I was checking my old books, and found one called
Game, Set and Math by Ian Stewart. I liked this as a kid because it had interesting math problems (although at the time I couldn't fully understand them).
I decided to check it, and found something interesting. In one chapter, two characters called Tweedledim and Tweedledumb discuss about playing
poker by phone. They are worried that the other one can cheat, so they develop a trustless system with an asymmetric encryption, in such a way that one of them can shuffle and deal the cards without knowing which are which.
Obviously I didn't know Bitcoin when I was a kid (simply because it didn't exist), but now I do, and I find some similarities in the concepts. And seeing that Bitcoin is real and has worked for years (even if it's still economically unstable) I'm curious about this “poker by phone” idea.
Has anybody developed an actual implementation of a decentralized poker game (or any other kind of game, for that matter)? Or is there something wrong with the theory that would make this impossible?