Hey,
Over the past days having discovered bitcoin has driven my mind wild. All this year I've been reading a lot about distributed networks. I was a programmer and I'm hugely interested in maths.
When we play Poker online, we are using a centralised network. You deposit your cash online, sit down at a game and play. You place your trust in the site to be secure; no other players can see your hands and no money is being secretly stolen from you. Even big name sites have been known to
cheat and smaller sites just shut down and steal your money.
There are two well known sites- PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. By being secure, they charge you excessive amounts to use their service. The market is monopolised by them since small sites are untrustworthy. This year I played on PokerStars and made $3k profit and payed $4.5k in rake- so I had to win $7.5k in total and hand over more than half my winnings to PokerStars.
Many players hate this.
A decentralised Poker network (using bitcoin). Here's the advantages:
+ Government heavily taxes Poker sites. Decentralised networks are outside the law.
+ No rake.
+ Don't need to place your trust in a company
+ Customise your client since you own the source!
+ No
tracker sites gathering statistics on your play against the rules of Poker
How could such a thing be implemented?
Mental poker is a scheme for neutrally verifying cards among players but is slow. Yet I imagine there's ways to speed it up by relying on trust/probabilistic methods.
The real problem is money put into the pot.
For those unfamiliar with Poker I'll explain: People bet on the strength of hands, and put money in a pot. After so many betting rounds, both players show their hands. The strongest hand wins the money put in the middle. How can this be decentralised?
The best scheme I imagined was if the pot was stored by a third party. We want to protect against collaboration so using the other players not involved in the hand at the table is not possible (5 of the 6 players on the table could be collaborating together and just steal your money). Each player could nominate a few escrows each that hold fractional amounts of the money. Since people disconnect (bad internet .etc), the escrows would need to be dedicated services.
6 players sit down at a table. Each nominates 2 escrow services that hold the money (12 in total). Player A and B start betting and putting money in the pot. $200 goes into 12 escrows or $17 each. After they show the hand everyone agrees player A won. But one escrow refuses to award their share of the $7 to A... Everyone at the table blacklists that escrow to never trust them again and alerts everyone else in the network. If the majority of the players at the table >50% agree that an escrow is bad, then everyone blacklists them.
This would be a great boost for bitcoin. My scheme is full of holes though. Looking for ideas.
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sorry someone just snapped them up.
