considering CHIPS has had no marketing, nor much of any discussion, it is quite interesting that the hashrate has doubled in recent days
"blocks": 69872,
"timeoffset": -4,
"connections": 30,
"difficulty": 0.01348656036015197,
that is double from the floor value, which we were only about halfway toward meeting, so it is more like a 4x increase in hashrate.
I continue to find bugs and issues with the c-lightning
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/issueshowever, the issues I am seeing are expected for being the first one to really push it to its limits. So far I am quite pleased with how quickly the lightning devs actually respond and fix the bugs I am reporting.
Dealing with the lightning channels is quite a bit different than the normal API expected for payments, however it has quite a lot of similar aspects to barterDEX. The version 1 of Lightning wont support MofN approvals for payouts, which means that table stakes needs to be controlled by a dealer.
There are two ways around this, the first is to have the dealers deposit a performance bond and in the event of non-compliance to have a claim process using the signed game state transitions as proof of who should win the bet. The second is to have the blockchain process the signed data and allow spending of the performance bond if it is a valid claim.
Needless to say, the former is much easier to do and is a necessary first step for getting the full blockchain enforcement done.
Practically speaking, this means that if you go allin with more chips than the dealer's performance bond, you would be at risk, but for a first out release, this seems acceptable.
On the gameplay side, I got a 10 player roundrobin playing a meaningless game with no gameplay, but using encrypted deck, MofN card dealing, at about 1 second per game. Certainly an actual game state machine is needed, but I dont see many issues in that area once I get the gaming platform supporting betting, cashier and arbitrary gameplay strings.
Clearly, any blockchain enforcing of game claims will require a hardfork, but I am leaning toward doing that after the initial official release, so it will be a planned hardfork. It is getting more and more likely that the current CHIPS chain will be the mainnet.