P2P Poker brainstorm session

It is possible to play a hand of poker "peer to peer" or without a trusted party without anyone being able to cheat. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

This could allow for zero-rake games at any stake, so it is worth thinking about. There is one problem to be solved, however: transfers of money.

Is there any mechanism to take care of "awarding the pot" after each poker hand that gives a guarantee the money ends up in the right hands without anyone being able to cheat?

At first sight, it seems that this is impossible, but if I hadn't known about "Mental Poker" I would have thought that would be impossible without cheating too.

I know we have some very smart people here so let's try to come up with ways to solve this problem.

wtf is this shit?

fayul

Well I don't see why you can't find a trusted party like a bank that can oversee the handling of money and just use the software to determine where it goes.
There's the possibility of actually keeping your bankroll yourself and not letting the poker room hold onto it. Then you would essentially deposit and withdraw every time you sit down at a table. I don't really think this is a major problem. A future concern for sure, but the earlier stages of such a project should probably be looked at first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key

Person A sends an encoded message consisting of identifier and their hand to players B, C, D, E:
[PersonAPokerHand=AcAd]
It's encrypted with SSL which is impossible to crack.

Every player at the table has a stake in the pot, and after the hand Player A releases the decoding (private) encryption key. After decoding the message, B,C,D,E all verify that a) it is a valid decryption since the identifier is correct and then b) agree by consensus that the hand is valid.

It relies on the trust of everyone else at the table consenting about A's hand. Now verifying that everyone is trusted (and not all collaborating against you) has several established algorithms which can be chosen. Bittorrent uses one of them to share files more with seeders than leechers (that's the seed/leech ratio you see on users). Basically the software ranks each person's consistency (how often results mismatch- should be almost never) and propagates that result throughout the network. There are other schemes, but off the top of my head I'd choose this one first.

About your PM question, I think you would have a separate pot owned by everyone at the table. If you ship money to the pot then it's collectively owned by everyone at the table (as per real life). The players of the table act like the board of directors for the pot. If suddenly 3 people at once disconnect there could be a problem but there are algorithms in several protocols like IRC to deal with safely handling this case. There's a bunch of schemes all over the place in many different distributed software that you should research as most of these problems have been solved elegantly many times before with mathematically sound schemes.

On October 16 2010 21:09 jchysk wrote: Well I don't see why you can't find a trusted party like a bank that can oversee the handling of money and just use the software to determine where it goes. There's the possibility of actually keeping your bankroll yourself and not letting the poker room hold onto it. Then you would essentially deposit and withdraw every time you sit down at a table. I don't really think this is a major problem. A future concern for sure, but the earlier stages of such a project should probably be looked at first.

http://www.bitcoin.org/

More trustworthy than a bank. Owned by no-one. No transaction charges. Currency neutral.

On October 16 2010 19:27 Zep wrote: wtf is this shit?

Just googled open source poker and found that there are a couple existing projects for server + client. Could probably build off of one of them. Go through and check out the security and then figure out how to handle money. Bitcoin looks like the right direction, but probably not suitable for a poker room.

Most of those poker sites are shit, and I could easily write better. I contacted PokerTH about a year ago and they have no plans for real money either due to legal issues.

Brings us back to bitcoin- no legal issues since there's no currency issuer There's even already an existing poker site,

https://betco.in/

theres a game happening there right now, works well
https://betco.in/

here's the source code:
http://github.com/hippich/Bitcoin-Poker-Room

maybe the solution is just supporting/popularising this software and making it work better.

Yeah, I looked more into the existing open rooms and most didn't look too promising. They kind of had a lack of developers. I'm still not sure about the whole bitcoin thing. It seems like the only value in this virtual currency is what the small selection of merchants are willing to sell their goods for. The exchange rates for buying and selling don't seem even as well and vary by exchange.
I can set up a forum and start a thread on 2+2 and some other of these random poker development projects to see what kind of interest and talent we can scrape together to get a project like this going. I can also set up an SVN and maybe a dedicated server for testing and whatnot. With enough decent programmers I think a project like this could get off the ground quickly and move forward pretty well. Especially since there are so many other projects we can grab relevant code from.

I set up a vanilla forum it's at http://www.stakeandplay.com. It'll be temporary until we come up with a name or create a sourceforge project and then we can just move the forum.

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

current economy is worth $200k, 20k traded in last 24 hours

i been playing this poker room and it works as advertised.
https://betco.in/

in addition, the source code is open and free. if you imagine a normal server oriented, non-distributed client then you don't need to re-invent the wheel as the setup is there and just need fixing up.

otherwise a distributed poker client using bitcoin would rule/be fucking awesome. rake free, decentralised, customisable client... but would require a longer time.

if you want to make a distributed client then you'd need some skilled guys: mathematicians, property programmers and a general programmer with poker knowledge. because once the protocol is designed it becomes fixed once people start using it widely, changes become hard to make. therefore you'd want to get it right the first time. And to really get the best you can get, poker players should invest capital into the project. i'd be interested to do a project if people want to invest and i have an ideal team in mind of suitable people, but it doesn't have to be me. I can advise though whatever people decide to do.

(post is a bit messy as i'm very tired from all night doing lots of stuff)

On October 16 2010 21:09 jchysk wrote: Well I don't see why you can't find a trusted party like a bank that can oversee the handling of money and just use the software to determine where it goes.

And the bank would take <5% of the pot as a fee. Oh, wait...

wow this is really fantastic. someone donated 0.5 btc to me on bitcoin and playing 1btc/2btc I turned it into 8 btc (roughly $0.80 :D). I never really looked into the workings of bitcoin before, but it really works! market statistics are here, http://bitcoinwatch.com/ (list of traders, market value of BTC, ...)

this is the poker room i tried
https://betco.in/
go on freenode irc #bitcoin-dev and ask for a small donation to test it out (and some guys to play)

if someone wants to open their own rake free room (maybe supported by ads)... well all the software (needs a little work) and banking system is there. you just need to promote it so cool & unbelievable that this works

The basic problem still remains:

What prevents me from going all-in preflop, gracefully take your cash when you lose, but quickly disconnect and refuse to send my cash when I win? So long as the player decides when to send his cash, the player can cheat. If the "host" of the room escrows, then the host can take all the money and disconnect. If all players escrow together, then 5 players can collude to take the 6th player's money but not giving back what is rightfully his.

Let's take another way of looking at it: the following properties must be true in a headsup match:

- If Alice disconnects, Bob should get the money Alice has invested in the pot so far, and all the money he has invested in the pot so far should be returned to him.
- If Bob disconnects, Alice should get the money Bob has invested in the pot so far and all the money she has invested in the pot so far should be returned to her.

However, in a headsup match there is no way to tell who has disconnected, you can just see that you have lost connectivity to the other player. Therefore it is impossible.

It seems that we have to have someone escrow the money. And they're, of course, going to charge rake. Fine, but we can still improve on the monopolistic and rent-seeking-inducing system we have now. Rake should be no more than 1 cent per hand.

What about a server-to-server design like xmpp?

The way you're thinking of it is like a counterstrike or COD match where one person is hosting and the others connect. We would have to have reputable servers. How difficult would it be to create a non-profit organization that hosts the servers and holds the money?

But that's basically what pokerstars is charging such high rake for. It's a reputable organization that hosts the servers and holds the money. The last part is actually the most valuable and what they can charge the most for.

So long as we keep it centralized it's going to be monopolistic and high prices. But if we decentralize it, then how are we going to place trust?

On October 17 2010 06:57 Fudyann wrote: The basic problem still remains: What prevents me from going all-in preflop, gracefully take your cash when you lose, but quickly disconnect and refuse to send my cash when I win? So long as the player decides when to send his cash, the player can cheat. If the "host" of the room escrows, then the host can take all the money and disconnect. If all players escrow together, then 5 players can collude to take the 6th player's money but not giving back what is rightfully his.

Networks of trust are well established and working in field (bittorrent and seeders/leechers being a good example). You validate in the peer2peer network with third party hosts the reputation of players sitting at your table. You sit down with 5 low reputation players at 6max and get a warning. I addressed this above. Really these issues are non-issues with a bit of consideration. Making a secure peer2peer poker client is perfectly possible with a little thought.

I also found, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system for distributed transactions. They are able to do it, so it's possible. Although I don't know about the latency (just from reading the PDF on the algorithm)
http://ripple.sourceforge.net/decentralizedcurrency.pdf

A metric can also be built on the mismatch between reporting of hosts when you query them.

BTW what you say about trust- I always trust a decentralised network more than a centralised one. The best example is the internet. No one controls a decentralised network as long as you don't own the majority of it (>50%) to flood the consensus with faulty info which a client relies upon to make decisions.

On October 17 2010 07:29 Fudyann wrote: But that's basically what pokerstars is charging such high rake for. It's a reputable organization that hosts the servers and holds the money. The last part is actually the most valuable and what they can charge the most for. So long as we keep it centralized it's going to be monopolistic and high prices. But if we decentralize it, then how are we going to place trust?

BTW I see you live in Netherlands. If you're a programmer, you might be interested to meet a friend of mine in Amsterdam who's very much into distributed systems. Might give you some ideas. He has a company (and I haven't asked him- it's just speculation now) but if we raised enough capital ($$) from poker players (to support the project), they would probably help us with coding and space to work for free. They have an investment in distributed technology. Then we would have a guarantee that the software is desired, and not for nothing.

Networks of trust may be well established but not with thousand dollar buyins. We want to be an any-stakes network, right?

ill hold the money

network of trust does not mean John is a nice bloke and Barry seems kind of cool, lets take their word for it. It's a security concept for asymptotically tending to certainty for verifying the validity of agents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
PGP uses it, and PGP is used by multi million dollar banks.

How do I Play Poker with this? I downloaded hippich-Bitcoin-Poker-Room-008b230

there is no .exe Program to oPen and Play

I've also been thinking recently a lot about distributed networks for anarcho-cryptography and sharing files in a sneaker net:
https://n-1.cc/pg/blog/openid_44398/read/44572/bayesian-security
I wrote that a month ago, but my new concept is using Bayesian analysis as a fast fact checking method for anonymity. That article is more geared towards anonymising data, but you can also use conditional probability in this way to very quickly build a trusted path through a network without exhaustive breadth depth searching.
I wrote a couple more of these (mostly analysing the nature of communications and distribution) if you want me to dig them out.

On October 17 2010 08:56 doriipoker wrote: How do I Play Poker with this? I downloaded hippich-Bitcoin-Poker-Room-008b230 there is no .exe Program to oPen and Play

Go to bitcoin.org and download the program.
Run it.
Get free coins from http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ or buy them http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=exchangers (I didn't buy any myself so can't vouch for them) or exchange PokerStars on the forums (there's a buyer)
Go to https://betco.in/
Deposit by sending money from bitcoin account to that site
Sit at a table and play.

But since it's only for testing, likely no one is around. You can go on irc.freenode.org #bitcoin-dev and ask people to play with you, if you want to test it out.

genjix2 (and anyone else interested in talking about distributed networks) pm me your msn. And if you don't have it, pm me your xmpp and I'll finally get off my lazy arse and set up an xmpp server.

genjix2:

It says in the readme that came with the hippich bitcoin poker room:
"Run script/room_server.pl to test the application."

How can I open .PL file? Im such a noob sry

Dont know how to open this.. atm. I am generating /khasing bitcoins, and asked for 0.50 free

did you try this poker room, https://betco.in/ ? because it runs really fine for me.

On October 17 2010 10:25 genjix2 wrote: did you try this poker room, https://betco.in/ ? because it runs really fine for me.

Ah lol, now I understand.. I created account there and now I see what u are talking about
I was downloading the Open source code of "Bitcoin-Poker-Room" under download sources

I think the best solution is a connected network of escrows each with a reputation rating that can be found in the network. It should be possible to design a network such that you have to have contributed more than you can ever cheat away at any given moment. Since it's always possible to prove what the real result of a hand was with public key cryptography, we have a mechanism for ensuring constant accountability. Let me think this true a bit more overnight.

best thread I've seen here in a long long time

Seems like a pretty cool project, I hope it goes somewhere.

I never thought security as being an issue. When you have an open source project or you're dealing with money the insecurities get pointed out pretty quickly. This project wants to include both.

given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow

Here's a pretty similar thread to this from a few years ago:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/45/...ers-help-fight-uigea-bottom-up-61014/

pokerstars i believe makes money off the interest from all of our bankrolls(which is a hefty sum im sure)

cool but doesn't sound like something fish would ever be interested in though

So, we'll have a similar system to email. There are a ton of mail domains and mail servers, we'll have a ton of poker domains and poker servers. When Alice@poker1.com requests to join a headsup table Bob@poker2.com is waiting on, the server at poker2.com decides if it trusts the poker1.com server. If it does, it gives Bob a guarantee that should poker1.com cheat, the poker2.com server will compensate Bob for the losses. This is making use of the fact it will always be able to prove what the real result of the hand was using cryptography. Poker1.com makes a similar judgment of poker2.com and makes a similar guarantee to Alice. If Alice cheats, poker1.com will compensate poker2.com for the losses, and if Bob cheats, poker2.com will compensate poker1.com for the losses.

Next, for every hand dealt, poker1.com and poker2.com engage in a cryptographic protocol that allows neither to influence the card dealt, but allows both to verify if either cheated. The players engage in betting rounds, new cards are dealt, until it is time for showdown. Both players reveal their cards Suppose Alice@poker1.com won the hand. Poker2.com can verify that Alice@poker1.com indeed won the hand, sends the money to poker1.com, which passes it on to Alice.

If poker1.com and poker2.com ask a very modest rake, they will make enough money to compensate the players in the event of cheating and make a good profit besides. If poker1.com is charging too high a rake, Alice cancels her account with poker1.com and signs up with poker3.com. Since poker3.com is just starting out, it can ask a reputable organization like poker2.com to escrow for it until it has built up a reputation of itself.

hmm what kind of potential does this all have? too lazy to read all the gibberish

Right now I am fairly confident that the system itself would work well. I don't know if we can get a large userbase.

"If you build it, they will come"

good luck making ads to attact fish & get them displayed with 0 rake

fish don't care about the rake they'll just play on ftp/stars/whatever and regs will keep playing there to play vs them

The current proposal does have rake.

There biggest selling point we would have is that the network is completely open. Anyone can write their own client: full 3d with unrealistically beautiful waitresses walking around in the casino saying "stick it alll in.. I want to see all of it in" whenever you move the bet size slider too hard and amazingly realistic backgrounds. Text-based client for the console. Clients that run on phones, inside your browser, on your microwave status screen or your graphic calculator.

Server side is completely open too. Got a great idea for an ad campaign? Join the network, run the campaign, bring in the players and profit.

By opening poker up like this where anyone can host a server or make a client and join the existing community, you have a strong culture of competition and creativity that will give us a better experience for a fraction of the rake.

Fudyann did a good job of giving some examples of the potential of an open source poker system. It's highly likely that a project like this with any popularity at all would quickly surpass all other poker clients in design and functionality. All the external programs people use like TableNinja and HUDs can be built in. As far as advertising goes I think a great software low or no rake site would sell itself in many cases. Also viral marketing of free tools like facebook and twitter have made many upstart companies successful very rapidly.

avatars using webcams instead of pics would attract fish lol

So, next problem: how are we going to implement transfers of money across servers? We cannot use a real bank because there are too many transactions, transactions cost money, and it would bring legal burdens, We need a virtual currency of some kind that is reliable and easily converted to ordinary currency. Bitcoin has been mentioned, I will look into that. Any other ideas?

The good thing about using a virtual currency like bitcoin is that it's 3rd party and things like deposits/withdrawals by the poker sites are just with the virtual currency. The problem is the stability of the currency (since such a relatively small amount is traded it can easily be manipulated) and also that the users themselves have to go through additional steps of purchasing/selling it. Ideally though we wouldn't need a 3rd party system and could somehow handle everything ourselves. I've been wrapping my head around this for a couple days now and haven't gotten anywhere. I'll pose the issue to some of my friends in finance and see if they can come up with anything.

hmmm... we could technically have the user deposit money, in USD, on a server and have the server do the conversions. but that opens up a whole new can of worms. instead of having your whole bankroll on the server it would be more robust if just your current bets and raises are escrowed.

That in turn requires the user to arrange for a virtual currency =( Maybe let the user decide what he wants. If he trusts the server, server does it, if he doesn't, server only escrows for current pot.

Also agree with your point about the stability of something like bitcoin.

On October 17 2010 20:39 Fudyann wrote: So, we'll have a similar system to email. There are a ton of mail domains and mail servers, we'll have a ton of poker domains and poker servers. When Alice@poker1.com requests to join a headsup table Bob@poker2.com is waiting on, the server at poker2.com decides if it trusts the poker1.com server. If it does, it gives Bob a guarantee that should poker1.com cheat, the poker2.com server will compensate Bob for the losses. This is making use of the fact it will always be able to prove what the real result of the hand was using cryptography.

How? You have to have a central authority which resolves "disputes", which accepts the cryptographic exchange as a proof and has the authority to force a decision upon both poker1.com and poker2.com

Poker1.com makes a similar judgment of poker2.com and makes a similar guarantee to Alice. If Alice cheats, poker1.com will compensate poker2.com for the losses, and if Bob cheats, poker2.com will compensate poker1.com for the losses.

The parties who make GUI-s need to be trusted. You can control the card shuffle etc. on protocol level using cryptography but you cannot control what GUI displays to the user. The GUI may show the user as if the hand is still going on while in fact it folds the hand on behalf of the user?

Trust-related, how do you ensure that the clients do not establish a side communication?

Next, for every hand dealt, poker1.com and poker2.com engage in a cryptographic protocol that allows neither to influence the card dealt, but allows both to verify if either cheated. The players engage in betting rounds, new cards are dealt, until it is time for showdown. Both players reveal their cards Suppose Alice@poker1.com won the hand. Poker2.com can verify that Alice@poker1.com indeed won the hand, sends the money to poker1.com, which passes it on to Alice.

If poker1.com and poker2.com ask a very modest rake, they will make enough money to compensate the players in the event of cheating and make a good profit besides. If poker1.com is charging too high a rake, Alice cancels her account with poker1.com and signs up with poker3.com. Since poker3.com is just starting out, it can ask a reputable organization like poker2.com to escrow for it until it has built up a reputation of itself.

Isn't the last part just like the skins/networks like iPoker or whatever network it is (where they vary effective rake amount by offering rakeback deals). Only they don't have the authority problems above.

Overall I like the idea, but once you have rake it becomes hard to understand why it should be successful. There are many poker rooms with less rake than PS/FTP but they are so much less popular. What makes this thing better than them, what's the unique selling point?

If I set up a new poker room, I start with 0 users. In our network, you join the existing network. So people can experiment with ideas without having to split the poker community to make it work. That is the unique selling point, and that is what will lead to better quality experience for a fraction of the current rake.

Don't most of those networks have common player pool?

What is the cost of entry? Can you join that network right now?

So the player pool is shared.

If you want to implement a new poker client etc. you still have costs,
and the fee (if any) for joining an established network is part of the investment you have to get things going. And you are paying for a service, namely-that of the centralized trust/authority system which handles a lot of messy stuff. In your model, it is not clear who does all this.

On October 19 2010 16:55 pluzich wrote: So the player pool is shared. If you want to implement a new poker client etc. you still have costs, and the fee (if any) for joining an established network is part of the investment you have to get things going. And you are paying for a service, namely-that of the centralized trust/authority system which handles a lot of messy stuff. In your model, it is not clear who does all this.

Well it should be decentralized. If there's a node system you could randomly have a control assigned. As long as there's enough nodes (servers running a room) the network will always remain up and power remain even.

Pluzich: I'm trying to understand but I'm not sure what services exactly you think would be centralized. Nobody gets "control assigned". There is no "authorization stuff". In that sense, the network is completely decentralized.

It's still semi-centralized because we need to give some nodes the chance to build a reputation strong enough for escrowing.

On October 19 2010 05:21 Fudyann wrote: So, next problem: how are we going to implement transfers of money across servers? We cannot use a real bank because there are too many transactions, transactions cost money, and it would bring legal burdens, We need a virtual currency of some kind that is reliable and easily converted to ordinary currency. Bitcoin has been mentioned, I will look into that. Any other ideas?

This sounds like a good question to pose to slashdot.

On October 19 2010 18:09 Fudyann wrote: Pluzich: I'm trying to understand but I'm not sure what services exactly you think would be centralized. Nobody gets "control assigned". There is no "authorization stuff". In that sense, the network is completely decentralized. It's still semi-centralized because we need to give some nodes the chance to build a reputation strong enough for escrowing.

I'll break it down.
poker1.com has 100 players who are suspected to cooperate in DoNs. Some players from poker2.com say this is the case and demand money back.
poker1.com does not see enough evidence, poker2.com does.

Would you expect some random group of nodes to resolve such things?
Note that things can get arbitrarily complicated and you'll need lawyers etc to be able to make informed decisions.

On October 20 2010 06:29 pluzich wrote: Show nested quote + On October 19 2010 18:09 Fudyann wrote: Pluzich: I'm trying to understand but I'm not sure what services exactly you think would be centralized. Nobody gets "control assigned". There is no "authorization stuff". In that sense, the network is completely decentralized. It's still semi-centralized because we need to give some nodes the chance to build a reputation strong enough for escrowing. I'll break it down. poker1.com has 100 players who are suspected to cooperate in DoNs. Some players from poker2.com say this is the case and demand money back. poker1.com does not see enough evidence, poker2.com does. Would you expect some random group of nodes to resolve such things? Note that things can get arbitrarily complicated and you'll need lawyers etc to be able to make informed decisions.

Well the easiest and most expensive solution would be to hire a neutral 3rd party with non-disclosure agreements that handle investigations with all the data sent to them.

Reputational enforcement. Let go of the idea to go to court to resolve these questions. All poker hands can be logged by players from poker2.com, they can make the information public, and people will start blacklisting poker1.com until it does something about it. The incentive is very clear for poker1.com is to show it has banned the colluding players and is now clean.

Edit: Poker1.com can of course sue the players for damages in traditional courts, but that's between poker1.com and its players. Perhaps some poker rooms will instead ask players for a sum upfront that will be forfeited if they break the terms of service.

On October 20 2010 07:27 jchysk wrote: Show nested quote + On October 20 2010 06:29 pluzich wrote:   On October 19 2010 18:09 Fudyann wrote: Pluzich: I'm trying to understand but I'm not sure what services exactly you think would be centralized. Nobody gets "control assigned". There is no "authorization stuff". In that sense, the network is completely decentralized. It's still semi-centralized because we need to give some nodes the chance to build a reputation strong enough for escrowing. I'll break it down. poker1.com has 100 players who are suspected to cooperate in DoNs. Some players from poker2.com say this is the case and demand money back. poker1.com does not see enough evidence, poker2.com does. Would you expect some random group of nodes to resolve such things? Note that things can get arbitrarily complicated and you'll need lawyers etc to be able to make informed decisions. Well the easiest and most expensive solution would be to hire a neutral 3rd party with non-disclosure agreements that handle investigations with all the data sent to them.

Hence the service, for which you'd have to pay (a lot, btw).

The next problem you'd have to deal with is that when you hire a 3rd party to investigate you have to ship lots of data to them. Because of the amount of data will be huge you won't be able to anonymize it. So you will be potentially shipping millions of HHs and other data to a 3rd party.

For instance-in the scam scandal with DoNs, you'd either have to have actual, not showdown, HHs, (with all cards face up), something only PS could potentially have.
Otherwise, to prove scam beyond reasonable doubt they would have to analyse maybe 100x larger volume of data, but only "as seen by observers on the table" (you see cards if there is a showdown, otherwise not).

Either sending open HHs or showdown HHs but on much larger volume to a third party is so dangerous. You have to trust them THAT much information. Also, your users have to trust you/the third party, otherwise they won't sign up.

Hence the trust problem.

Brian Townsend would be very happy to work for that 3-rd party btw

The whole point of the cryptographic scheme is that you don't need to trust the server is trustworthy. The server doesn't know any of the holecards. Only you know your holecards. Does that mean we can't investigate cheating?

It'd be nearly impossible to investigate collusion in the typical ways a poker site would be able to. They can screenshot a desktop and see what applications are running in the background, they know hole cards, same table frequency, and they know personal information like location and IP address.

On October 20 2010 08:19 Fudyann wrote: The whole point of the cryptographic scheme is that you don't need to trust the server is trustworthy. The server doesn't know any of the holecards. Only you know your holecards. Does that mean we can't investigate cheating?

In principle it may be possible to "open" the HH, you need a special protocol for that which is invoked, for instance, when there is a court case or something like the investigation we discussed above. But you'd probably need the agreement of all the servers because of cryptography (i.e. everyone has to use their private key).

We know same table frequency. The others are unreliable (ip address and location) or too invasive (screenshot desktop). Potentially we can figure out a protocol for revealing hole cards during an investigation.

Would typical players mind if their hole cards were made public in the course of such an investigation? Many live players get pissed if they cards are accidentally revealed by the dealer at the end of the hand, and in poker it's obviously valuable to hide how you play.

Bump. I am still interested, but I'm stuck for the moment on the problem of collusion tracking.

Does anyone have a clue how we're going to prevent collusion in a p2p network? My best idea is this:

You rate the people you play with if you suspect them of colluding. The rating is sent into the network and clearly visible whenever you play with someone. You avoid people that are often suspected of colluding.

The basic problem remains that there is no central authority that has access to full hand histories and the like.

So far it would wrok well for hu only=]

That's no good, too many people have both HU and 6max as their main games and want to be able to play both on one site.

Can somebody step in to tell me how collusion is usually investigated? What is needed?

Collusion is found using hypothesis testing. It says given a sample mean and standard deviation from our population of players, what is the chance these measured variables (standard deviation for folding hands, playing speed, ...) is down to chance?
If these probabilities are unacceptably low then you could have a bot. However if many of these variables are all low then you most likely do have a bot. These actions don't reflect how a human player would play.

That's what PokerStars means by statistical analysis. The more data to data mine and find patterns amongst, the better.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2717599/defeating-a-poker-bot

On October 16 2010 18:47 Fudyann wrote: It is possible to play a hand of poker "peer to peer" or without a trusted party without anyone being able to cheat.

No, it is not. /thread

On November 11 2010 12:34 lucifer wrote: Show nested quote + On October 16 2010 18:47 Fudyann wrote: It is possible to play a hand of poker "peer to peer" or without a trusted party without anyone being able to cheat. No, it is not. /thread

Cheat as in fake your cards. Preventing collusion is also an easy problem to solve: simply make all matches headsup. The hard problem is solving it for ring games. Any ideas?

On November 11 2010 16:12 Fudyann wrote: Show nested quote + On November 11 2010 12:34 lucifer wrote:   On October 16 2010 18:47 Fudyann wrote: It is possible to play a hand of poker "peer to peer" or without a trusted party without anyone being able to cheat. No, it is not. /thread Cheat as in fake your cards. Preventing collusion is also an easy problem to solve: simply make all matches headsup. The hard problem is solving it for ring games. Any ideas?

No - 2 players in different parts of the world can always be on the phone and there is no way to even try to inspect them if you can't see their holecards or their previous hand histories or table selections.

Collusion is not a very big problem in poker. It's not really a problem at all frankly. My main worries as someone without computer security knowledge is security of hole cards and security of my money. Convince me of that and I'll play on your site in a shot and so will the fish - they don't care about collusion either.

We can log table selection and hand histories, just not hole cards. The whole point of the system is that it's impossible to see somebody's holecards without that person revealing them, and equally impossible to misrepresent your holecards.

On November 12 2010 01:47 Fudyann wrote: We can log table selection and hand histories, just not hole cards. The whole point of the system is that it's impossible to see somebody's holecards without that person revealing them, and equally impossible to misrepresent your holecards.

Which brings me back to no it isn't. especially not p2p when it's infinity easier.

The problem with recording holecards would be the possibility of abuse for investigations beyond collusion. You'd probably have to have a pretty sick analysis system for flagging statistical anomalies and only bring those up for review.

On November 11 2010 20:24 Oly wrote: Collusion is not a very big problem in poker. It's not really a problem at all frankly. My main worries as someone without computer security knowledge is security of hole cards and security of my money. Convince me of that and I'll play on your site in a shot and so will the fish - they don't care about collusion either.

Don't agree with collusion. I think it would be an even larger problem on a site where people think they can get away with it. As far as security goes, I would feel more secure on an open source poker room than a proprietary closed client.

On November 12 2010 07:52 lucifer wrote: Show nested quote + On November 12 2010 01:47 Fudyann wrote: We can log table selection and hand histories, just not hole cards. The whole point of the system is that it's impossible to see somebody's holecards without that person revealing them, and equally impossible to misrepresent your holecards. Which brings me back to no it isn't. especially not p2p when it's infinity easier.

Are you claiming that it's possible to see somebody's holecards without that person revealing them? If so, I think you probably don't understand the cryptography behind this.

If not, then what do you mean?

i feel we cant really plan this thing to perfection unless someone makes one first for people to try it, even if it's just play money at first then just fix or check things as you move along and see actual probs. talking about this constantly will only kill interest as time goes by and it would be a shame to see this thing just fade away.i mean no disrespect in any way, i hugely support what you are trying to do. we gotta get a beta thing started if that's possible.

im working on it. give me time jeez.

Can I have 4 beta testers please?
- You must be able to use IRC.
- Be able to arrange amongst yourself a playing time within a days notice.
- Participate in a mailing list to offer feedback.

The more the better since arranging testing sessions would be easier as everyone need not attend.

Plus points:
- Any technical knowledge like admin of Linux.
- Mac OSX users.
- Power users who use Windows a lot.
- Graphics artist.

I need various work done. Every small task slows me down and adds up from doing the balls & meat core tech.

You can track the progress here and read the public wiki.

More info:
Protocol RFC
Personal scratchpad.

Here's an old video of the client:


Server service is coming along nicely too.

as much as I would like to pay no rake,

this sounds like an excuse to not get better at poker to increase ur win rate.

P2P poker using Ripple uncentralized funding transfers
I was thinking about setting up a P2P open source poker game for some time and had already done much research on it's possibilities. My original plan was to use the already running open source pokerth game with some modifications that would allow a payment module to be plugged into it. The original plan of the payment system was to use bitcoins built in multisign scripting to allow for a completely uncentralized escrow method of payment. I had already done some programing in bitcoin and created a branch called multicoin that would enable testing using worthless crypto currency to start to just keep score and to test out if the idea would really work for real bitcoins first? I later had other interests and dropped out of my software development of Multicoin. I just recently went back to look again at what we now have in open source crypto finance and found something even better than bitcoin for poker p2p finance called Ripple. Ripple doesn't fully replace Bitcoin but it actually can be used to transact and auto convert bitcoin if desired to any desired currency at even faster speeds of 5 seconds per transaction compared to bitcoin that would take up to 1 hour at times to do a transaction. Ripple has everything we need to both play with real money in virtually any currency at the same time. Ripple not only provides a way to transact funds over a no name no address accounts much like bitcion with just a big number and secrete number, but also has the built in tools of multisign to allow again for the escrow to hold the pot of a game until the winners of the game are determined and can be paid out. Ripple being uncentralized much like Bitcoin can't be taken down or controlled by governments to sease assets and there is no central point of all assets that can just run off with all the money. It can also be setup to play in a virtual fake money to start that can be used just to keep score in the beginning and to test for problems so we can debug and fix them. And to also allow those to continue to play and just keep track of there score by looking at there virtual Ripple coin accounts to see there status. If that ends up working it would only require switching to the standard Ripple network to allow for real money games at cost per game money transactions of as little as 0.0001usd per game so we are taking about playing poker for 100 years for like $6 for a lifetime. Ripple also allows for controlled credit limit loans so you could even have poker bankers involved in the games if desired in real or fake money. Also since the cost of the transactions are so low you can also play in micro pots of like 1 cent or less even in real money. So at these numbers people wouldn't need to have so much trust to get started in it. Also inside of Ripple transactions there is memo data that can be added and used to add notes of what games the transaction was used for and who the players were that you won it from and what software was used in the game. One other thing I think that will be needed is a method of tracking trust of players. I'm sure there will be some cheaters or attempted cheaters, but at some point there will also be reputable people that many people will get to trust. With the cryptographic signatures you will be sure you are playing with the same people you know each time.

There are still many unanswered questions as to how all this would have to be setup to make it almost impossible to cheat or at least just work.

One feature I would like is that it would be cool if you could exit a game at any time and take what you already won or leave with what you have left. At this point this would be hard for me to do but not impossible.

At the beginning to make it simple all that join a poker game would be part of the multisign escrow. Each player would put in some random decided pot amount that would buy you some random number of chips to start the game. Each player would play until they have no chips left or have won the entire pot. Any number of players could play from 2 – 10 people. When the final two players finish the game the destination address for payment is set in the escrow by the winner and each of the players signs off that he was the winner so he gets the total funds transfered into his Ripple account. In the event that something goes wrong in the game for any reason. There can be a dispute of the group of players that would have to conclude with more than 50% that there was a problem with software or other. In this case all the money goes back to each of the players less a small transaction fee if needed in the Ripple transaction. Ripple also has time values that can be added into the escrow contract, so if no one signs the transaction over some period of time that would also be concluded as something went wrong and the money again returned to the original players. The escrow time can also be set to allow some time for the players to ether agree or setup a dispute. In most cases this would not be seen by the players. It would all be handled invisibly and automatically in most cases by the pokerth payment system. At some point we could also add a third party trusted entity to some games if desired that can mediate if needed in bigger money games. In this case the third party would most likely want some money to act in such a capacity.

On the side of cheating. How can we be sure that some players don't use a modified version of the open source game to allow them to cheat by looking at cards or changing card values in play? I'm hoping others can figure that one out as I'm not really sure. I haven't looked at the pokerth code that closely yet. I don't know anyone that presently cheats in pokerth but that maybe due to the fact that it's used to play with fake money not real. So until we get the fake money in Ripple working with pokerth, we can figure this part of the security out later if we find we need it. The cryptographic playing card section of p2p poker might be another project in itself for all I know. I can only say that I've played Pokerth for many hours with very few problems to date. It seems very stable as is.

See the references below for more details on the proposed multisign features of Ripple:

https://ripple.com/https://ripple.com/

https://wiki.ripple.com/Multisignhttps://wiki.ripple.com/Multisign

https://wiki.ripple.com/Contractshttps://wiki.ripple.com/Contracts

https://wiki.ripple.com/Main_Pagehttps://wiki.ripple.com/Main_Page

and the pokerth site:

http://pokerth.net/http://pokerth.net/

if Ripple isn't ready yet maybe we have to go back to the Bitcoin multisign methods as we tested in multicoin some time back:

https://github.com/sacarlson/MultiCoinhttps://github.com/sacarlson/MultiCoin

Also note that some of these multisign and contract features of Ripple are said to be future features. I'm looking to see if the code in any of the Github branches already has some at least partly working version of these features that we can start to test with. I see them speaking about it months ago that sounds like they almost had something. So we might just have to wait and see.

by Scott Carlson (c) Apr 21 2015

This is a work in progress:
http://scottygeekpage.blogspot.com/2015/04/p2p-open-source-poker-program-proposal.htmlhttp://scottygeekpage.blogspot.com/2015/04/p2p-open-source-poker-program-proposal.html

Everything is solved and explained, and 2 projects are almost finished coding:

https://thewealthofchips.wordpress.com/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v...o95UzhWftWJ3Ke_gAoNLTQQEudNeUQeY/edit

pokerth_accounting is ready for testing today not tomaro!! The Mental poker upgrade is mentioned in my wiki as in a future addition that would not be hard to add. The Mental poker c++ libs are already published and tested as seen on another github project that shows times to shuffle well within reason on todays computers. At this point my project is ready for testing. In it's present state we use Stellar.org testnet STR and trust line generated coins we call CHP (for chips). CHP are a worthless crypto currency that we will us just to keep score at this point and for testing the concept. The CHP coins are distributed to member players of pokerth from poker.surething.biz site in a one time 100,000 to start money. As far as other matters that can be a concern like collusion, With the Stellar uncentralized money system were all transaction can be seen by the public. We can track who was playing with who and when on every game ever played to research the possibility of collusion. From this information you can decide weather you want to play on a table with possible colluders or not. I've also added a primitive website that displays all the active members account ballances so you can compare you skills with others at http://poker.surething.biz . This site also contains the database to share your Stellar.org account numbers with other pokerth players. The pokerth_accounting program that runs in the background on your local system does everything invisibly without any added effort from the player of pokerth. After or durring the game you can analize your accounting with an sqlitebrowser to view what you paid who and when. Sqlitebrowser is also used to make changes in the configuration of the system allowing you to change currency or network to real money on a different network like Ripple or other. The software for the most part is completed ready to run but I'm sure we will be finding bugs to fix soon. That's why I need testers. There is no way I can test every function without realtime play involved. So if your willing to help us move this along take a look at our present evolving code at https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki and https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting. If you have any question you can find me at #pokerth IRC or even on pokerth game chat as sacarlson or leave me a note on github. Oh and again on the mater of Mental poker algorithm, the present game uses servers that no one ( should say not many) people have access to. So until we start playing with big money I'm not going to wory about it. Remember with Stellar.org that even in real money we can play with very small pots of even less than 1 cent worth of crypto currency of say STR. Transaction costs are so small even in real money (non testnet) the costs would be less than $3 for about 100 years (more than a life time) of play. On testnet in it's present default settings it is completely free. I should note that the next upgrade we are pushing is implementing the built in uncentralized escrow system on Stellar.org. With that and Mental poker added it should be about done. So give it a try and find out for yourself just how close we really are. The open source code can be see here: https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki

On July 09 2015 03:57 sacarlson wrote: pokerth_accounting is ready for testing today not tomaro!! The Mental poker upgrade is mentioned in my wiki as in a future addition that would not be hard to add. The Mental poker c++ libs are already published and tested as seen on another github project that shows times to shuffle well within reason on todays computers. At this point my project is ready for testing. In it's present state we use Stellar.org testnet STR and trust line generated coins we call CHP (for chips). CHP are a worthless crypto currency that we will us just to keep score at this point and for testing the concept. The CHP coins are distributed to member players of pokerth from poker.surething.biz site in a one time 100,000 to start money. As far as other matters that can be a concern like collusion, With the Stellar uncentralized money system were all transaction can be seen by the public. We can track who was playing with who and when on every game ever played to research the possibility of collusion. From this information you can decide weather you want to play on a table with possible colluders or not. I've also added a primitive website that displays all the active members account ballances so you can compare you skills with others at http://poker.surething.biz . This site also contains the database to share your Stellar.org account numbers with other pokerth players. The pokerth_accounting program that runs in the background on your local system does everything invisibly without any added effort from the player of pokerth. After or durring the game you can analize your accounting with an sqlitebrowser to view what you paid who and when. Sqlitebrowser is also used to make changes in the configuration of the system allowing you to change currency or network to real money on a different network like Ripple or other. The software for the most part is completed ready to run but I'm sure we will be finding bugs to fix soon. That's why I need testers. There is no way I can test every function without realtime play involved. So if your willing to help us move this along take a look at our present evolving code at https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki and https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting. If you have any question you can find me at #pokerth IRC or even on pokerth game chat as sacarlson or leave me a note on github. Oh and again on the mater of Mental poker algorithm, the present game uses servers that no one ( should say not many) people have access to. So until we start playing with big money I'm not going to wory about it. Remember with Stellar.org that even in real money we can play with very small pots of even less than 1 cent worth of crypto currency of say STR. Transaction costs are so small even in real money (non testnet) the costs would be less than $3 for about 100 years (more than a life time) of play. On testnet in it's present default settings it is completely free. I should note that the next upgrade we are pushing is implementing the built in uncentralized escrow system on Stellar.org. With that and Mental poker added it should be about done. So give it a try and find out for yourself just how close we really are. The open source code can be see here: https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki

^Man, look at your post. You think anyone is actually gonna try and go through that monstrosity?

If you're trying to advertise to get people to try out your software, at least make the pitch cleaner and more inviting. Perhaps get a friend to clean it up if you struggle with english or something.

On July 09 2015 15:16 devon06atX wrote: If you're trying to advertise to get people to try out your software, at least make the pitch cleaner and more inviting. Perhaps get a friend to clean it up if you struggle with english or something.

On the one hand it's not relevant because there are bigger further along projects on the go, that this person seems unaware of. On the other hand it uses ripple which is like a big bank friendly version of bitcoin, a competitor but not at all the same thing as bitcoin. Then I think this makes 4 or more projects of p2p poker.

I hope the poster or devs will contact me.

On July 09 2015 15:16 devon06atX wrote: []^Man, look at your post. You think anyone is actually gonna try and go through that monstrosity? If you're trying to advertise to get people to try out your software, at least make the pitch cleaner and more inviting. Perhaps get a friend to clean it up if you struggle with english or something.

Good point thanks for the feedback. ya next time I'll make it shorter. like maybe...

Pokerth_accounting is a fully functional program module that runs along side pokerth, that allows people to play FREE P2P poker with real or imaginary money using new fast uncentralized crypto currency methods see https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki for details, we've added many new features.

On July 09 2015 15:16 devon06atX wrote: []^Man, look at your post. You think anyone is actually gonna try and go through that monstrosity? If you're trying to advertise to get people to try out your software, at least make the pitch cleaner and more inviting. Perhaps get a friend to clean it up if you struggle with english or something.

Good point thanks for the feedback. ya next time I'll make it shorter. like maybe...

Pokerth_accounting is a fully functional program module that runs along side pokerth, that allows people to play FREE P2P poker with real or imaginary money using new fast uncentralized crypto currency methods see https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki for details, we've added many new features.

On July 11 2015 12:48 sacarlson wrote: Show nested quote + On July 09 2015 15:16 devon06atX wrote: []^Man, look at your post. You think anyone is actually gonna try and go through that monstrosity? If you're trying to advertise to get people to try out your software, at least make the pitch cleaner and more inviting. Perhaps get a friend to clean it up if you struggle with english or something. Good point thanks for the feedback. ya next time I'll make it shorter. like maybe... Pokerth_accounting is a fully functional program module that runs along side pokerth, that allows people to play FREE P2P poker with real or imaginary money using new fast uncentralized crypto currency methods see https://github.com/sacarlson/pokerth_accounting/wiki for details, we've added many new features.

You have a security leak and so your project cannot fly. Tweet by btc core dev P Todd, retweet by Szabo (btc's guru):

I wrote a paper analyzing the Ripple consensus algorithm: https://github.com/petertodd/ripple-c...s-analysis-paper/raw/master/paper.pdf … tl;dr: Ripple is centralized..