Quote:
Originally Posted by Gzesh
Okay, here is something to read up about.... you can start off the NVG crowdsourcing contribution to this effort:
1. How long does the ETH blockchain currently take to validate a transaction ?
2. Can the gameplay run on a side-chain, and would that minimize delay in the game, i.e. otherwise the game stays static every time a player makes a decision (which has to be communicated to all other players, active in a hand or not) for example ?
The poker market will require a solution better than chess-by-email speed.
1) Fairly long, and fairly expensively*. From a few seconds to minutes.
2) It would be a token base system with event calls logged in a contract. Things can be done asynchronously. There is some difficulty in encrypting and making this unexploitable. There are a few strategies involved with this. A sidechain would introduce trust, though making it public would be a step up from what we have now.
There are some examples of slot machines doing this. We are talking five years of development minimum for anything reliable. This is all new, and very hard. Ethereum has many EIP (Ethereum Improvement Projects) that will deprecate many things and add new functionality to make all of this easier. It's coming, but you have to wait.
To be honest, there's not a lot wrong with centralized systems that take crypto (besides risk of them running off with it). The price for tournaments of 10% is pretty high. I wouldn't expect it to be too much cheaper with Ethereum. There is a cost to building reliable infrastructure. I think the game of poker has gone the way of MTTs, so this will be possible. I think pokerstars will do just fine for the next ten years, but its day of reckoning will come.
*Edit: It's much more expensive to transact with a contract than to just send money. This is because you have to pay for data to replicated on every computer in the world running a node and keeping an up to date blockchain. In ethereum a call to a contract can cost many dollars depending on what you are asking the contract to do. If you are just sending value (Ether), then the gas cost is the minimum. If you offer a low gas price, a miner might process for even free, but usually it's a few cents these days, and .10-.25 if you want it confirmed very fast.
The reason an event log is a good idea is because an event log is a feature built into the Ethereum Virtual Machine to log things with a far lower amount of gas. It also costs nothing to just ask a contract what the state of a variable is because it's already written to the blockchain. There are more features coming in regards to logs and the way the EVM works. If anyone feel passionate about Ethereum, I urge you to participate in the discussions on github. You can shape the future with your opinion and use case. Programmers are a funny bunch, we don't often think outside our box, but are open to new ideas that are better.
Last edited by hmm422; 08-04-2017 at 11:04 PM.