Bitcoin Forum

hi all,

I think I have a solution to the following two problems with current provably fair gambling sites:

1) in off-chain sites, the site can cheat the user trivially in such a way that the user will know
immediately he'd been cheated, but will not be able to prove it to third parties.
(e.g., the site can just update the balance arbitrarily or pretend the user had bet on a different outcome)
(see this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311404.0), full of flame and troll)

2) For those sites that attract investors  for a share of profit/loss (such as just-dice), there is currently no
way to prove to the investors that the site is fair; for example, the site owner could
play anonimously and win arbitrary large amounts (damaging investors).

The solution would require third parties to run an auditing service online. Of course
they will not be able to manipulate the game, only to verify fairness. I imagine
different gambling sites running an auditing service for each other, or large
investors running  such a  service themselves.

The cryptography of the proposed solution is quite different from what is currently
used; instead of hashing it would be based on signatures.

Since writing up the complete proposal takes considerable time, I will do it only if someone is actually interested in implementing it.
COding this will require substantially more work than for any of the current solutions;
in particular, user-side JS cryptographic signatures (kind of like on blockchain.info) will have
to be implemented.

Please let me know here or by PM if you are interested.

That's not how it works, usually. You implement and if people find it interesting, they might use it.


This has been implemented already, see https://github.com/bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib, http://kjur.github.io/jsrsasign/, and google for other sources.

that's just one way of making things work.