Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I want to present the project I'm curently working on, I'm aiming to finish the MVP (currently at 80%).

Who am I?
I'm a Software Engineer, currently I have a full time job as Software Engineer (Java, PHP, node.JS, AWS mainly).

What is this project about?
Cryptocheckers is a place where users can play checkers competetively (10x10 board) online against other people (real persons) placing bets. For example, you start a match and get paired, you are in the betting room for (0.0005BTC), let's suppose you win, you will get +0.0005BTC to your account, if you loose, you lost the btc, simple as that. But, the beauty of this is it's not like a casino games where everything depends upon pure luck, and in the long run the casino always wins due the house edge, in this case, it's a skill based game, the more experience and skill you have, the more chances you have to win, its a skill that can be developed and improved.

Team & Time spent developing current state
So, currently I'm the only one and I've been working on this over a year now, since I cant spend all the time I would like to since I have a full time job, but, if this project works and succeeds I will take the decision to leave my job and work on this project fully and even start other skill based games.

Some Images:
Register
https://i.ibb.co/GsjD82Z/image.png (https://ibb.co/gvC8fT0)

Profile (Needs pulishment)
https://i.ibb.co/Pwk4yLJ/image.png (https://ibb.co/GcmkD6G)


Game Client - Waiting
https://i.ibb.co/4pY6xby/image.png (https://ibb.co/BBrXRhD)

Fees:
There will be a small fee that only the winner has to pay, the looser won't pay any fee. The fee is not decided but at the beggining it will be very low. Anyway, I'm open to ideas and changes, so lets talk!

Game Client - In Game
- Abandon button needs ui work
- Right panel showing the moves also needs more work

https://i.ibb.co/nLMF6gb/image.png (https://ibb.co/4VRHKm7)

Currently Working Features
Website:
- Login
- Register
- Deposit
- Cashout
- Profile (needs some UI work)
- Referring users - You get paid for users who registered under you and play.

Game:
- Matching engine (match players based on their betting room) - This will also be improved, the pairing system will be done with a ELO ranking syste, to make matches more fair.
- Play the game
- Decide Win, loss, tie by one of the following conditions:
-- Opponent has no more pieces left
-- All opponent pieces are blocked
-- Tie after 25 movements without a piece being eaten
- Recover/Panic mode: The state of all board are stored every 3 seconds, in case a server dies, the state of the boards are stored and can be recovered automatically
- Abandon the game
- Turn timeout
- Strike System, when you miss your turn you get striked, at 3 strikes you get kicked and lose automatically
- Sounds: When your opponent finishes turn you get notified with sound

The Game itself is mostly done, where most of the work needs to be done is on the website and UI.

Missing Features
- Homepage
- Pulish profile
- Add more social elements (like having a friend list)
- Add a chat to the game (maybe?)
- Ideas are welcome (?)
- Add Google NoCaptcha V3 to check humanity without interrupting the user flow

Those in bold are required to deliver the MVP

Infraestructure
- Self hosted rancher+kubernetes solution to orchestrate containers
- Website backend: Java + Springboot
- Game Backend: Node.JS + Socket.IO
- Game Caching: MongoDB
- UI: Bootstrap + VUE.JS
- Domain (.IO), SSL Certificates (https), Quality Email Service (AWS SES - no emails going to spam directly!) all set up.

Business Inquieres
You want to invest? or maybe you are up to a partnership please contact me privately, I'm open to investment, partnerships.

Hiring Frontend Engineers
So, I'm a Backend Engineer, and my Frontend/UI work sucks hard, I can't pay much but maybe we can come up to an agreement, please contact me privately.

Please, I would like to get some feedback from the community, if it's a good idea, if it could work, I also will need some people for beta testing, I will use this thread to let you know when I need beta testers. Don't hesitate to ask questions or give ideas/improvements! I hadn't much time to post more pictures.

The game based from the images looks bearable at this point but my main concern about betting games like this is they do need to have a license first before they legally operate in a betting game. So my question is are you already licensed and if you are what is the jurisdiction that grant license for you? Since I didn't see any mention about the legality of your game I am presuming that you are still unlicensed for it so I think you should also manage some time in getting it before you even try to make your website officially running.

Isn't checkers the same as chess in the respect that they can be "move generated"? Aren't their programs online that give you the solution to a certain board, and would help people cheat against other opponents?


Like for example, on chess.com there are anti cheating software that is used to help detect against people cheating, but even then it is not always found.

Thanks for reply. I would not say, "Bearable", There is some more progress than in the pictures.

And about the license, you are right, I'm not an legal expert, but I had in mind no license, not sure if it's needed since, it's not gambling nor "real betting", it's not like sport where you bet for a team, or you gamble against the casino, not sure if this applies here, here in Spain cryptocurrency is not considered as a currency. Maybe there could be a legal void to workaround? Like using different terms, or buying something in the website that allows you to play, something like coins that have 1:1 value tied to bitcoin, not sure.


I was totally unaware of this, honestly. How could I write a cheating software to detect something like this? maybe like a trust system?

And btw, no one told me yet if its a good idea and if you would use this kind of service, would appreciate this feedback.

I would stop you right there. Any game that involves players putting some money on it to win is considered as gambling. No matter what you call it may it be as a wager, bet, or prize money it still counts as gambling and you need a gambling license to legally operate your Checkers game. Now I would understand if players doing side bets externally from your website but if bets/wagers are done internally which involves the use of your website then it counts as gambling. You may also think that “Checkers” might not be a normal game for gambling that's why you think there is a exemption but the thing about gambling is it involves money and that's it.

Yea, make sense, then I think I can just throw this away and work on another idea. Could I still sell this project to someone interested, you know some place where I can sell this? I mean, I invested over a year of my time into this, ofcourse it started as a side project to learn, but it started to grow and grow until I got this idea, but well, not wasted at all.

Quick question, all bitcoin casinos or gambling site with crypto do they have licene? all of them?

You cannot combat cheating.   A person can use a second PC to run a checkers game and you would never know.

It will come down to who has the best computer program. 

Most of the cheating software revolves around predicting the best possible move to maximize the chances of winning depending on the current state of the board.

This software doesn't need to access the website, since somebody could easily run a separate client and manually input the piece positions to calculate the optimal result.

There is really nothing you can do to prevent this, and this is one of the reasons why there are few platforms that offer wager-based simple board games like this.

OP don't give up so easy.  There's always complications, you've gotta look how to get past that - especially I've you've dumped a year of your time into it.

What about the regulatory systems of different parts of the world?  There's a bunch of places that either have super lax licensing or don't have it at all.  If you domicile your company there and are "regulated" by them, that could be a solution.

Also if you can make the game fully decentralized and autonomous then anyone that wants to play can make deposits into the smart contract required and you have your hands off the steering wheel.

Anyway, maybe you should pivot, or maybe you should keep going, but you shouldn't base your decisions off the opinions of other people at the early stage you're at.

That's bad advice.  People cheat (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2834153.0), and that's not an opinion.

Thanks all for the good words. Not sure what to do next based on the opinions but I think they're right.

The problems:
- Legal
- Cheating

Is it really needed to have a company setup and any regulation at all? I mean, i'm not handling usd deposits, only crypto. Here in Spain crypto are not considered an asset.

Cheating, there is probably no way around this, maybe some kind of trust system?

Anyway, maybe I'll give it a go to sell it, if not, I just jump to another idea.

Checkers is a solved game (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game). A computer playing perfectly knows every possible outcome of every possible board permutation and every possible move, and so therefore will never lose (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12296-checkers-solved-after-years-of-number-crunching/). Two computers playing perfectly against each other will draw every time, but a perfect computer will almost always win against a human.

There is nothing you can do prevent cheaters online. Online chess sites are riddled with them. Introduce a monetary component, and your site will quickly become overrun with them.

It looks like you've put a good amount of work in to this project, and I'm always happy to see original ideas for incorporating bitcoin in to various sites and services, but unfortunately I don't think this is sustainable. As mentioned above, there is a reason that fiat gambling sites don't offer games like this.

I see lot of the comments posted above address the current problems you have but no one really gave you a solution. The cheating problem exists, Yes! Can it be solved? Obviously! There are a lot of ways, you can prevent a bot from accessing the game or pretending to be a user. Something as simple as a video must be important for both the users playing the game or you run your game into an Iframe with secure inputs or dynamic html tag names to prevent it from bots.

All meaningless. Even if you come up with a system which will 100% prevent bots from playing (which is not possible), I could simply open a second window or even set up a second machine out of shot of the video, copy all my opponent's moves against a computer program, and then simply mirror the move the computer makes against my real opponent.

Thanks Patatas, Making sure that a bot will  not access to the game is actually not that complicated, (I could trigger a captcha each 5 min, or randomly during the game) my concers is what other users mentioned, third party software where you can input current state of a board and the user would just copy that over to the site, how could I solve this issue?

I saw some comment of a guy in chess.com proposing a solution.

If a user always does the "perfect move" then it might could indicate that the user is cheating, but could it be the case of a real user making the perfect move always in row?  whats the chance of that happening?

Anyway I'm happy to see people supporting and liking the idea, but I need a solution to the mentioned above

Captcha doesn't protect you against bots, it just makes it slightly costly to bypass it, but when money are at stake, it's absolutely worth it to do so, you can buy thousands of captchas for a few bucks.

And as for people cheating, you really can't prevent it, and because of that the game isn't fair, it's probably better to do to a dice site that has an edge, but is open and verifiable about it, instead of risking getting cheated on in a pvp game. The only solution is to choose/create a game that doesn't have any AI that plays it better than humans.

AI will always come in the lead for the mere fact that they are trained on/for a dataset that will be beyond human experience/capability. Dota 2, for example, has no "moves" to it. Everything is "Dynamic" yet OpenAI which was trained for a few weeks came forward and beat the world's best^[1] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBEidvm_tZQ). Here is a quote from OpenAI blog^[2] (https://openai.com/blog/openai-five-defeats-dota-2-world-champions/) regarding the timeframe the bot spent on learning.


Same happened with "Go", this game was thought to be something which AI's can never be good at, But then came "AlphaGo" and beat the best of us. Currently, AlphaGo has the lead. AIs given enough training time will always come in the lead as they are less prone to making errors and have tons of experience on their back. I believe there will be no game in which humans will come out top. AIs will always take the lead.

As for OP, I believe there is still a chance for his project. He could make this project for friends who want to play against each other. People who trust each other enough that they won't screw each other via cheating could use a service like OPs but then again the People who OP will target will be very small in numbers. Another way to use his project could be, OP could make this a faucet of sorts. Teaching people how to Play checkers and at the same time get rewarded... But if there isn't a way to sustain this project then it's better to kill/sell^[3] (https://flippa.com/sell) it than operate it at a loss.

---

Sources:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBEidvm_tZQ
[2] https://openai.com/blog/openai-five-defeats-dota-2-world-champions/
[3] https://flippa.com/sell

You can be running a program that analyzes moves like chess.com

However you would only be able to tell that there was cheating after the game, so if you wager money a pending period would have to come into play. This is more of a pain than it is worth though because the anti cheating software won't pick up every single game, and so people will cheat and win money until they are banned and then will remake an account.

How do you make your game be trustless. How do you (developer) prevent you to pretend a player who have the outstanding advantages over real players. That make you easy win

+1 to this one, you are 100% right, I wanted to say the same. Opponent can manipulate your moves and then copy computer's moves against you so this game can be the most unfair one for playing online.
There was also one project - velocitychess.com where you were able to play with bitcoin and vcash (their coin which you could exchange in btc) against opponents but they went down. I think there is no big demand on it and doesn't worth to waste time on developing this game. Velocity was popular compared to others but mostly people were playing with insanely low amount of money, with 1-2 cents.

I agree.  Just wanted to point out - AIs will not make any errors - they will act as programmed, and if they do something wrong, it's because we made an error programming it.

This is why manual drive cars will be gone before 2050.  If a car makes a mistake, a programming fix will make sure it never happens again.  Humans make the same mistakes over and over no matter what they learn.

How long until AIs can solve modern captchas anyway?  A year?  Two?

What I meant by "errors" is that the AI at the end of the day relies on the Operating system, Sensors, etc. These can often fail but the failure of these is often placed upon failure of the AI itself. Besides that, the whole concept of AI is that they have incomparable experience in different situations which may arise. I do agree with you that if AI was trained on "bad" inputs/variables it will fail because of Human failure but not the failure of itself. E.g Never training a Driving AI on Icy roads and then expecting it to nail the driving is a bit of stretch.


Tesla's are the future its just a matter of time before the transition is made.


You know what's funny. The captchas we are solving today are actually being used to train the AIs, So these do exist already if technically speaking but they are few in number and not for public use just yet...

I totally disagree with the captcha thing. Google has it's noRecaptcha v3 that doesn't require any human intervention to solve a captcha, it just intercepts user behaviour and analyzes it to determine whetever its a bot or a human, so in that sense someone plugin in an automatic software to the website I would discard that option.

My concern is that you could indeed just go to a checkers solver website, paste the current board state, solve it and then just "copy and paste" the moves, that would indeed be something that I couldn't know.

I was thinking of the possibility to check whetever the user always does the perfect move, but then I have another problem, could it just be that someone really experienced can hit 10x times the perfect move in a row? or is it because he is using some assistance.

And te thing with driving cars is a bit offtopic, but, you an't "fix" a mistake on an AI, what you can do is train them with thousands of datasets. And I will say, they won't be perfect and never be, there are thousands of billions of combinations of real life situations an AI can't be trained because peope working on that just don't have that large set of real life combinations, what indeed will happen is as people drive these cars, they learn, and learn, but that's something but will take years to perfection, so no, automatic cars won't be perfect, and it will take time to be perfect, if they can get at that point.

Absolutely, particularly when you are down to a few pieces left on the board and there aren't that many available moves. It could also be that a user could make several good-but-not-perfect moves, as dictated to by their computer software, to aid in avoiding being detected as cheating. Although the perfect set of moves will always win against a human, a good set of moves will still win almost all the time (certainly enough to turn a huge profit), while being significantly harder to detect.