Bitcoin Forum

While I was eating a cheeseburger yesterday, I had a bit of a eureka moment. Current dice sites have a house edge that makes them ultimately unprofitable if one plays long enough. They can also be shut down by authorities, hacked, or the site operater can run away with users' funds. But what about a decentralized peer-to-peer dice betting system? There would be no need for a house edge because there would be no "house". The total number of bitcoins in the system would stay the same although some players will emerge as winners and others as losers. Users would be playing against each other (i.e. for every winning bet there would be an equivalent losing bet) and the behavior of its participants could be enforced using some sort of protocol that rejects attempts to manipulate the system.

What do you think about this? It should be plausible at least in theory, no?

Without some sort of "house edge" or "rake" of some kind...how do you give incentive to people for participating in the p2p dice betting system if they aren't interested in gambling?