HTML5 Anonymous Bitcoin Poker

https://www.bearcoinpoker.com

by LeoHaggins • 11 years ago

66 53 11 years ago

bearcoinpoker.com

LearnerGeek• 11 years ago

how does it stop collusion at the tables ?

murbard22• 11 years ago

Impossible to stop, unless you strictly play heads up poker.

Even in the far fetched scenario where you place participants in Faraday cages, they can still communicate by timing bets, changing amounts, etc.

LeoHaggins6• 11 years ago

Connection from the same place on the same table are forbidden (comparaison between address is done on hashed ip's)

imglorp• 11 years ago

Look left; look right. If you're not colluding with either of those guys, then they're probably colluding against you. :-/

Taek• 11 years ago

Not reassuring. If there's money to be made, people will try to make it. It's reasonable to assume a group of friends would take a weekend trying to collude at poker.

There are a few things you could potentially do to make it not worth their time. The first is to take money before assigning a table, and then randomly assigning the person. The second is to have the house take such a large cut that even with collusion it's not profitable.

You still have to worry about Sybil attacks. It's one thing for me and my 3 friends to play poker together and try to land at the same table. It's another for me and my 1000 bots at different IP addresses (bots who will, of course, play computationally perfect games and collude any time they are at the same table) to try and beat the odds.

merlincorey9• 11 years ago

There is no way to stop serious and experienced collusion from any table in any online poker room in the world.

As others have mentioned, proxies and out of band communication make it nearly impossible to really detect.

That said, detecting blatant or clueless collusion is fairly simple, as things like chip dumping and soft-playing can become fairly obvious just by observing play.

stevecalifornia• 11 years ago

The only gambling occurring is the gambling that this is a trust-worthy implementation of multi-player poker.

theseatoms• 11 years ago

How have other sites established credibility?

merlincorey9• 11 years ago

Usually by having their RNG audited and/or open-sourced/testible (though that has its own potential problems) followed by marketing and support and time in existence.

The newer a poker site is, the more likely it is to be shady, simply because it hasn't had anecdotal reports of it not being shady from actual players.

andy_ppp2• 11 years ago

Fair enough, but you stand to make a lot more from being trustworthy than not... I think this is an excellent idea.

rspeer• 11 years ago

you stand to make a lot more from being trustworthy than not...

What? How do you justify that conclusion? That seems at odds with most of the history of gambling.

You make the most money if you appear trustworthy but aren't.

loupereira• 11 years ago

What assurances are there that the house isn't cheating?

mikeash2• 11 years ago

The assurances are as follows:

merlincorey9• 11 years ago

The house makes money from rake. This means it's not in the house's interest to enable any cheating, since cheating makes the house less trustworthy, and therefore, there is less rake being generated.

encoderer2• 11 years ago

Unfortunately the criminal mind discounts the possibility of getting caught. There have been several big scandals of this sort in online poker. Scams at Absolute, Full Tilt and others have been uncovered.

abeiz• 11 years ago

I experimented with this a few years ago. Even going as far as creating https://bitflop.me. I came to the conclusion that the future legal battles would just not be worth it.

marcinbejm• 11 years ago

is this project in development?

tomcam• 11 years ago

I came to the conclusion that the future legal battles would just not be worth it.

So, no. Wise decision, at least if you're Stateside. Government wants to preserve its monopoly on gambling.

redindian75• 11 years ago

very interesting... WebRTC and poker - In the 'About us', you had mentioned on putting it on GitHub... is it still the plan?

howradical• 11 years ago

That looks really cool, would love to see a mobile version of this.

z3t42• 11 years ago

I think a site like this can easily make more money then say a drug-store on darknet, but perfectly legal.

There are some challenges though, like multi account cheating, and bot players.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

I thought online gambling was generally not legal.

z3t42• 11 years ago

It's illegal in the country I live in, but we still have tons of TV commercials for online gaming. So it's legal to play, but the site and company needs to be located in a country where it's legal. And they also would have to pay taxes.

dmcginty• 11 years ago

I'm in the United States. To my knowledge online gambling is not strictly illegal, but it's illegal for online casinos to send or receive money to or from any banking or crediting organization, therefore preventing users from transferring money into casino accounts. Bitcoin is still in a weird realm where it's considered property rather than a currency, which I imagine would make it similar to gambling with gold. (My knowledge is outdated by a couple years, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

TylerE2• 11 years ago

Why do you believe this is legal?

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/02/seals-with-clubs-chair...

merlincorey9• 11 years ago

Their problem was accepting players from legal states (Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey), and in this case, specifically the Nevada Gaming Commission came at them for not registering to be regulated while accepting US players and having "company officers" in the US.

The truth is, Micon was the "chairman", but the actual operations and such all took place out of country.

Crypto currency gambling is legal in the United States so long as there is no USD involved because crypto currencies are akin to stocks. You don't pay capital gains until you convert stocks into USD or other fiat currencies.

The implication is that somehow Micon may have been turning BTC from seals into USD and not giving a cut to the Nevada Gaming Commission.

joosters• 11 years ago

It's completely illegal, even in territories that allow online gambling.

How are they preventing underage gambling if the site is completely anonymous?

nofollow• 11 years ago

frequently loses connection and when i reconnect the old dealt cards for a hand are not redrawn, only the newly dealt cards for that hand are drawn.

tempestn• 11 years ago

That's a feature. Don't want to look like a noob, peeking at your hole cards more than once...

LeoHaggins6• 11 years ago

Thanks for the bug report, fixed now :)

merlincorey9• 11 years ago

It seems like the basic poker-game-algorithm is broken here. I have been able to play without paying blinds, which is not how poker works, generally.

LeoHaggins6• 11 years ago

Ahah, yeah, that's a quick bug we introduced today, you were able to join a table without paying the first blind :D It's been fixed for a few hours now :)

RoboTeddy• 11 years ago

Using something like Ethereum, it's actually possible to prove that the house is fair: https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/comment/2944/#Comment_...

It involves a clever trick for keeping hole cards and the deck initially secret, despite the fact that everything in the blockchain is public.

ryanlol• 11 years ago

I deposited 0.6 btc, messed around with the site a little bit (didn't play a single game) and ended now there's only 0.07 btc on my account.

I'm not sure if losing your customers coins is such a great business model.

LeoHaggins6• 11 years ago

Please provide me your username, I'll check and make sure this never happened.

HTML5 Anonymous Bitcoin Poker

Related Stories