This just keeps getting better...
I have been dreaming of the day that Texas Hold'em makes a comeback. I am good enough to go pro, and with small enough rake and enough fish swimming in the water I could easily make $100 an hour with a high enough bankroll.
I've been considering what it would take to create decentralized poker. Is it possible to shuffle a deck using sharded keys that require a key from each player to reveal? Turns out, YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT JUST HAPPENED. The ramifications of this development are massive.
Online poker is a very shady topic. All the big sites were laundering money and they got banned in America in an event dubbed: Black Friday. April 15, 2011.
Before Black Friday I could play on Full Tilt or Paradise Poker. Even though these sites took a "huge" rake (5% of the pot capped at $3) I was still able to make $20 an hour with relative ease and acceptable volatility. Without the rake I would have been making $30-$40 an hour with even less negative volatility. I was playing 4 tables at once $1 No Limit poker. Any more than that was too much and i would make too many mistakes.
Unregulated gambling: Crypto's first and most prominent use case.
This decentralized RNG (random number generator) solution is perhaps the greatest achievement in the cryptosphere to date. Random numbers are a huge deal in computer science because they aren't actually random.
Until now, any random number generator could be reverse engineered to determine which numbers would be created. This technology has applications far surpassing Poker and gambling in general. It can be applied to literally any application that requires random numbers to be unknown until a specified time. This concept will be applied in so many areas it's hard to even imagine the future. Video games will come first after gambling. That much I am certain.
It's very hard to express just how big of a deal this is. The irony of CoinPoker developing this technology is palpable. They've just made themselves obsolete. This technology can be used to completely eliminate the middle man and allow anyone to play Poker rake-free without a centralized authority.
The Race To The Bottom is here. Soon™, gambling will no longer be gambling. "The house always wins," will become, "The player always breaks even." Gambling addiction ruining lives will cease to be a problem.
I've been working on a custom poker database over the past decade. I gave up a long time ago when Full Tilt got shut down. However, this decentralized system will allow my database to be much more powerful.
Players can verify the randomness of the deck, as well as see the undealt cards after the hands are completed.
Hiding information is a big part of playing cards, and if no information is hidden, then having a database to find patterns in player behavior is a huge advantage.
Centralized trust
You have no idea how many horror stories I've read about poker players having their funds frozen for weeks/months. This tech makes that risk a thing of the past.
Another huge aspect of this is that many big poker sites were statistically proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been cheating. The random number generation was being exploited. Many users did not trust online poker. Now it's provably fair. Online poker is about to make a huge comeback that can't be regulated or banned. They're going to try and then realize it's exactly the same as trying to ban torrents... except even harder because torrents were often centralized on Pirate Bay and other assailable servers. Crypto is going to experience the biggest comeback in the next year or so it's going to be a wild ride.
P. S.
It's important to note that I don't necessarily think CoinPoker will become popular. It's an ICO on Ethereum so it can't scale yet. Ethereum is not a good platform for this kind of service in my opinion (at least at the moment). However, I believe that the technology created here will be used throughout the cryptosphere in a burst of innovation.
Poker games do not have to exist on chain. An Ethereum Plasma solution will allow anyone to launch a "home game" that only gets updated every once and a while and is not controlled by any centralized entity. Perhaps CoinPoker will implement such a solution but I'm guessing they'll try to retain as much control as possible, which will be their undoing in the long run. Their coin will have little value, as a service like this should be able to be implemented with a myriad of coins. They may end up having very little competition to start and corner the market for a while before being undercut. We'll see.