I was involved with this project in the very early stages, but disassociated myself when the project went public as "almost" having solved the fundamental issues and nearly being ready for launch, when in fact nothing noteworthy has been accomplished.
The four fundamental issues are:
1) Transaction costs
How are you going to ship large amounts of cash around in a distributed system without paying a fortune in transaction costs?
Anticipating your answer, bitcoin will not work as a poker currency because it is fundamentally unstable. Like other fiat currencies, its value depends purely on what people imagine it is worth. However, even more so than mainstream fiat currencies like the dollar, the value of bitcoins will be erratic. Imagine the blow to your reputation when somebody cashes in $1000, runs like jesus and triples his buyin, then cashes out and it's now only worth $800.
Let me also note that the value of Genjix' own bitcoins will greatly improve when large amounts of people start buying bitcoins to play poker. And the value of everybody else's bitcoins will plummet when he sells his.
2) Escrowing
When large sums of money are involved, people will be trying to cheat. If you leave it to the players to do the transactions at the end of every hand, the following scenario could occur:
If I ship my $900 stack into the $1000 pot on the river, and you call, I show my cards, you show yours.
1) If your cards are better than mine, I disconnect and keep the money I bet so far.
2) If my cards are better than yours, I keep playing and take your money.
It's possible to solve this issue by escrowing, but that requires independent third party organizations that function as escrows. These organizations will charge rake. "Rakefree" poker room is false advertising.
It also requires intimate knowledge of cryptographic algorithms that could make that type of escrowing immune to cheating.
3) Cheating
You need some kind of central, public facing organization that answers questions about the system (or multiple). This is easy enough to provide.
Then you need to explain to people why these organizations cannot help you when you suspect you have been colluded against, when you suspect you have been playing against bots, etc.
Since the cards are generated by a cryptographic protocol which is immune to tampering and cheating, there is nobody who knows players' holecards except the players themselves (and when they choose to reveal them). The players cannot misrepresent their holecards, but they do not HAVE to reveal them (wonders of cryptography).
That leads to there being no central authority with access to all the hand histories, and most of the measures taken today to prevent collusion, botting, etc would be impossible. You have to maintain a good reputation or people will leave your network.
4) Latency
So far, all cryptographic protocols that have the properties a poker room would require: randomly shuffled deck, nobody can tamper with it, all players get holecards and can't misrepresent them, there is no way to know somebody's holecards unless that player reveals them, impossible to forge proof a certain hand went down the way it did, etc.
These protocols introduce considerable latency. How are you going to deal with people from all over the world playing together at a full ring table without slowing the game pace down to an absolute crawl?
All these issues can be solved.
In fact, I have several ideas, and I'd be happy to brainstorm with you on them. But funding? Are you serious? Show me your business plan, show me what you are going to do about the four fundamental issues. You're asking for funding when what you have now in terms of results and plans is something my 8 year old sister could get together in a weekend. |
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