what is Pangea?
It's a project that was started in November 2014........still awaiting completion....don't hold your breath waiting for completion.....there are plenty of online poker sites that work already
Cheers Jon
Pangea was started by a different team, but they ran into some technical issues and during the bear market disbanded.
I agreed to take over the development under the condition that it not impact the other things I needed to get done. It did have a GUI and a working alpha release about 2 years ago, but then the NXT thing happened, and KMD dPoW, notary nodes, pax, 5% APR, hacker attacks, LP nodes, barterDEX and a few other things intervened.
Anyway, I have generalized the decentralized card shuffling/dealing to handle any number (up to 255) and many more players (32 to 64) than needed for normal poker. The generalized gaming platform will be under privatebet (BET assetchain), which is 60% owned by JUMBLR. So this rather directly relates at this point.
I am still in the process of finalizing the low level protocol, but the test programs are creating random sized decks with random number of players and shuffling/dealing faceup/facedown pretty well. The protocol has an externally generated encrypted deck that is combined with a deterministic shuffle based on every player's shuffling (with a commitment step to prevent there being any "last player" to shuffle).
What this means is that prior to the revealing of the player's shuffle after the commitment step, nobody will know the ordering of the cards. Afterwards, all players will know the order in the encrypted deck. But it is encrypted. To decrypt (and to solve any player disconnect issues), when dealing each card the MofN shards (using shamirs secret sharing) are sent to the destination player by the other players, so only the player who gets the card can see it. If it is a faceup card, it is just decrypted by all players and it is possible to verify that each card is valid and the entire deck has a checksum to make sure each card is actually in the deck.
At this point the low level protocol is sufficient for most use cases, especially ones without any facedown cards, like roulette, slot machines, craps and most casino games. For high stakes poker, the small attack vector of the external deck creator colluding with a player exists. Even in this case, all it would allow is for the colluding player to see the face down cards, but that is quite an advantage in some cases. I have a way of making it so that even with collusion no player or even deck creator would know what the cards are, but it will be quite a bit of work to do that and also allow recovery from player disconnects, so I wanted to solve other parts first.
Still a matter to integrate generalized game play state machines on top of this, but that is a matter to create a complete list of events possible for each game and a game evaluator based on these events. Easier said than done, but conceptually just a lot of tedious work so I am not worried about that part.
What I am dealing with now is how to deal with the betting. I was surprised at how fast poker players play online poker. Coin confirmations are just too slow to keep up, not to mention a lot of blockchain bloat. While investigating various possibilities, I looked into LN and so far it is very promising. To experiment with this, I need a recent bitcoin fork that ideally I can make any required changes to. So I made CHIPS. I also forked the Elements C based LN node and got it working with CHIPS. At least it is talking to it, but no peer to peer transactions yet.
The difficult issue is that players need to commit funds to an unknown outcome while the current hand is being played. Who controls those funds? If it is a multisig, then what happens if N-M players disconnect? When players lose, they lose financial incentive to even stay connected. One possibility is to create ever smaller MofN destinations as each player leaves the game, but all of that is more latency and lots of complication.
Once the LN code is integrated into the privatebet platform, that will allow instant bet processing and combined with a cashier functionality, I think it can be leveraged to work in all the barterDEX currencies. The one big question is whether LN directly supports MofN owned addresses. Based on my current understanding of the LN architecture I dont see any reason it cant, but I highly doubt the early implementations already have this working, so I will likely have to add such functionality into LN. An alternate method that uses the existing LN functionality would be to have a "dealer" node that safekeeps the tablestakes and have a way for the players to sign off on a game's result. In this case, the conversion of CHIPS back to whatever original currency would be contingent on MofN signoff or some other dispute resolution. Definitely some issues left to be solved.
For now I just need to get more familiar with what exactly LN can and cannot do and at that point finalize the method for integrating CHIPS into privatebet. One interesting idea is to allow purchase of CHIPS by different currencies at marketprices and allow redeem into various currencies. Then you can end up trading coins by playing games.
For those who are saying why am I working on "new" stuff while the ICO site is down, well, I did help as I could with the ICO site and I did get an iOs breadwallet to work with Komodo during the last week as I was doing the above, so I think that is pretty good progress.
