A race to the bottom is not a good thing for those whose returns from their efforts are pushed downward.

"Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVRqiaClhhY

The race is in regard the COST of production and it can be counted on like moore's law but better. It sends us on a cooperative effort to make more efficient energy. It's strong and apolitical (politically neutral).

Sorry for double posting mods;

Fiat means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money "let it be done"

https://medium.com/@rextar4444/a-bit...l-2e1378e77849

^^^uh, that last post wasn't me and can be deleted (or not), its in the wrong thread anyways

In regard to bots. Could we identify a gto strategy if could see all of a certain players hole cards? Because I think if we could then we would have solved poker. It seems it would take a bot to know a bot by identifying the spots the suspect played a certain degree of differently from how the detective bot would (perhaps that's not even good enough). Regardless, the cheater could dial down their bot so that it is not so profitable that it gets caught. Bots seem not very detectable.

Moreover, I think we can compare bots to bitcoin miners, as they are trading computational effort for transferable utility (money if we consider bitcoin and crypto-currencies money). And in this sense the old mantra truly applies, they are generating rake (regardless of whether the operator prefers to have bots or not).

Consider a randomly seated pool of bots playing in a wild wild west field. I think these bots wouldn't grind to the point of the games being -ev for them (assuming they all basically have the same winrates). This was actually one project's solution (Pokereum) which used random seating as part of their cryptographic protocol security algorithm.

Thinking of this as the base layer, then it should be, since its randomly seated, decentralized in a certain fashion. And this would allow for a proper jury pool for hand validation (obviously you would have bot pools arise).

The extra step on top of Pokereum is that this layer of bots secures the cryptography for the layer above it-private sites.

It COULD be done such that the private sites subsidize the underlying bot layer which would still be an obviously incredible net savings to the industry.

I basically conceived this before ethereum was implemented (probably not before I read of it).

The resolving consideration is the equilibrium between the profits bots could make minning either ethereum (or other crypto-coins) or playing/minning poker.


I have one more post to make buts completely tangental so I want to seperate it. But its quite interesting and would like PTLou and Gzesh especially to consider it...gimme a sec to write it up.

Thinking about bots or cheaters and how they cannot be stopped. I've made the conjecture, or shown, that Coinpoker's (for example as the first of more to come with this token model) token CHP's will have an exchange value that highlights the honesty or value of the underlying operations from the players perspective (where players act also as investors in the sense that they benefit from the CHP's they hold). So if there were a ton of cheating such that the games were tending towards GTO, this would show in the value trend of the token.

If that is agreeable then it could be shown that a site like ACR could be made more honest if regulators FORCED them to tokenize.

This would have significant ramifications for not only the poker industry but I think the regulations that get applied to emerging token model businesses.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I have what I hope are some practical questions.

1. As others have asked, will this new model be accepted and/or understood by enough players to work? I don't doubt that the idea/mechanics/tech can work.

I will use driverless cars as an example. It's a great idea. Without a doubt, fewer people will die in vehicular accidents. Computers don't get drunk, or tailgate, or drive too fast when there is snow and/or ice on the roads, or flip off other drivers. That said, I've seen videos of people taking their first ride in a driverless car and many of them were scared. It's a great idea whose time may have not yet come.

People don't understand crypto. Some think that it's shady, or must be illegal. I've talked to college students who don't know what Bitcoin is. My wife, who has a high-powered job for one of the big health-care companies, didn't know what Bitcoin was when I mentioned it.

2. In the current poker model, poker sites are regulated by a country, state, or some other governmental entity. We all know that legislation doesn't keep up with technology, and that governments don't like to give up power. How is that going to work? If governments try to regulate something that they can't control and don't understand, that could get really messy.

Is that part of the idea, to do an "end run" around government? The example that comes to mind is Uber. Taxis have to be licensed in most US cities or states, but Uber pulled off their end run by becoming popular so quickly that they became too entrenched and too popular for governments to stop.

3. I want poker transactions to be efficient and fair, and I want to make money. That's it. It's my job and it's all about the benjamins. Most players aren't like me. They want to play because they saw someone make a million dollars on TV, or because it looks like fun or because a retired football player that they like does it. Or maybe they want a chance to play against the pro that represents the site.

4. What about general site friendliness? Will there be weird avatars, E-mails congratulating players when they cash, and all the other cutsie stuff that some beginners like? I don't need or want any of that, just give me space for my HUD stats (very important to me*) and I'm fine. I must disclose, however, that I've been forwarding congratulatory E-mails to my wife for more than 10 years and she still likes getting them.

I'm concerned that if it's a great idea and all about the tech, but the look and feel is boring, it won't work. You're competing for people like my son, who has played poker a few times but plays Call of Duty every day.

How about this: Have a toggle to show or hide the cute stuff (as with a four/color deck option.) Have fireworks on the screen when someone wins a tournament or whatever. Juicy Stakes poker gives me an applause sound when I win a hand, but when I win a tournament I just get a few words on the screen telling me that I won. That's kind of odd.

If Virtue Poker had a toggle option I would just turn the "extras" off, unless I had a cat in my lap. Vanessa Rousso likes to watch fireworks on the screen.

One last question. Will you be open to player input? PokerStars at one time had a player committee that they sat down with and listened to.

One easy way to do this would be regular online player surveys. Ask people what they like and don't like, what they would like to add or get rid of, etc. Of course you would want to include all player levels. Someone who plays for fun and loses money will have very different concerns than someone whos makes a six-figure annual profit.

--------

*On some sites it's hard to find a good space for my HUD. I only have ten stats. Many players have a lot more than that.

All these questions are covered in he proceeding dialogue. You could traverse this thread backwards. I suspect you haven't and the last 3 to 10 pages would probably be quite interesting for you if you haven't.

noose gets paid by the word. so not much in cliff notes form from him

so here or cliffs.

Everything you say about Coin Poker and other decentralized or partially decentralized, crypto-ish type sites is true from a practical and business standpoint.

Most of what noose says about Coin Poker and other decentralized or partially decentralized, crypto-ish type sites is true from a theoretical, white paper standpoint.

Somewhere between theoretical and reality might lie a great online poker industry and some hope for the dis-enfranchised online grinding souls murdered by amayastars, regulatory burdens, scammers, and bots.

Other than that lots of detailed convo on various aspects of the above, but thats about it.

The barriers are many. First though you need a stable currency which seems unlikley for a long time. Nobody is going to be happy deposititng $100 worth of bitcoin, running it up to $200 and withdrawing $40 because the coin crashed in the meantime.

Firstly you wouldn't need to "deposit". Even on sites you do it would be quite trivial to set up the ability to hold your funds in any currency. Coinpoker for example also has the ability to inflation target anything with a price. You really haven't addressed to content of the thread, and your complaints are well solved.

You might want consider what you mean by "politically neutral".

The race to the bottom involves both the overall cost of production and the ability of each factor, capital and labor, to extract compensation from the revenue to be realized from sale of the service or product produced.

A more cost efficient production process itself says nothing about how revenues therefrom are distributed between the two production inputs of capital and labor.

It is striking that, in the context of your discussing a game that requires liquidity, i.e. a large number of participants, there seems a bias toward the Billionaire Boys Club rather than a mass-market customer base.

How two economists solve opening a can of soup:

1. First assume a can opener.
2. Apply can opener
3. QED

One person's solution of something "quite trivial" can raise a huge number of problems and considerations, both legal and business related.

Reasonable question ....

Ironically, I think you hit on the one issue in the prospective crypto-denominated poker market that is not really a customer issue.

If "the meantime" means while someone is actually engaged in playing poker, I think such a risk averse person is probably not someone who would hold crypto in the first place or gamble it on poker

Spot-rate deposits and withdrawals being available between different deposit/playing currencies nevertheless would generally resolve the "currency risk while playing" danger you describe.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. My intention and suggestion is that the smartest players will understand all this first. And that's who we want lead the industry (rather than those that would sell the idea that more rake is better).

There is some misunderstanding here. I've I am player and I were to deposit on a crypto/decentralized "site" (which there is no real reason to deposit), if I wanted to hold my assets in USD, that could be a very simple program/transaction. It's just an exchange and there are many exchanges that do this.

There is no proper complaint that a "decentralized" solution would imply a volatile bank roll.

For example if you wanted USD stability you could exchange for USDT (tether's).

1. See post 963 above yours. Cliffs: Not likely a problem for the market of prospective poker players.

2. Odd example of a hedge, compared to just withdrawal back to whatever crypto was brought to the game.

Ah, right, I read it right now.

I use USDT as an example of why "crypto-poker" is not necessarily volatile.

Anyways I made the conjecture or observation that with a model like Coinpoker, and many such sites arising onto a fairly free market of exchange, the price will effectively reflect underlying honesty of the respective site.

If I have explained my reasoning well enough, we can think of a time when the players begin to favor sites that have this token price metric. At this point its theory, but its a very strong and significant theory. It is very akin to what would happen if you put our national currencies on a free market. Allowing for proper arbitrage, the prices of them would lose a distortion of their signal. At the equilibrium a signal is created or observable that we never otherwise could have access to.

So in the (near) future as the player base learns to trust sites that have the best pricing trend signal, I think that there could be reasonable dialogue held on the topic of regulators pressuring legacy sites to tokenize as a form of very strong regulation.

Sites like ACR, if the cheating allegations are true, would have that dishonesty reflected in the price trend of their token.

I get your point that the price trend of a sites token will inherently reflect its overall perception/success in the market. Good site.. token goes up. Bad site token goes down.

But why complication it ? How about active daily users determining a sites overall perception/success in market. Good site, more active daily users. Bad sites fewer active daily users.

Why muddy the waters with more complicated topic of token inflation/deflation?
For example, you could have bad site that manipulates its token value. Thus bad site, but token price goes up. flaw.

Thats the thing. In today's world the users active doesn't necessarily reflect the quality. It's nowhere near a free market. And the payment processing frictions are responsible for that. In world where there is no cost and no time involved in transferring sites you have a more arbitraged market. These things distort the price signal. The price signal is the true liquidity catalyst. It is something we have never had or seen. It signals for the herd where to go, those that otherwise "don't care about rake".

Not on a free market. This is the most important point. On a free market, it is a given, that the price signals cannot be distorted or manipulated for the gain of the issuing bank. It becomes our axiom.

I think your bolded statement above is about as wrongly held a belief as is possible, as to that set of site users.

You do not understand either the nature and importance of player liquidity, or history of the online poker market nor past examples of nearly friction-less ability to transfer bankrolls between sites*.

Your last couple of posts have gone off a dangerous elitist deep end as well: you want certain game-skilled players to lead the industry, you characterize the rest of poker players as "the herd". (I know a few very highly skilled game players, some have really excellent poker industry judgment, others do not. )

Online poker is a matter of numbers, what you decry as a "herd" are individual players making decisions about where they want to play. They may have any number of reasons for their choices, the market makes the aggregate determination but there are undeniable liquidity effects at play.

(*I get it that you are not really Nelson Rose, you just like to play him on 2+2 sometimes.)

I said in a world with no fees and instant transactions, the liquidity is increased, and this will reflect the quality of the site. I doubt you would deny that processing fees and time add a noise that wouldn't be their otherwise. Or do you?

I would understand this, but that is why I suggest that the player archetypes that are chosen are significant in "solving" the poker problem. I think a "good player" or "intelligent" or "skilled" player implies a certain amount of care for the game. And that those players in the future run or the free market will do better than those "sharks" that are skilled but shrewd in regard to the their contribution to the industry and/or the recreational players that are seeking entertainment (albeit through an attempt at skill).

So there are those specific players that are good in an industry fostering way, that I encompass in my definition of "pro". Then I think we might be more on the same page.
The conjecture is that price will lead everyone. And they are only "sheep" in the sense that they traditionally have not cared about rake, or especially underlying and hidden effective rake. The price of the token reflects the effective rake which is a very special transparency from the players view.

Not sheep to a slaughter, sheep to greener fields. But fields they would never know to migrate to without the signal that will be observable. It will be a ticker on 2p2 perhaps.

Your "conjecture" fails to account for the price/value of playing poker for a vast segment of the prospective market.

1. WSEX ran rake-free poker; it did not fare well. Your conjecture is based upon a limited view of how poker players view the "price" of playing in terms of their user experience.

2. Shoehorning "everything" that is less than optimal in your view into what you categorize as "underlying and hidden effective rake" may sound good in your modeling, especially as to players who would otherwise profit in its absence. However, it is not a good shorthand, not adequately include recreational players ....

"Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity" requires offering entertainment as a value received

3. Using pejorative terms like "sheep" to describe less-skilled poker players is both elitist and offensively misses the point of what makes a successful poker economy. I once canned a marketing director because he could not grasp the need to respect players/customers, especially those who likely contributed the most to the poker economy.

I'm not so concerned with rake free poker, but we should be able to collectively admit that the less rake an operator is able to charge the better it is for the profitability of the game. But this isn't just rake as a % but effective rake, which includes many things. It's complex which is why you need a free market driven price to evaluate each site.

Recreational players and especially the ratio to pros is definitely considered in what becomes the price signal. On two otherwise equal sites if one site is soft and the other is not very profitable, the tokens from the former become dearer.

I don't mean to use sheep like that. There is the players boycott problem we described, a game theorist cannot justify boycotting when the boycotting simply causes the game they are boycotting to get softer.

Sheep in the sense I mean, is simply that large population or field of players that won't move to the higher equilibrium because they cannot cooperatively do so-they MUST be lead to non-cooperatively do so. That is what this new technology does, it creates a signal for self interest actors.

I absolutely believe sites and pro's have an interest and duty to serve and entertain the recreational players.

This is a weird position for me to be in. I'm usually the early adopter of any new technology. I studied computer science before people had computers in their homes, and before my college had a modem. I wrote my programs on a dumb terminal connected to the mainframe. My first home computer cost $2,000 and I had to make payments on it. I had to write programs in BASIC* so that it would do the things I wanted it to do, for example, printing labels.

Now I feel like the Luddite in this crowd.
-------

*Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, one of the first computer languages.

Our first family home computer when I was a little kid in the early 80's used BASIC, it was a BBC micro model B. Those were the days! I struggle to understand some of this thread though although I have bought a bit of crypto just to speculate. Makes you wonder where we'll be in another 30 years at this rate.