PokerChips: Hosting Fair RNG Sessions

[santaclause102]

For anyone interested in a Poker DAC https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14372.0

[bytemaster]

With our voting DAC we will have certified IDs that are verified voters.  You could use that to identify unique users.

[CoinHoarder]

Can I get ya'lls opinion on this?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhvqsa702k8p5vg/v0.01%20-%20The%20Future%20of%20Decentralized%20Online%20Poker%20As%20I%20See%20It.docx

On version 0.02 now.. I added a lot more data points to catch collusion and bots, and made some other minor changes such as adding "infractions" and initiating a three strike rule for innocent players that are mistakenly flagged.

My concerns:
1. The vote system might be able to be gamed, any suggestions to make an improvement on it?
2. What is the best way go about stopping multi accounting?
3. Eliminating duplicate data points and adding ones I haven't thought of.

I decided that giving people three chances wasn't a good idea and removed the infractions and "three strike rule". If cheaters are caught, they should be banned. Not sure what I was thinking there, but it seems ridiculous to have to catch someone cheating three times to ban them.

Anyways.. I could really used some feedback on what I wrote. I've been to like 4 forums, emailed a couple people I know are really interested in decentralized poker, and I haven't got any feedback on this is it is rather frustrating. I am trying to help, but I need a little feedback to improve upon what I have done this far. I can keep working on the data points... consolidating them, deleting duplicate searches, and adding ones I haven't thought of/researched yet. However, I need help on the following:

My main concern at this point is stopping multi accounting (which I feel might be impossible in a decentralized poker network after doing some research), and people being able to game the cheating detection system. Multi accounting is tough, because the way centralized sites stop it is by asking players to send in photo IDs, utility bills, etc.. then they analyze them for fakes and make sure no one has more than one account. In a decentralized poker network I feel there may be no good solution for this.

[CoinHoarder]

Can I get ya'lls opinion on this?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhvqsa702k8p5vg/v0.01%20-%20The%20Future%20of%20Decentralized%20Online%20Poker%20As%20I%20See%20It.docx

On version 0.02 now.. I added a lot more data points to catch collusion and bots, and made some other minor changes such as adding "infractions" and initiating a three strike rule for innocent players that are mistakenly flagged.

My concerns:
1. The vote system might be able to be gamed, any suggestions to make an improvement on it?
2. What is the best way go about stopping multi accounting?
3. Eliminating duplicate data points and adding ones I haven't thought of.

[gamey]

Awesome! I will definitely read the paper within the next couple of days.  I am very interested because it seems like the solution of this would have exceedingly broad applications beyond poker. 

While somewhat smart I have adhd which makes reading academic papers a lot of effort so I am always hesitant to start.

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk

[toast]

I could read the paper but I am almost certain to be let down.  decentralized does not work with poker.  The network has to know cards.  There is no way to guarantee no collusion between host and a player. 

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk

Not coinhoarder's paper, that's just anti-collusion techniques.

Sergio's MPF paper. There is trustless poker. Clever crypto.
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

There is always collusion, but that is equally problematic in centralized poker solution. If Full Tilt / PokerStars could run it profitably then it is possible to decentralize.

Does the paper say how a network can know holecards and guarantee with a very high degree of certainty that only the network knows?  You were the one to point out to me that a network can't know private keys. (Which led to a lot of insight as to what is possible/the necessity of "tokens") 

If a network can guarantee that no one knows holecards then you have solved the same problem AFAIK.  I'm sure that there is some way to fragment the data where one node won't know, but that isn't quite acceptable.  The expectation lost due to collusion with the house far outweighs any collusion between players.  This is likely true in most any multiplayer game of imperfect information.  IMO that is why so much of the effort to make poker honest is misplaced.

The difference between centralized vs decentralized poker is that the number of actors you have to trust is finite in centralized poker.  In a network, it is unknown.

There is almost nothing I know more about than the meta game in/of poker.  I had an account on Planet Poker which was the first for money poker site.  Not trying to pull rank or whatever, just saying this is like the one thing I've wasted far too much of my life being involved with.  So I'd love to see a decentralized poker solution that solves house collusion.  Catching player collusion has little value to me and is relatively straight forward.  This isn't intuitive to most people though. It appears more value is placed on the solvable problem of detecting (with some certainty value) inter-player collusion or some simplistic fixation on the "fairness" of the RNG.

YES, it is solved. I know it seems impossible. I don't know how else to say it, besides "read the paper".

[CoinHoarder]

Does the paper say how a network can know holecards and guarantee with a very high degree of certainty that only the network knows?  You were the one to point out to me that a network can't know private keys. (Which led to a lot of insight as to what is possible/the necessity of "tokens") 

If a network can guarantee that no one knows holecards then you have solved the same problem AFAIK.  I'm sure that there is some way to fragment the data where one node won't know, but that isn't quite acceptable.  The expectation lost due to collusion with the house far outweighs any collusion between players.  This is likely true in most any multiplayer game of imperfect information.  IMO that is why so much of the effort to make poker honest is misplaced.

The difference between centralized vs decentralized poker is that the number of actors you have to trust is finite in centralized poker.  In a network, it is unknown.

There is almost nothing I know more about than the meta game in/of poker.  I had an account on Planet Poker which was the first for money poker site.  Not trying to pull rank or whatever, just saying this is like the one thing I've wasted far too much of my life being involved with.  So I'd love to see a decentralized poker solution that solves house collusion.  Catching player collusion has little value to me and is relatively straight forward.  This isn't intuitive to most people though. It appears more value is placed on the solvable problem of detecting (with some certainty value) inter-player collusion or some simplistic fixation on the "fairness" of the RNG.

Mental Poker solves this, which is what Toast was implying. If you read the paper you will see that Sergio has all of that figured out, collusion in between the host and players will be mathematically impossible through cryptographic functions. The problem of Mental Poker has been researched since 1979, there is a ton of work that has been done on it in academia. It is practically solved at this point after 30+ years of research.

[gamey]

I could read the paper but I am almost certain to be let down.  decentralized does not work with poker.  The network has to know cards.  There is no way to guarantee no collusion between host and a player. 

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk

Not coinhoarder's paper, that's just anti-collusion techniques.

Sergio's MPF paper. There is trustless poker. Clever crypto.
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

There is always collusion, but that is equally problematic in centralized poker solution. If Full Tilt / PokerStars could run it profitably then it is possible to decentralize.

Does the paper say how a network can know holecards and guarantee with a very high degree of certainty that only the network knows?  You were the one to point out to me that a network can't know private keys. (Which led to a lot of insight as to what is possible/the necessity of "tokens") 

If a network can guarantee that no one knows holecards then you have solved the same problem AFAIK.  I'm sure that there is some way to fragment the data where one node won't know, but that isn't quite acceptable.  The expectation lost due to collusion with the house far outweighs any collusion between players.  This is likely true in most any multiplayer game of imperfect information.  IMO that is why so much of the effort to make poker honest is misplaced.

The difference between centralized vs decentralized poker is that the number of actors you have to trust is finite in centralized poker.  In a network, it is unknown.

There is almost nothing I know more about than the meta game in/of poker.  I had an account on Planet Poker which was the first for money poker site.  Not trying to pull rank or whatever, just saying this is like the one thing I've wasted far too much of my life being involved with.  So I'd love to see a decentralized poker solution that solves house collusion.  Catching player collusion has little value to me and is relatively straight forward.  This isn't intuitive to most people though. It appears more value is placed on the solvable problem of detecting (with some certainty value) inter-player collusion or some simplistic fixation on the "fairness" of the RNG. 

[toast]

I could read the paper but I am almost certain to be let down.  decentralized does not work with poker.  The network has to know cards.  There is no way to guarantee no collusion between host and a player. 

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk

Not coinhoarder's paper, that's just anti-collusion techniques.

Sergio's MPF paper. There is trustless poker. Clever crypto.
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

There is always collusion, but that is equally problematic in centralized poker solution. If Full Tilt / PokerStars could run it profitably then it is possible to decentralize.

[gamey]

I could read the paper but I am almost certain to be let down.  decentralized does not work with poker.  The network has to know cards.  There is no way to guarantee no collusion between host and a player. 

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk

[CoinHoarder]

Good collection of anti-collusion suggestions.

Serio Lerner who wrote the 100% trustless Mental Poker Framework paper is providing consultation for BitShares =D

Awesome, yes he is an expert on mental poker.. I am sure he has it all figured out!

I am trying to focus more on ways to fight collusion, as that is another challenging problem that perhaps developers are not fully aware of. I've played a lot of poker in my time, so I'm fairly familiar with the logistics of online poker networks.

I really like Bitshares and Bitshares AGS.. wish I had some money to invest! Hopefully I can get some in before AGS closes up. I've been recommending Bitshares AGS to some of my friends/family, as you guys have a lot of good projects in the works.

Good luck to you guys, I'll be around. This is only my first iteration of that paper, I would like feedback and it will be revised as feedback is received.

[toast]

Good collection of anti-collusion suggestions.

Serio Lerner who wrote the 100% trustless Mental Poker Framework paper is providing consultation for BitShares =D

[CoinHoarder]

Pokerstars has 'Zoom' tables at multiple stakes.
There are usually a couple of hundred people in the zoom pool at any one time.
After each hand you are zoomed to another random table & given a new hand, this is to speed up the action but it also means you can't collude because the likelihood of you sitting at the same table as your colluders enough is very low.

Also I'm sure 80% of the poker volume is under 2/4 ($400 buy-in tables) and at those levels colluding is pretty pointless. Winners at those stakes are either bum-hunting (seeking out & getting position on weak/recreational players, no collusion needed, not worth it.) or they're mass multi-tabling playing 8-24 tables at the same time, making so many decisions so quickly it's not possible to collude. (They break even and live off rake-back*)

Rake* you showed the rake table earlier in the thread which looks lucrative for shareholders but bear in mind players can get anywhere from 20-60% of that back on most sites via rake-back. So you'd probably have to undercut that model by 75% to be attractive.

A bigger problem at lower stakes than colluding is bots, many people have automated bots that just play basic strategy on multiple tables and eek out a profit.

People talk about collusion etc, but the real problem is insuring that the DAC is not leaking information to another player.  How do you guarantee that ?  The goal seems to go against the nature of "Distributed" in DAC.

Research the term "Mental Poker"

[CoinHoarder]

Can I get ya'lls opinion on this?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhvqsa702k8p5vg/v0.01%20-%20The%20Future%20of%20Decentralized%20Online%20Poker%20As%20I%20See%20It.docx

[gamey]

Pokerstars has 'Zoom' tables at multiple stakes.
There are usually a couple of hundred people in the zoom pool at any one time.
After each hand you are zoomed to another random table & given a new hand, this is to speed up the action but it also means you can't collude because the likelihood of you sitting at the same table as your colluders enough is very low.

Also I'm sure 80% of the poker volume is under 2/4 ($400 buy-in tables) and at those levels colluding is pretty pointless. Winners at those stakes are either bum-hunting (seeking out & getting position on weak/recreational players, no collusion needed, not worth it.) or they're mass multi-tabling playing 8-24 tables at the same time, making so many decisions so quickly it's not possible to collude. (They break even and live off rake-back*)

Rake* you showed the rake table earlier in the thread which looks lucrative for shareholders but bear in mind players can get anywhere from 20-60% of that back on most sites via rake-back. So you'd probably have to undercut that model by 75% to be attractive.

A bigger problem at lower stakes than colluding is bots, many people have automated bots that just play basic strategy on multiple tables and eek out a profit.

A good assessment.  One thing about random tables/identities is it reduces transparency.  If a host was to give information to a player, this would effectively hide any way of a player protecting themselves.  This is where I think poker is not a good idea.  People talk about collusion etc, but the real problem is insuring that the DAC is not leaking information to another player.  How do you guarantee that ?  The goal seems to go against the nature of "Distributed" in DAC. 

[Empirical1]

My concern with this DAC that doesn't seem to be being addressed yet is that  - An online poker site is a lot like a night club.

You can charge guys less for entry but if there's no hot chicks inside they'd rather go somewhere else and pay more.
(In this case the guys are the serious/semi-pro/professional poker players and the hot chicks are the recreational players.)

$ made from weaker players - rake + rakeback = Player Profit

Lots of Pokerstars budget for example goes to sponsorships, glitzy promotions, customer service, security and creating a good user experience. This expenditure is designed to attract the recreational (weaker) player (Who don't even understand how much rake they're paying.) The rest of the player pool (which actually put in most of the volume and generate most of the sites profit) is generally going to where the most recreational players are.

I think that's something to keep in mind - that being successful here is also about being able to offer more than just reduced rake.
 
There is a market here in the crypto-economy I guess, as Seals With Clubs managed to attract a decent user base.
I think in the US there is also tax on poker winnings and a poker DAC might make that a bit more avoidable. 

[Empirical1]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

The thing about blockchains is that every time you play you can be a new user.

How about making your seat and table random?  The player can't choose where they play.

Pokerstars has 'Zoom' tables at multiple stakes.
There are usually a couple of hundred people in the zoom pool at any one time.
After each hand you are zoomed to another random table & given a new hand, this is to speed up the action but it also means you can't collude because the likelihood of you sitting at the same table as your colluders enough is very low.

Also I'm sure 80% of the poker volume is under 2/4 ($400 buy-in tables) and at those levels colluding is pretty pointless. Winners at those stakes are either bum-hunting (seeking out & getting position on weak/recreational players, no collusion needed, not worth it.) or they're mass multi-tabling playing 8-24 tables at the same time, making so many decisions so quickly it's not possible to collude. (They break even and live off rake-back*)

Rake* you showed the rake table earlier in the thread which looks lucrative for shareholders but bear in mind players can get anywhere from 20-60% of that back on most sites via rake-back. So you'd probably have to undercut that model by 75% to be attractive.

A bigger problem at lower stakes than colluding is bots, many people have automated bots that just play basic strategy on multiple tables and eek out a profit.

[Overthetop]

I can't believe it!!!
..

[Stan]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

The fact that news like this does not move the PTS price at all tells me that the investors in this space have no clue what they are doing.

Er, I mean, this is incredibly great news.

BitShares is a tinderbox in a powder keg filled with rocket fuel looking for a spark.

And you all know what happens when this baby gets up to 88 miles per hour...

[thisisausername]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

The fact that news like this does not move the PTS price at all tells me that the investors in this space have no clue what they are doing.

Er, I mean, this is incredibly great news.

[gamey]

I played poker on the first for money poker site and have been vaguely involved ever since.  Big fan of bitshares/protoshares.

Collusion between players is a concern, but the real concern as a player is that another player colludes with the house.  Having 2 players collude is a huge disadvantage, but it is nothing compared to having another player know YOUR hole cards.  Everyone here addresses collusion, but the real problem is guaranteeing that no one has a client that gives them unfair information.  I don't see anyone addressing this ?  How can I inspect the DAC?  How would that work ?  Creating a RNG seems like the first issue and was what people talked about in the early days of poker, but guess what...  To this day there has not been one known incident of a rigged RNG.  There have been multiple known issues of "super-users" and quite a few suspected ones.

Any variant of actual poker relies on bluffing and betting or it is not poker.  These features of poker mean that once an opponent has knowledge of your hand, you have 0 chance of winning.  I don't think you can have any sort of provably fair poker because of this.  The closest thing you'll get is a game like open face chinese poker.  It isn't really a poker game but relies on poker hands for scoring.  Everyone draws 1 card at a time and plays it in their hand face up.  This can be made provably fair, but it is not poker.

Poker is great, but I can't see any real advantage for having it hosted on a blockchain.

[HackFisher]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

Fantastic!!!

Wow, cool!!

[betax]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

Fantastic!!!

[unimercio]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

breaking good news ! Bonus

[testz]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

WoW 

[mint chocolate chip]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

Woohoo!!! Is this an 80 page document on how poker will work as a DAC?

[toast]

GUYS OMG GUESS WHO IS JOINING INVICTUS
http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

[thisisausername]

I suspect the statistics of colluding players (more folds, probably) and that of non-colluding players would look different enough that a statistical model could be trained to recognize likely cases and lower a chain-based trust metric accordingly.  We'd have to tie it to Keyhotee IDs above a certain trust ranking themselves to prevent sybils. (Assuming that the cost of getting a keyhotee ID with a given trust metric can scale higher than the expected returns from colluding.)

Hosts could then choose what level of trust they'll allow; so false-positive colluders have a place to prove they aren't colluding at the cost of losing money to likely actual colluders.

I don't have a large corpus of poker games to confirm this suspicion, of course.  There is a way we could get such a thing though...

[JakeThePanda]

Toast,

I know you have a lot on your plate, but are you still thinking about the possibility of a poker DAC?

[Azuos]

I think this is a great idea and would like to add my experience to the conversation.  While I have no idea about the technical aspect of how this could be implemented, I have played a lot of online poker and I can add from that end. 

Collusion is a part of online poker and there is really no way to eliminate it.   I know it happens in all of the online venues as it is very difficult if not impossible to trace.  That being said I don't see collusion as that big a problem if a few precautions are taken.  Rake is very important in helping to minimize collusion, if there is no rake, one person can take 8 hands and play against one person, and this would provide the team a big advantage.  The rake makes this an unprofitable move as as the majority of hands will be played within the team where money is lost in every pot.  Now the team could fold every hand the mark isn't in and avoid the rake but no sensible player will sit under these circumstances for long without noticing. 

For collusion to be effective (in Hold-em, what I am most familiar with) a very specific set of circumstances need to exist to give a team of 2 or 3 an advantage over the table.  Over a vast number of hands there can be some advantage to the team, but thinking that they are going to wipe out a table of decent players where the cards are random is just fantasy.

One thing that would totally eliminate the possibility of collusion would be to implement a game such as Full Tilt's Rush Poker.  In this game player have no control over the table they are seated at and are moved every hand.  With no way of choosing what table you sit at, there is no way to work as a team.

[MrJeans]

I was also thinking along the lines of being randomly assigned to a table and having your identity concealed from others.
Here the only way to collude with someone else or yourself would be to wait until players have taken a turn and then observe the similarity between tables to see if you have managed to get two hands on the same table. Buy paying a tiny fee to join a table, such a collusion strategy can easily become unprofitable if there are enough tables.

[toast]

One way you could go about it is to take the baby step during the initial design of playing every game heads-up. With only two players, collusion becomes irrelevant.

You can still have player/host collusion, since players can't know the PRNG seed while the game is going. There's no clever crypto to avoid this AFAIK

[mint chocolate chip]

One way you could go about it is to take the baby step during the initial design of playing every game heads-up. With only two players, collusion becomes irrelevant.

[JakeThePanda]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

The thing about blockchains is that every time you play you can be a new user.

How about making your seat and table random?  The player can't choose where they play.

[bytemaster]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

The thing about blockchains is that every time you play you can be a new user.

[toast]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

IP addresses might not help identify a person, but it could make it more difficult for a single player who has set-up multiple accounts to play at the same table as matching IP addresses would be a major warning sign that a player is playing multiple hands.

You'd have lots of false positives hurting innocent players and the only true positives would be from scammers who are idiots

[mint chocolate chip]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

IP addresses might not help identify a person, but it could make it more difficult for a single player who has set-up multiple accounts to play at the same table as matching IP addresses would be a major warning sign that a player is playing multiple hands.

[JakeThePanda]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

The only thing I can think of is a trust ranking or public statistics on your play. Stats like how often a player sat at the same table as another player and how often they played a hand together and other stats that may be relevant to collusion only.  Along with stats, you can have an approval system to sit at the table.  If 80% of a persons hands were played at the same table as another player, the other players at the table can disallow that player to sit.

I don't know.  Just throwing out ideas.

[toast]

Neither of those solutions solve the problem. The problem is two players at the same table sharing information about their hands.

Anonymizing identities doesn't matter if me and my accomplice know each other in real life and can just pick the same table.
IP addresses are totally useless for anything related to identity verification.

[mint chocolate chip]

Couldn't we solve some of the collusion issue by making the player identities completely anonymous like Bovada Poker does?

Would the system be able to prevent someone from the same IP address playing multiple accounts simultaneously at the same table?

[JakeThePanda]

Couldn't we solve some of the collusion issue by making the player identities completely anonymous like Bovada Poker does?

[toast]

Infinite-deck (or similar variants to solve this problem) poker is a really interesting idea but would probably have a totally different emergent gameplay and would not appeal to the huge network of poker pros.

It's good to realize that the problem is not exclusive to DACs by thinking about the fact that two players can signal to each other at a physical table.
You have to make each player think that each of the other players would lose money in the long run by colluding. Since this is not true within poker itself, the DAC has to structure the incentives right using mechanics like reputation and collateral.
If we have a satisfying solution to this then it could immediately be applied to much more important things than poker.

[mint chocolate chip]

Been thinking hard about this. The actual mechanics of the host/player roles and interactions are complex but not complicated.
The hard part is coming up with anti-collusion incentives. There's pretty much no way around having something like a pseudonymous reputation market / insurance / collateralized trust, with trusted hosts doing their own KYC

Basically one of the biggest roles of the large poker sites is anti-fraud. When it comes to multiplayer games, there's only so much you can enforce using crypto.

This is why I think for a poker DAC you use the block hash as your random source. You need a modified poker game where knowing the hand of another player with whom you are colluding gives you no advantage over a 3rd party.   This means that you have to simulate an infinite deck such that holding an ACE in your hand does not preclude the other players from having the same ACE.



Now the challenge is to

Knowing the hand of another player irregardless of whether there can be the same card out is an advantage, and a very big one when it comes to betting strategy and making every call/raise/fold decision.

I don't like the idea of messing with the rules of the game, there must be some better way to curb collusion without distorting the odds or changing the advantages for the more skillful player.

If you had enough players, randomizing opponents at the start of each hand and hosting tournaments can make there less of a chance of knowing your opponents. Probably many other ideas...

[bytemaster]

Been thinking hard about this. The actual mechanics of the host/player roles and interactions are complex but not complicated.
The hard part is coming up with anti-collusion incentives. There's pretty much no way around having something like a pseudonymous reputation market / insurance / collateralized trust, with trusted hosts doing their own KYC

Basically one of the biggest roles of the large poker sites is anti-fraud. When it comes to multiplayer games, there's only so much you can enforce using crypto.

This is why I think for a poker DAC you use the block hash as your random source. You need a modified poker game where knowing the hand of another player with whom you are colluding gives you no advantage over a 3rd party.   This means that you have to simulate an infinite deck such that holding an ACE in your hand does not preclude the other players from having the same ACE.



Now the challenge is to

[toast]

Been thinking hard about this. The actual mechanics of the host/player roles and interactions are complex but not complicated.
The hard part is coming up with anti-collusion incentives. There's pretty much no way around having something like a pseudonymous reputation market / insurance / collateralized trust, with trusted hosts doing their own KYC

Basically one of the biggest roles of the large poker sites is anti-fraud. When it comes to multiplayer games, there's only so much you can enforce using crypto.

[santaclause102]

I have some strong connections to high roller players that I would support here if you would find that helpful in some way at some point...

Are you on 2+2?

I don't play myself and am not active in the poker community. But I know a lot people (my brother is one) living in poker communities mostly in Asia. They play online mostly, all for a living.

Also note that the average quality of players got higher and higher over the last years and it gets more and more difficult for anyone to make money respectively that the average return decreases for high rollers. This can be a big factor for a high demand for low rake services...

[JakeThePanda]

I have some strong connections to high roller players that I would support here if you would find that helpful in some way at some point...

Are you on 2+2?

[santaclause102]

I have some strong connections to high roller players that I would support here if you would find that helpful in some way at some point...

[mint chocolate chip]

Current Pokerstars rake table. If all the rake is returned to the shareholders, it is very profitable.

Stakes                                    % Rake   2 Player Cap   3-4 Player Cap   5+ Player Cap
$0.01/$0.02                             3.50%   $0.30                  $0.30           $0.30
$0.02/$0.05                             4.15%   $0.50                  $0.50           $1.00
$0.05/$0.10 to $0.08/$0.16     4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $1.50
$0.10/$0.25                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $2.00
$0.25/$0.50                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.50
$0.50/$1 to $3/$6                    4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.80
$5/$10 to $10/$20                   4.50%   $0.50                 $1.50           $3.00
$25/$50   4.50%                      $0.50   $2.00                  $3.00
$50/100   4.50%                      $2.00   $3.00                  $5.00
$100/$200 and above             4.50%   $2.00                  $5.00           $5.00

Rake would have to be much lower than traditional poker sites.

Rake on Seals with Clubs - the bitcoin poker site - is already much lower than traditional online poker sites I believe. A rake free system would be something special, of course that might not be shareholder friendly.

[JakeThePanda]

Current Pokerstars rake table. If all the rake is returned to the shareholders, it is very profitable.

Stakes                                    % Rake   2 Player Cap   3-4 Player Cap   5+ Player Cap
$0.01/$0.02                             3.50%   $0.30                  $0.30           $0.30
$0.02/$0.05                             4.15%   $0.50                  $0.50           $1.00
$0.05/$0.10 to $0.08/$0.16     4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $1.50
$0.10/$0.25                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $2.00
$0.25/$0.50                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.50
$0.50/$1 to $3/$6                    4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.80
$5/$10 to $10/$20                   4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $3.00
$25/$50   4.50%                      $0.50   $2.00                  $3.00
$50/100   4.50%                      $2.00   $3.00                  $5.00
$100/$200 and above             4.50%   $2.00                  $5.00           $5.00

Rake would have to be much lower than traditional poker sites. 

[Amazon]

Current Pokerstars rake table. If all the rake is returned to the shareholders, it is very profitable.

Stakes                                    % Rake   2 Player Cap   3-4 Player Cap   5+ Player Cap
$0.01/$0.02                             3.50%   $0.30                  $0.30           $0.30
$0.02/$0.05                             4.15%   $0.50                  $0.50           $1.00
$0.05/$0.10 to $0.08/$0.16     4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $1.50
$0.10/$0.25                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.00           $2.00
$0.25/$0.50                             4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.50
$0.50/$1 to $3/$6                    4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $2.80
$5/$10 to $10/$20                   4.50%   $0.50                  $1.50           $3.00
$25/$50   4.50%                      $0.50   $2.00                  $3.00
$50/100   4.50%                      $2.00   $3.00                  $5.00
$100/$200 and above             4.50%   $2.00                  $5.00           $5.00

[Markus]

wow, love this idea so much.

But at present the US has made online poker illegal on a federal level through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Will there be a problem?

No problem at all.
ROW* comprises 6 890 000 000 people and has an annual GDP of 56 445 000 000 000 USD.


* http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Rest_of_the_world

[Amazon]

Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson are walking the streets of Vegas these days.  That should tell you how strong the case was.  Also not true that all sites are banning US IP.  I still play online poker on like 5+ different sites.  There are still many options for US players.  Merge, Winning Poker, Bovada, Revolution and a bunch of other smaller sites.  Seals with Clubs is the biggest BTC poker site. 

You are correct in that major sites like PS don't offer to US players anymore, but that was part of the deal they made with the DOJ.  Same with Party Poker.

End Derail/

back to coding mumbo jumbo.  Stuff I don't understand.

Great, please contact me if anyone is making this real. I want to help as much as I can.

[JakeThePanda]

Thank you both for the clarification. If I remember correctly, the owner of FTP, Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson were charged for violations of gambling and money-laundering. Not sure what's after that. And now all major sites ban US IP to play real money (although NV and NJ start issueing online poker license).

Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson are walking the streets of Vegas these days.  That should tell you how strong the case was.  Also not true that all sites are banning US IP.  I still play online poker on like 5+ different sites.  There are still many options for US players.  Merge, Winning Poker, Bovada, Revolution and a bunch of other smaller sites.  Seals with Clubs is the biggest BTC poker site. 

You are correct in that major sites like PS don't offer to US players anymore, but that was part of the deal they made with the DOJ.  Same with Party Poker.

End Derail/

back to coding mumbo jumbo.  Stuff I don't understand.

[Amazon]

Thank you both for the clarification. If I remember correctly, the owner of FTP, Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson were charged for violations of gambling and money-laundering. Not sure what's after that. And now all major sites ban US IP to play real money (although NV and NJ start issueing online poker license).

[JakeThePanda]

wow, love this idea so much.

But at present the US has made online poker illegal on a federal level through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Will there be a problem?

This is 99% not true.  Playing online poker isn't illegal and it's not even clear that operating a poker site is illegal. Fulltilt Poker (FTP) and Pokerstars (PS) were never charged with operating a poker site.  It was about money laundering and bank fraud.  UIGEA is a law that makes it illegal for financial institutions (banks and credit card companies) to process payments to gambling sites.  A big part is based on the Wire Act.  The Wire Act was originally put in place specifically for sports betting.  The Department of Justice (DOJ) made a legal opinion on the Wire Act shortly after FTP and Pokerstars were charged.

The United States Department of Justice made public documents with its legal opinion on the Wire Act, 18U.S.C. § 1084, concluding that “interstate transmissions of wire communications that do not relate to a ‘sporting event of contest’ fall outside the reach of the Wire Act.”

The legality of online poker is too vague and this is probably the reason the DOJ hasn't tried to shut down any other poker sites after the FTP and PS case.

disclaimer:
I'm not a lawyer and don't claim to be an expert on the law or the legality of online poker.

[mint chocolate chip]

wow, love this idea so much.

But at present the US has made online poker illegal on a federal level through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Will there be a problem?

That is not true. Online poker was not made illegal because of the UIGEA. The UIGEA made it illegal for financial institutions to facilitate transactions between poker sites and people.

[Amazon]

wow, love this idea so much.

But at present the US has made online poker illegal on a federal level through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Will there be a problem?

[JakeThePanda]

Awesome!   Online poker is the reason I found out about BTC.  Would this forever end the rigged RNG debate?

[toast]

Right, "blockchain" just means "chained cryptographically-dependent messages", in this case the mini-blockchain just uses proof-of-intent AKA signatures. No matter what, you need signatures from players on the state of the table up and including their decision, so theoretically at minimum you need a message of the form "sig_a(state_n, sig_b(state_n-1, sig_c(state_n-2, ...)))" initialized by the host and signed as it passes around the table, which is accepted as a transaction into the main chain. Hosts should have some freedom about what the message has to look like as long as players sign off on it (like, "host is allowed to kick players after just 15 seconds" or something).

[bytemaster]

Bravo

The only problem I have is that the game requires a full mini blockchain to verify itself. 

You can eliminate the mini, per-game blockchain that gets bundled into a single transaction by using a OpenTransaction Triple Signed Receipt.  This will make the validation of the game much easier (and smaller) and thus help things scale better.

[toast]

literature:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1550.0
luckyshares? where is that written about?


Two roles in this DAC:

1) Table hosts. Put down Chips as collateral and start a Game. A game is just a session where the host puts up a verifiable RNG feed and then ends the session with proof that the RNG was fair. For example, a host promises to run a PRNG with Hash("Poker game #101", <secret>, [player_nonces]) as the seed and then publishes <secret> and [player_nonces] at the end. The main PokerChips chain watches hosts and reimburses players when the host acts maliciously.
2) Players connect with each other and with a Host and use a local consensus algorithm to make a mini-blockchain for this Game. The Game becomes one transaction that is processed by the PokerChips DAC, which reallocates shares between players appropriately.


So the high-level idea is:
* DAC enables hosts to compete for players
* DAC insures players against misbehaving hosts
* Hosts and players connect off-chain and generates Games as transactions

So Hosts compete for trust (not enabling collusion) and rake and pay most of the DAC operating costs (main chain consensus) while players get fungible insured poker chips and pay rake