To start off with I'd like to thank everyone who has supported CypherPoker whether materially, in spirit, or otherwise. I'm amazed and thankful for the attention and excitement that the project has generated.
I was genuinely surprised that this subreddit managed to gather as many members as it has given that I didn't do much to advertise it. With one of my blogs, Toronto City Life, now heading into its 8th year (yikes!), I'm all too well aware of how difficult it is to find an audience let alone an interested community. To this end I have to extend extra thanks to certain members of the Bitcoin community for stoking the fire.
I'm also very happy to report that my local CypherPoker family has grown. Earlier this month I was approached by two gentlemen with a keen interest in the game and a willingness to support its further development. The fact that this support included a financial aspect was a great relief – Sarah and I have been living on vapours for some time now and the loss of my job a few months ago certainly didn't help the situation.
Kamal and Ben, the two gentlemen in question, have also provided some excellent input that has provided me with avenues to move beyond some of the looming roadblocks of the project.
With the completion of the main game code I began looking at cryptocurrency integration. For some time I've been mentioning an escrow system of some sort as being a part of the solution but didn't have too many details to go along with it. Skeptics pointed out that collusion could be a big problem for game verification and settlement but I put such comments on the back burner until I was ready to tackle the problem. Still, the commenters had some good points.
As I usually do, I started sketching out some pencil-and-paper concepts to see how the problem could be tackled. I would need something decentralized and highly collusion-resistant but every time I thought I had hit on a custom solution I was able to figure out a way to manipulate it. Maybe the solution would be found elsewhere.
An immutable blockchain-based system seemed like a good way to fill in some of the gaps so next I started looking into a purely Bitcoin-based solution. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the non-Turing-complete Script language (
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script), was far too limited to perform the necessary mathematical operations, not to mention that the brevity of storage available on the Bitcoin blockchain would become a problem very quickly.
It was around this time that Kamal and Ben suggested that maybe smart contracts might be the way to go. I admitted that my experience with such technology was extremely limited but with the present dearth of alternatives it would certainly be worth a look.
Not wanting to put the carriage before the horse I'm not going to get into which particular solution we've been focusing on but the initial testing is looking extremely promising.
I'm sure that anyone following the project will be wondering what kind of timeline we're looking at so this is the part where I put on my prognostication hat. The project is pretty much all uncharted territory so it's important that I accompany any predictions with a big caveat but based on what I know I expect to have a working proof of concept in early 2016.
Working around the limitations of the smart contract solution will take a little longer and I'm sure that we'll want to do plenty of testing before releasing any such solution, but if I were being forced to provide a date for this I would guesstimate some time around April of next year.
Besides ideas and support, our new partners are providing some of the other desperately needed pieces to the puzzle so I have good reason to expect that 2016 will be a banner year for the CypherPoker project.
Personally I'm elated that we're able to vault the hurdles we're discovering as we go along and moreover that people are seeing some of the same possibilities that I've envisioned since the beginning of this endeavour. Even if we have to push certain technologies to their limits I'm more confident now than ever that the totality of the project is achievable, and I look forward to sharing the details with you once the wrinkles have been ironed out.
Once again I want to offer my heartfelt thanks for your continued support and feedback. Without you, producing a peer to peer game of any kind probably wouldn't make much sense.
Wishing you a sincerely restful and joyous holiday, and may the new year bring with it as many blessings as have been bestowed on me.
Patrick
