only distinction.

We can think of the different security issues and the different problems from the players perspective and think about how having central point of failure are costly. Then it is not necessarily a competition between a p2p model versus centralized server models (ie we can consider a hybrid evolution).

Triple posting but I want to separate these points out. I recently found my "brocoin" poker investment (nothing significant ) and tracked the project down. To my surprise it is still going and has evolved and changed some. Brocoin was advertising "merge mining" as their solution and has added I believe proof of stake in order to solve the "technical collusion" problem (ie with private keys not of the player/cards cheating type).

So you have:

Coinpoker with josem as head of security...
Virtue poker with intent to make a jury pool system...
Cypher that designed an interface for a poker engine that all projects can use....
Brocoin poker that has a merged mining pos system...
Acebusters that is actively working on smart contracts and building a community

That spells out a first layer. It is bigger than most people understand p2p decentralized poker to mean. They think it means simply solving p2p shuffling and dealing. But there are other security problems and cost problems from the players perspective (which involves the cost from the providers perspective).

It is not one project that can decentralize the game but the collective evolution.

We have players all over the world that would like to see a global pool again so there is pressure there. This is enough economic power to bring about 2nd layer state channel topography on ethereum.

We have traditional server based sites that could benefit cost wise from this tech, but of course they lose part of their market share. I think though even Poker Stars, upon realizing their monopoly isn't safe, will quickly jump to support this movement as well (I assume Josem talks to them about it on a regular basis).

We can imagine the effects of global shared liquidity among SITES, and intersite crypto clearance of fiat deposits

If you are assuming that I talk with PokerStars about this stuff on a regular basis, you are completely wrong.

I was assuming that, yup. Pokerstars must be interesting in a p2p shuffling dealing protocol, no?

I'm glad to be able to correct your mistaken assumption then.

On the issue of their interest in shuffling mechanisms, I don't know; ask them. My employment for that company has concluded. It's over. We've separated.

has anybody played on acebusters yet?

Why?

Not anymore than Kodak was interested in cutting edge digital photography technology in late 80's. classic Innovators Delimma.

That being said, I dont believe there is any sort of player demand for solely a better shuffle (most all agree shuffles with large / regulated sites are fair.)

However Blockchain (and related future iterations/innovations) as a whole is a wildly disruptive technology that will turn many aspects of the internet and related industries/services upside down.

Current market leaders in any of those areas ignore this all at their own peril.

Kodak Park in Rochester NY once officed 40,000 Kodak employees. Its now a ghost town with decaying buildings and a few hundred people.

For the same reason Josem is.


I have. I am also familiar with the team behind it. They don't have a full implementation of mental poker (ie p2p). But they have tenacity and a willingness to evolve and listen to the players to do so.

They are considering building towards patrick's cypher poker, and using it as a 1st layer to their 2nd.

The user experience is not there, but they are holding a community and so I am still quite interested in working with them (from a player perspective). You buy ethereum and then exchange it to nutz, their host chip denomination, and eventually you can upgrade that to stake. You can sell stake but only slowly over time. Stake gives you interest in the process, and probably hand/security verification, and site profits.

Then why is Boba Fett is asking why pokerstars SHOULD be interested in the noose protocol?

That's not an answer. I'm asking why you believe "Pokerstars must be interesting in a p2p shuffling dealing protocol, no?".

Um...because I was curious why you think that.

Because its at their own peril to ignore the technology.

And since Josem is now a part of this emerging industry and he's been studying it for quite some time (ie while he was still with them), I would have thought that he would have mentioned it to them. But instead I guess he just jumped off the ship to let it burn (at its own peril!).

Ignoring it is not the same as not being interested in it at this point. Perhaps they've looked into it and decided they're not interested. Regardless, you seem to think this is something they should be considering implementing, so I'm wondering why that is. Seems like an unnecessary upheaval to me, so your perspective interests me.

Whole lot of assumptions being made here. I don't think your fixation on Josem's relationship to Stars is all that helpful to the conversation.

I think its fair to assume that Josem sees the emerging industry and technology as the new wave. In the last few weeks the price of bitcoin has raised the value of bitcoin and crypto currency related projects at server orders of magnitudes higher. That is a change in market share of the Poker industry.
Month's ago the price of bitcoin was 2kish and its now nearing 20k. That segment of the industry just grew times 10.

And now a movement is growing creating a protocol that would allow pokerstars to ditch all rng/shuffling/dealing server based hardware and infrastructure for something that is self maintaining and comparatively costless.

And as PTLou alludes to, they ignore this and don't take advantage, at their own peril. They are already foreseeably no longer the status quo site. These new sites advertising budgets are tied to the fastest growing investment/currency in the world.

They can't afford to ignore this technology.
I don't think you'll find I'm making baseless assumptions that can't be backed up, as much as it seems.

As much as I appreciate your insights itt, you've made a classic mistake in the bolded portion of your post.

For BTC blockchain dependent sites, the rising cost of miner fees has priced them out of key market segments unless they adapt. Where every transaction's fee, priced a a % of a BTC, has skyrocketed, those costs tend to price out lower price points for any transactions.

(Ironically, the "rake" charged in the form of miner fees, irrevocably tied to a % of BTC regardless of how small/large the transaction will push decentralized poker from that blockchain to a new, more hospitable environment ..... Similarly, for all the care taken in providing code for dividing a BTC into very small fractions to allow for micro transacions even as the price increased, what was lost in the process was adjustment of the transaction costs (i.e. miner fees) built into every transaction. If a miner fee of say $30 USD value is collected, how can a transaction for a $25 value make any sense. BTC remains a nice investment tool for value, but less a tool for micro-stakes transactions. )

We've discussed solutions such as lightning for the rising cost of mining fees, but it remains a mistake to think rising crypto values necessarily help decentralised onchain operations. )

I wonder if enough evolution has occurred and the topic of the decentralization of poker is legitimate enough that we might be able to move on. I think that enough of us understand the general idea and the changes that we are already witnessing. There is still discussion about what these implications are and how they might come about.

But I think for most who might find this topic interesting there is still a sort fuzzy understanding, and I think that this can be cleared up with some citations. And that these citations might have been unintelligible in the past but that they might speak far more clearly now that there is empirically observable change already happening (and more already planned and paid for by various crowd funded projects).

Ultimately decentralization of poker must be a movement made by the players and I think we might find great interest in some of the ways I have been viewing the game in light of this emerging technology.

These sites that exist today are not "blockchain dependant" or in other words the rising fees do not (necessarily) affect their bottom line. You are speaking of the new breed that shuffles and deals with a protocol tied to a block chain.

I believe I have not made the mistake you point out.

I think your question has been answered.

But I think the definition of the noose protocol has morphed.

If it is only a RNG shuffle thing, then it needs to be called the Noose Shuffler, and no stars does not care about that because vast majority of players do not care about a better shuffle.

I thought the protocol was more robust in its feature set.

The crypto poker market just 10x over the last year. Gzesh falsely accused me of making a mistake that I did not make. Pokerstars share of the market has RAPIDLY declined. They have OBSERVABLY lost their de facto monopoly on the industry. Players now have many options, and there are many more significant projects on the very near horizon.

Josem's team just collected 6 million usd's worth of presale equity and now their company, assuming they held that in ether (or bitcoin etc.) has raised ~30% in the last month or so.

All of this, is not needed anymore:







Nor is the complex security protocols, personal, building, security security systems etc. The complex setup of banking and currency management and the skilled professionals and teams hired to oversee these things.

You have an inconsistent viewpoint. Where is phil galfond poker? He didn't realize the costs involved are insurmountable. And now the emerging sites are taking poker stars monopoly and distributing it among themselves and offering poker at a discount to the players (in currencies that are INCREASING rather than decreasing in value!).

Pokerstars cannot lower their prices they are in a position where they need to perpetual increase the effective rake in order to service their debts and as they lose their customer base to games that are far more profitable from companies that are far better funded they will be forced to consider this software so they can downsize their operation cost.

This is obvious. And its no longer deniable. They already lost a significant amount of their market share, if you are a poker player that is intelligent and considers your bankroll and investment you have already left fait poker stars and started "generating rake" for a crypto site. These sites are PAYING their players to play their and invest in their products!

ok im coming out with my own decentralized poker.

Patrick's cypherpoker means to provide you the tools to do that. At no cost for the use of it.