Bitcoin Forum

I'm exploring the notion of Bitcoin as a tool for smart contracts as they apply to online games. So far all online gaming is done through central servers. The rules for poker are clear and should be easy enough to program into a decentralized contract. The roles of the dealer would need to be enforced as well as the players so all players share equal stake and a dealer that quit would be penalized. Confederacy would need to be eliminated through randomization and anonymization. Thoughts?

Forgive me for being naive, but why would bitcoin make that possible? Wouldn't you be able to do that without bitcoin?

The notion of bitcoin, to be precise. The idea is to use public-key cryptography for decentralization as I got it (so no need for central servers as such). The purpose is to make the game presumably more fair and also lower fees, if I'm not mistaken.

Good question. I had never heard of smart contracts before the advent of Bitcoin. They are the foundation of Bitcoin 2.0 development. I would like to know how it can be done using decentralized and distributed provably fair consensus contracts outside traditional Tort law.

Isn't this the basic thought behind ethereum? One of the uses of ethereum may be online gaming.
But where does game theory come into your question?

I suppose Ethereum could be used for the game design when it is released, but the cryptographic security would still require a staked cryptocurrency. Game theory is central to all decentralized and distributed operations. Currently only centralized solutions are used for the strategic decision making wrt gambling. They will require a consensus scheme that creates trustless fair play. Game theory also needs to deal with cheating and metadata, so additional security measures will be required. I'm sure there are other issues created by making games decentralized.

So far, nobody has come even close to creating such a device. Yet this may be a crucial implementation for Bitcoin acceptance as a technology.

Apparently this is the wrong forum. The Bitcoin 2.0 forums have discussions about these.