astute.

I thought it was already established and agreed upon long ago ITT that solving these issues is where the value of decentralized model mainly lies. And it's not about protecting the regs, it's about creating a fair game that is as profitable as possible for any player that is good enough to beat it. Recs would also benefit because their deposits would have greater longevity.

Decentralization is online poker's life line. Otherwise it is doomed to all the problems listed in PTLou's post. All we'll have is a pass time activity that is maybe barely profitable yielding a minimum wage.

This is so obvious, can't believe it's still being debated.

Not shilling, I have zero idea about this project, just curious if anyone ITT with a better grasp on latest industry developments has any insight about them -

www.edgeless.io

https://twitter.com/edgelessproject

According to their road map poker will be launched in Q4 of 2018

I have no idea if/when this particular project will succeed. But to all of you worrying about player adoption and liquidity you are stuck in yesterday's paradigm. Greater and greater portion of today's player pool is becoming crypto literate. Tomorrow's reg AND rec will prefer decentralized model, a tendency that is in parallel with greater cultural/technological shift to decentralization that is currently underway.

There will be an influx of new players coming to the game through their crypto exposure. And they will converge with the legacy pool players that adopted on a decentralized model.

Then all you legacy minds will follow.

Seems a better poker site strategy would be to provide a superior poker user experience.

Providing price stability is something that can promote player confidence in gaming denominated in this new-fangled crypto, but protecting investors who are speculating on future price rises is a different matter.

A way to accomplish the former and not mess with the latter is to promote cashouts with a play-through requirement.

Are you concerned more with rewarding ICO speculators or with poker players looking for a great, or at least a competitive, user experience ?

Drinking ICO koolaid is different that promoting a competitive decentralized gaming experience.

Been there with SatoshiDICE, which accounted for >80% of BTC blockchain transactions five years ago.

You too easily assume too much with respect to the appeal of a game played on a decentralized basis, especially a game which requires player liquidity and a ton of interactions. A player's user experience matters greatly. When you whistle past the graveyard of "liquidity", you are foolish. (There are MANY other decentralized gaming/betting channels open to develop which do not rest on that "liqudity " paradigm of poker, but poker does. Facile assumptions you make cannot wish away the issue.)

As a "legacy mind", I've seen the online poker industry development story before. (I think it is doable, but way harder than you assume just to get it competitive. The "legacy" gaming engines are neither dense nor static in their understanding.)

The " how-to" discussion is not for this thread, nor for free.

I'm not dismissing the crucial importance of user experience nor liquidity. I'm dismissing doubts that decentralized model is capable of favorably resolving these issues.

Crypto/blockchain space is the most interesting technological field right now and it's on the forefront of innovation. It attracts the best development talent there is. There has been great progress made on second-layer solutions to address scaling. While user experience on scale needed for poker is not quite there yet, the amount of resources and talent that's being pored into resolving these limitations leaves no doubt in my mind that it will be resolved in a reasonable time frame(I would claim by 2020 at the latest).

As far as liquidity goes, just like developers, the public is also attracted to the crypto/blockchain space in mass. Virtually every crypto exchange had to temporarily close registration of new accounts due to skyrocketing demand. Blockchain(decentralized) technology is all the rage in the mainstream media right now. It has been normalized by it. The fact that the game is spread over a blockchain will not be a hurdle in attracting players. It will be an advantage, assuming the user experience isn't inferior to the legacy model. And it won't be. It will be faster and slicker because it will be newly developed using latest development tools.

Not arguing against the statement "legacy" gaming engines are neither dense nor static in their understanding". But they will have to match the benefits of decentralized gaming in order to compete. Win win for the players.

You all are both saying things that are true.

These new methods and protocols have insane amounts of potential in many fields including online gaming. They will and are being applied to casino games and in that space will for sure grab market share.

Their application in online poker is a bit more challenging but will bring forth new innovations. For example the UI/UX I've seen from the first few p2p sites are just way better than legacy. New sites used UI tools from today, legacy sites are using tools from years ago. Cashier services massively improved with crypto.

I'd be last person you hear talking about stifling innovation in the gaming space. But, none of those improvements will solve the major issues that plague WW online poker market. Nothing will bring back the boom boom days that so many crave.

Nonetheless, these solutions applied to online poker should absolutely be explored and move forward.

That boom 1.0 is dead and not coming back is an obvious fact.

There is a potential for boom 2.0 precisely because of the enthusiasm for crypto/blockchain. Daytrading that was so prevalent during the .com boom died and is now coming back because of crypto. I think there's a bit of an overlap between the mindset of participants in trading and poker and it's not unreasonable to expect an uptick in participation from that segment if the quality games are easily accessible. Also, trading is just one example of revival of an activity sparked by crypto. It got people that never traded before involved. Poker has a wider appeal and I think quality games have a decent chance of attracting next generation of players that will discover the game because of their exposure to crypto.

However boom or no boom the fact is that the margins for the player are shrinking. Increasing(not restoring to the boom 1.0 levels, that's unrealistic) or maintaining them at the maximum possible level is the main appeal of and argument for decentralized model.

Could unpack your post in detail, but only will comment on two aspects:

1. One poker network accepts something approaching 60 different coins for deposits; your comments about a potential Boom 2.0 have validity.

2. Quality games means "offers liquidity, liquidity, liquidity" in in addition to a smoothly running game. It does not mean that a game must be denominated in any specific crypto coin,so long as deposits/cashouts are processed.

A "decentralized" poker game engine faces both a struggle to create a competitive UX and established competition that can offer both quality games and crypto in/out.

It is possible, but the "uptick" perhaps does not require decentralized games, only a crypto transactonal tie-in.

We need to use this word more accurately. Decentralized can have different meanings and we don't want to wet the dialogue down by not all being on the same page with what we are pointing at.

We talked earlier in the thread about a "noose protocol", this would be something all sites use because it would be the securest and best maintained.

Decentralized in this sense means there is no one single provider in a monopoly position. Some people use decentralized to mean "p2p" which only implies decentralization. A p2p poker software could still have a centralized nature and also, conversely, you could decentralize the landscape without p2p software (it would be politically difficult though etc.).

From the players view to "decentralize" really means to lower effective rake, because that is what the intelligent player would want and it is why the server model with a monopoly and legacy status quo sites are not favorable.

To have a noose protocol that all sites build on, would do this, it would change the nature of the operator. And the "ux" would be greater on each site.

For those like myself that are still learning about underlying technology here is good overview on blockchain consensus protocol.

Its a long read but presented in an quick to digest and easy to understand format. Put some things being discussed ITT in better perspective.

https://blockgeeks.com/guides/blockchain-consensus/

I'll bow out of the discussion at this point as beyond my plodding thought process. I am talking simply about running a poker game on something other than a centralized server, i.e a decentralized game, period. That presents enough of a challenge to offer a competitive poker playing experience to fill a thread by itself.

Trying to pack in further assumptions about what else players "would want" , or what the business model would or would not entail, what the cost of offering such services might be, or whether there would be one market standard for all, smacks of central planning for a "poker feature utopia" where one ux fits all.

"The future" in my experience does not develop predictably bounded according to some preconceived notions. Rather, a first step in this area would be to get to scalable, playable poker in a decentralized game environment and then watch its likely unforeseen evolution.

That is a tough enough row to hoe in my view. The rest will follow in its own course. That's how markets work.

well put.


On another topic, After reading the Blockgeeks primer and thinking more about the technology (less about an online site using it), I have a question for block heads ITT (just invented that label)


Over the long term is a Blockchain (and variants) in fact immutable and provably secure. In theory it is, but in practice I'm not so sure. Further, there are so many variants coming out (and many more to come) to solve various problems, how can it be known that all these will meet the same standard.

Think about encryption methods over the past decade. It was (and is) an arms raise between software providers and hackers with constantly improving technology.

Could I describe how a blockchain could be hacked today? No. Seems pretty legit. But, there was a time when the same could be said for all of the past encryption standards.

This brings us to a special paper which was written to the nsa in 1955. It exclaimed that encryption would outpace decryption The revelation is the crux of the design of bitcoin. https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/de...h_letters1.pdf







When bitcoin was first presented it was scrutinized by different experts of different (computer science) domains. The conjecture presented is that it is not hackable, in a similar way that 2 + 2 = 4.

It is not "this is a strong software that might be hard to hack." rather is "..this software is conjecturally secure and will remain as such".

It won't be hacked and those that understood that realized they were looking at something special. But in order to create something conjecturally robust it means there would be implicit limitation and that limitation shows in the form of its transactional capacity on the base layer.

It's not really a limitation though, it is part of the strength of the design. in "Money, blockchains, and social scalability" Nick Szabo explains the tradeoff:

http://unenumerated.********.ca/2017...alability.html
To understand bitcoin you start with the fact that it cannot be brought down. And people ask if other coins might beat it and they don't understand the nature of the necessary evolution of security or the economic implications which I didn't touch in this post.

You can't bow out, i think there are few at your level of understanding of this paradigm. So to you, you might have used 'decentralized' to mean a p2p network that can provide poker, with the implication there would be a user interface provided.

Beyond that it stands to good reason this protocol would be open source and it might serve many different user interfaces. This is how it should be designed for maximal efficiency.

Absolutely. This must also be implicit in the philosophy of the design. It becomes a question such as, "what are the minimum requirements for a protocol implementation." And that direction also helps keep it maximally secure.

This is why I suggest there is some "core" aspect that is sharable among all sites, and that core would be the crux of a p2p poker protocol.

nash papers were boss. so cool to read his handwritten notes. thanks for sharing.

szabo link has problemo. I tried to post link after finding it myself and same thing happened.

The letters have an amazing insight which is not easy to recognize without the context, and I think we have approached it well enough in this thread. This movie scene is relevant:



The letters in this scene that Alicia tells him were never sent or received are the correspondence you just read. It is said I believe by Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir:

https://www.iacr.org/conferences/eur.../Rump/nash.pdf

Rivest and Shamir are relevant because they put together the problem of "mental poker" which the "noose protocol" is the solution to.

The insights in regard to unbreakable encryption is that math can be used to store value. These are among other interesting insights that he released at that time. "Parallel control"is paper about how we should go about designing the basis for AI. There is a special consideration in it in regard to decentralization and there is a use of a telecommunications network, so you can really see how far ahead he was of his time and which direction he was thinking: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/ran...008/RM1361.pdf

The paper expresses an insight about how to scale the system, and 70 years later we still aren't technologically advanced enough for this consideration-but we are approaching that time.

It might seem tangential to the dialogue but its quite relevant (I think I shall tie in, with a different post if that's acceptable).

Basically, tying it all together, we want to ask, as a group and community, what would happen if many or all poker sites had coinpoker's basic model, and they could then inflation/value target in regard to the price of their chips....what would happen if there was inter site stability between the value of the tokens?

And do we understand that question, have I expressed it intelligibly?

I believe this problem stems back to when noose was spamming links with dozens of accounts. What word is being filtered out? You'll have to put a space in somewhere to be able to tell me, of course.

I'll be interested to see how others feel, but to me your last half dozen posts or so have been quite unintelligible, kind of like we've regressed back a few accounts.

I think its "unenumerated" "********" dot "ca" edit b l og spot

I wasn't sure about coinpoker because I am not the best at reading "whitepapers", but now that the project has unfolded a little (and probably evolved internally), I realize that it is our perfect example. And for this it is probable that they have a REALLY sharp individual or team behind them.

Coinpoker now has millions of dollars in equity and a finite set of "chps" and this will allow them to control the market value from the players/investors perspective. They can buy or sell CHPs in order to (respectively) raise or lower the price of them.

So the players gain a new metric, like a technology, in regard to the respective price of the token of each site that uses this model, because they will in effect represent the underlying "honesty" of the issuers of the chips.

Much like how money on a free market would work. You don't need an audit the free markets create a price signal. Here Hayek is relevant:
https://****************.wordpress.c...dible-machine/
Hayek also wrote a thought experiment (The Denationalization of Money) on what would happen if there was no such monopoly on the money supplies which is quite conducive to this argument as well.

In regard to commodities, the price signals where they go, in regard to poker they would signal where the PLAYERS should go. It it is how the problem transmutes to poker.

Also part of the reason I am difficult to understand is I have been writing esoterically, and so the "key" is in the articles that I have written. The argument is very big, and its obviously far more helpful to open it in dialogue. But on the surface I think its so big that it seems "empty".

So the question to return to is...what happens if/when the tokens of these different emerging poker sites asymptotically trend towards exchange price stability?

I cant say I completely get it but with the backdrop of other articles posted, I kinda see where you are going. All interesting but maybe in theory only over the short term. But, many (all?) important things start out in some form of theory

Question though. Wouldn't what you describe benefit players in a larger degree than the sites? If so, what would the motivation be for sites (new or legacy) to bring this forward?


on another note. Nash stuff was fascinating including his handwritten notes on what seems to be a basic framework for AI (in the 1950's !!) Not sure what the right word is to describe him. Genius isn't strong enough.

I didn't know if he was still alive, so I asked Mr. Google. pretty sick how he and his wife died.

It's more than that. But you do him good service. I think perhaps you actually read the parallel control memo, because you are never otherwise inclined to agree with my assertions. On quick read one might try to argue that he wasn't describing AI, or advanced AI (its advanced), but if you give a careful read its quite obvious we have not reached the technology he describes. He was quite young when he wrote that, and the special insight hidden in that paper is about scaling. The relevance is that bitcoin has fostered a type of civil war in regard to scaling because satoshi locked bitcoin into an not scalable fashion and many are upset about it and blaming the currents devs. We could go over this problem and it would take time.

Nash died in a cab crash. He was coming home from an award ceremony in which he was a recipient. The limo didn't show so they had to take a cab. Some articles poke fun at him and give him a darwin award because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I can't remember properly, but iirc, there were articles I can't find now, that said the seatbelts actually weren't working.

The interesting observation is he died on the NJ turnpike. He spent 20 years giving talks around the world in regard to an international e currency with a stable supply that would usurp control of central banks. there were many versions of this argument and it was called "ideal money". The first version had an abstract that opened:
There is another point about axioms. We aren't there yet, but I will present it. If you have the proper axioms you can create something like the noose protocol simply from inquiry:


This few paragraphs will seem fluffy and empty:

This is the important one:


Its quite difficult, even for economists, to swallow. An already accepted axiom.

We should return to the question, the inquiry, if each site released a token, and the tokens trended towards perfect exchange stability, what would that mean?

There is another dialogue to be had that is very deep. I have only had it with one group that includes one incredibly sharp person. After many weeks we got to the insight and he was shocked. "It is very subtle" he said. And it is. But its also very big.

Another person previously, clearly reads his sources. I respect that. He made this post to show Nash's timeline: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?to...66#msg18502866

The big man travelled nation to nation giving his speech.

The poster said to me, "I'm sorry, you killed Nash" I don't think its true, and I hope its not. But he is the only other one to traverse the material.

We have to return to the question...

OK Agent Mulner

I am currently retaining the best medium I can find with proven experience in talking to the dead.

Simply want to ask Mr. Nash where his bitcoin keys are stored.

I'm assuming his bitcoins will buy me and lots and lots of pizzas. I like pizza.

If satoshi was benevolent his keys are lost forever. It took benevolence to solve the problems he did. There are even less bitcoins than people think. Let us return to the question...What happens when there is inter site stability between token token prices? Do we understand this question?