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by dick_sucker2 2932 days ago
Would you agree that this is a harder problem than say casino and gambling on the blockchain? There are great use cases for improving trust with smart contracts and ledgers that prevent the house from cheating or running off with the money.
1 comments
hobofan 2932 days ago
Not sure what specifically you mean. Doesn't gambling on the blockchain usually work without a "house", e.g. smart contracts that are not in anyone's control? Those are the only gambling systems I've seen so far on the blockchain, but I must admit that I've never deeply looked at that topic.
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dick_sucker2 2932 days ago
The smart contracts have to be in someone's control. It's better if they aren't controlled by the house though. Check out FunFair.
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hobofan 2931 days ago
Ah, the FunFair example makes it more clear what you mean. I think the main obstacle there is finding/creating a decentralized way for (pseudo-)random numbers to establish true fairness. From what I've heard that problem has mostly been solved, but I don't know for certain.

> The smart contracts have to be in someone's control.

They don't _have_ to be. Someone has to deploy the smart contract, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they get any privileged access to alter/use the smart contract after deployment. That's where a lot of the beauty of smart contract enabled blockchains comes from in my opinion.

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DennisP 2931 days ago
There are various solutions for randomness. Funfair's is for the user and the house to generate chains of hashes, e.g. hash(hash(hash(secret))). Each posts the outermost hash to the smart contract. Then each can reveal successive preimages, and the contract can XOR each pair to get a random number.

Here's an article on an idea very similar to theirs, with sample code: https://www.blunderingcode.com/gamble-channels-fast-verifiab...

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