I came across an open source project that claims to implement true peer-to-peer mental poker (including multiplayer). Apparently it was originally written in Actionscript for Flash (!!) but has been ported to Javascript: https://twitter.com/endertown/status/1701010824331165914
It integrates with BTC and ETH wallets but I haven't gotten deep enough into it to see exactly how. Thought it might be interesting!
The mental poker primitives they talk about in the documentation aren't actually implementable in Bitcoin, so they're fudging on the rules somewhere. My guess is that it's somewhat trusting of the other side to hand over whatever amount they owe instead of that actually being enforced by the blockchain.
Ah yes I was just seeing that as well - from what I can tell, someone is expected to run the "server" which is responsible for accounting. But the actual game play does seem to be based on true P2P "mental poker" primitives. I suppose the missing bit is rolling up the results to L1 instead of a centralized server keeping track?
Hah yes I do understand that but I'm still hazy on the overall concrete architecture. This is my current mind-map:
1. A "host" will create a new game by creating a new singleton on-chain that contains MAGIC
2. A "player" will join the game by committing XCH to that singleton using more MAGIC
3. All the actual gameplay happens off-chain and P2P for speed using pre-committed MAGIC from singletons
4. Each player keeps track of their own hands won so they can submit proofs using MAGIC when they stand up. If all the MAGIC checks out, they can withdraw their balance from the game singleton.
This is more a product question than a technical question. But poker AI is completely dominant over human poker players, right? If it were possible to play fair poker online for money, it seems like poker AIs would dominate the game, and humans would just lose money. Would that really be something that people want to do?
Imagine playing chess online for money, in a distributed blockchain way. Any human is just going to lose to Stockfish. Why would anyone want to play, more than a few people who implement Stockfish bots to take the money of any human foolish enough to compete?
Poker is actually more resistant to computer dominance than Chess is. Current real time assistance is better than most players, but Omaha 5 isn't there yet and I have some thoughts for other variants which are even more difficult for computers. But first I'm supporting more familiar variants because that's what people want to play.
Is this really useable at all?
I came across an open source project that claims to implement true peer-to-peer mental poker (including multiplayer). Apparently it was originally written in Actionscript for Flash (!!) but has been ported to Javascript: https://twitter.com/endertown/status/1701010824331165914
It integrates with BTC and ETH wallets but I haven't gotten deep enough into it to see exactly how. Thought it might be interesting!
The mental poker primitives they talk about in the documentation aren't actually implementable in Bitcoin, so they're fudging on the rules somewhere. My guess is that it's somewhat trusting of the other side to hand over whatever amount they owe instead of that actually being enforced by the blockchain.
Ah yes I was just seeing that as well - from what I can tell, someone is expected to run the "server" which is responsible for accounting. But the actual game play does seem to be based on true P2P "mental poker" primitives. I suppose the missing bit is rolling up the results to L1 instead of a centralized server keeping track?
That 'server' is what in cryptography is called a 'trusted third party' or in legal parlance a 'casino'.
Hah yes I do understand that but I'm still hazy on the overall concrete architecture. This is my current mind-map:
1. A "host" will create a new game by creating a new singleton on-chain that contains MAGIC
2. A "player" will join the game by committing XCH to that singleton using more MAGIC
3. All the actual gameplay happens off-chain and P2P for speed using pre-committed MAGIC from singletons
4. Each player keeps track of their own hands won so they can submit proofs using MAGIC when they stand up. If all the MAGIC checks out, they can withdraw their balance from the game singleton.
Am I even close?
Sounds likely. It doesn't gain much over simply trusting the third party.
This is more a product question than a technical question. But poker AI is completely dominant over human poker players, right? If it were possible to play fair poker online for money, it seems like poker AIs would dominate the game, and humans would just lose money. Would that really be something that people want to do?
Imagine playing chess online for money, in a distributed blockchain way. Any human is just going to lose to Stockfish. Why would anyone want to play, more than a few people who implement Stockfish bots to take the money of any human foolish enough to compete?
Poker is actually more resistant to computer dominance than Chess is. Current real time assistance is better than most players, but Omaha 5 isn't there yet and I have some thoughts for other variants which are even more difficult for computers. But first I'm supporting more familiar variants because that's what people want to play.