14 ms·

Etherplay: Play Skill Games on Ethereum

78 points by bpierre 10y ago

davidgerard 10y ago
I suppose it's a step up from "honest Ponzis". https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contracts-in-practice.html https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  serious question, why do you hate crypto (bitcoin, ethereum, etc..) so much? I see your username in a lot of places, from hacker news to wikipedia, always doing your best to criticize or stop these sort of technologies. I don't understand this obsession. I don't like say... angular.. but I don't go around trying to sabotage or bad mouth the project as I prefer to spend time on more productive things.
  - wslh 10y ago
    Yes, it seems David chose specific community member characteristics to criticize the cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. So why not make a book about the community instead of the technology? If he is not clear about this, he is just following a classical fallacy.
  - dpc_pw 10y ago
    I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast, yet the whole crypto-ecosystem is ridden with crooks and frauds trying to make money of suckers. Altcoins that are obvious scams, services that have "accidental" bugs and loose your money, services that get "hacked", and so on. As a rule of thumb everything in cryptofin should be considered a scam before proven otherwise. It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.
  - tps5 10y ago
    Instead of calling him out over his "obsession," please try to respond to his argument. Is he wrong? Is he making incorrect assertions? I am genuinely curious. I don't know a lot about cryptography, blockchains, bitcoins, etc. I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but seeing two knowledgeable people civilly discussing the merits of these things would be interesting. Calling someone out for "being obsessed" isn't. To use your angular analogy, if someone went around criticizing angular everywhere, I'd like to see a discussion between that person and a pro-angular guy. Because I guarantee there are smart people and good points to be made on both sides of that argument.
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      Well I'm sure someone has engaged him before so I don't think I would be particulary productive. Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses, regarless it's also very easy to criticize something and far more interesting to find solutions, you can critize the current decentralization tech much like you could easily criticize and dimiss this internet thing in 1984. I was just genuinely curious about his motivations. My example with angular is that even though I really don't like it, I wouldnt want to waste time criticizing it or stopping people who want to advance it.
      - tps5 10y ago
        >Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses Such as?
        heliumcraft 10y ago
        for e.g the article claiming "100 bugs per 1000" takes a crapy contract and considers refactors as bugs, critizes well known things to take into account, and generally exagerates. Another example, is the infamous 'solar exploit' article (since then slightly modified due to criticism), which is written by someone with a financial interest against ethereum (due to owning a startup with a competing product) essentially makes a claim equivalent to saying the internet is broken because you can do this in nodejs http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg
  - desireco42 10y ago
    I don't think 'not liking angular' is such a rare trait, it is more of a common view
  - cashmonkey85 10y ago
    It's an amazing technology and I believe it's only going to get better. But let's be honest here. Ethereum is a scam and so are 90% of the projects of there.
  - noio 10y ago
    I'm reading the article he linked and others on the site. It's super interesting stuff and he does paint a convincing picture.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Cryptocurrency advocates have, in the past, aggressively promoted the currencies with not just over-hyped arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reasonable criticism, but also tying it to a politically confrontational ideas that would be very damaging to society if they were actually successful. This has produced a lot of anti-advocates. Etherum combines un-upgradeable code with a lack of formal verification systems. As a result, the only way an exploit could be fixed in one of its largest and most heavily promoted use cases (the "DAO") was to fork the currency. Both forks are still trading, although one at greatly diminished value.
    - DennisP 10y ago
      Fwiw, the Ethereum Foundation has someone working full-time on formal verification systems, and the online solidity compiler has a partial implementation of formal verification for smart contract sourcecode. Aside from that, the DAO disaster has made people realize they need to build backup plans into their contracts. Maybe you can't change sourcecode at will, but you can add emergency shutdown mechanisms, predefined paths for upgrading code via systems of modular contracts, etc. There's a tradeoff vs. trusting the admin, but for now it seems like a good one in many cases.
  - empath75 10y ago
    I've played around with investing in bitcoin and I'm a strong believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchains as a technology, but there really are a ton of scams in the industry and it's worthwhile to point that out.
    - gertef 10y ago
      What are your investments that aren't speculations?
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative. * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.) * Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself. * Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong". * Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone. * Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted. * Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise. * Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case. * Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't. * Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service. * I feel like it.
    - sayurichick 10y ago
      what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
  - eternalban 10y ago
    Angular is not a construct based on, and promoting, socio-political theories. It is entirely fair to have a political stance regarding these systems.
- kordless 10y ago
  > Since blockchain enthusiasts had already self-selected for gullibility Just by that statement alone, it would appear some of your arguments against Ethereum/blockchains are based on fallacious arguments. Fallacies are a strong indication there is a conflicted view being held by one or more debaters. Not all "blockchain enthusiasts" are gullible, but there may be gullible people in the space and people who prey on them. There may also be a large amount of negatively biased individuals in the space who only observe and comment on the behaviors of the last two groups. FWIW, I've observed both in person multiple times. I always keep in mind the obvious polarization around cryptocurrencies when discussing them in public. I find it doubtful any arguments made with bias around the use of cryptocurrencies will have a serious impact on adoption in the future. Ethereum isn't used for anything important right now anyway, so any biased arguments made for or against it are rather pointless and a waste of good resources. What will affect the future usefulness of cryptocurrencies is yet to come.
- madethemcry 10y ago
  I voted you up. You could have written more instead of linking to an excerpt of yours. But after reading it with the great examples of bugged contracts you gave I must say: thank you. I especially love the GovernMental example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ghzhv/governmentals_1100_eth_jackpot_payout_is_stuck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ghzhv/government...). Small bug but the involved ether will stay in nirvana forever. I only knew about the failed DAO up to now. All those smaller failed contracts fit perfectly in the image the DAO left. I mean I love the idea of ethernet and its contracts but I see no solution to the inherent software bug problem. You can't do a hard fork for every bug.
- EnFinlay 10y ago
  Skill based cash tournaments are a thing far removed from the block chain.
dpc_pw 10y ago
I fail to see what's the point of ethereum/blockchain here. The proof of score must be given by the server (otherwise how would you prevent the score fabrication after the fact?), then owners of the service can always fabricate couple of nice high-scores for themselves.
- rc_bhg 10y ago
  Feels like just an experiment with this new technology. Maybe over time they can improve and upgrade to make scores more verifiable.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  It seems they are using a (verifiable) oracle to verify the proof due to gas costs. A good alternative to this is to use something like a computation market http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/ http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/
bpierre 10y ago
They posted this article that provides more information, I should have posted it instead. Maybe the HN mods can change it? https://medium.com/@etherplay/what-is-etherplay-d51424674931 https://medium.com/@etherplay/what-is-etherplay-d51424674931
deweller 10y ago
Arcade style games will not work. As soon as there is value to be gained, someone will quickly write a bot to simulate player inputs and play a perfect game.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gertef 10y ago
  They'll work fine for the purpose of extracting ether (== money) from unsuspecting rubes.
- 314 10y ago
  Isn't that the point of Economics2.0, we should assume that the devs have read Accelerando and are investing heavily in lobster as we speak.
carl_corder 10y ago
I wanted to try playing the game (EtherSpace), so I added the MetaMask extension to Chrome. I noticed the account is initiliazed with 1.000 ETH on the Ropsten Test Network. However, the game requires you to play on the Main Ethereum Network for a price of 0.01467 ETH. Sadly, I have no ETH on this network.
brilliantcode 10y ago
This is what I mean by Ethereum is a solution looking for a problem. What possible use case here that should be adopted by the gaming industry? So the top score is immutable and verified by multiple 3rd party miners? Help me understand because I never get a good answer.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Ethereum, MaidSafe, etc.. are trying to be a solution to a specific problem: how to create a trustless decentralized internet (and perhaps even society), one that does not require centralized structures like it does now. It's not quite there yet, and there is a long way to go, but at least there is some progress.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    > how to create a trustless decentralized internet what evidence of demand is there? what compelling need is there for existing infrastructures to uproot their investments for some elusive buzzword?
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      Remember what happened to wikileaks.org ? A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. How do you create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible. You might not care but this is a problem that a lot of ppl do care about. By the end of this year with the release of swarm and ethereum naming system it will be possible to run a completly decentralized (no servers), uncensorable, 100% uptime website.
      - brilliantcode 10y ago
        that's not a widespread problem held by many nor evidence of consumers demand. Like you said, it's a problem considered by a few but outside of that there's very little reason to use ethereum. go ahead and downvote my critical views on Ethereum, I'm already used to it from /r/ethereum pumpers. But I'm taking away that there's no good rationale for adopting Ethereum or blockchain technology other than very micro and esoteric niches.
vessenes 10y ago
Naysayers are missing the point of this (admittedly very simple) proof of concept: a few developers wanted to make a game that allowed money pooling and tournament payouts. So they made it. Without any work getting payment processing, banking, a gaming attorney, and so on. This is such a significant competitive advantage for a small team that it changes the landscape of the possible -- the typical costs in time and money of those parts of the game would vastly dominate the development costs of an asteroids remix. In this case, probably most of the work was put into the game itself, not the Solidity/ETH side.
- pampa 10y ago
  Without a gaming attorney, chances are high that you will need a criminal attorney later.
  - usgovatgug 10y ago
    I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Taek 10y ago
  Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed. "Oh, they made an investment platform without any of the hassle of traditional investment platforms". Then someone found a bug, and poof it's all up in smoke. The danger of ethereum right now is that it's really easy to get something incorrect and broken operating at full capacity on the network. It's really hard to write secure programs, and when money is on the line there's a juicy bounty for anyone who finds a mistake. It seems like a significant competitve advantage but I don't think any serious product, idea, etc should be developing on ethereum while compiler bugs are still regularly being discovered, and while best practices are still regularly being updated.
robertcorey 10y ago
25% rake is too high. Game should be playable in "fun mode".
- EnFinlay 10y ago
  Agreed. Necessary if people are going to risk money. Give them the ability to practice.
- gertef 10y ago
  what's the minimum bet? 25% of 0.01p isn't bad
EnFinlay 10y ago
I cofounded a startup based around a similar idea. We were (attempting) to make an API that mobile game developers could plug into their games to add skill based cash tournaments. Mine was called Foosler. There were a couple others - Cashplay and Skillz. Shut 'er down after a couple years of hard work and lessons learned. It's a hard business to make work. Good luck to Etherplay :)
- Torgo 10y ago
  Were the problems primarily regulatory?
  - EnFinlay 10y ago
    Problems: 1. It was my cofounder and I's first startup and we lacked marketing skills 2. Most causal players perceive that for a given game, there are many people out there way better than them, so they didn't want to risk any money 3. Mobile game developers are quite happy playing the freemium lottery 4. Google changed their ToS and our stuff was written in Java 5. Startup newbies make bad decisions
CoryG89 10y ago
I have often thought about trying to build something similar to this for a while using either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Although I have been discouraged by laws against online gambling in most US states. Does anyone know if this sidesteps gambling laws somehow? Or is this based in a jurisdiction that doesn't have laws against online gambling?
- Kiro 10y ago
  I don't know about the laws in the US but in Sweden it's not classified as gambling if it's skill based.
  - openasocket 10y ago
    It is the same in the US. In fact, that's how fantasy sports sites can operate legally in the US.
    - CoryG89 10y ago
      I'm not sure I understand how fantasy sports sites or anything like that are anymore "skill-based" than say poker or blackjack, I guess those are legal under this definition as well?
- sibwijjs 10y ago
  Wow, try to contribute to the community and my comment shows up auto dead. HN mods certainly know how to silence those they hate usgovatgug 4 minutes ago [dead] [-] I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.
- 10y ago
dihibbvd 10y ago
Well I give up. Fuck the mods and fuck censorship.
- sctb 10y ago
  There are some restrictions for brand new accounts that are implemented in the HN software. Sometimes legitimate posts get caught by those filters, but it can take a bit of time before the community or moderators see those and vouch for them (as was just done here). You can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com any time for help.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
Hrm...apparently the "proof" that the game was played is the combination of the player's input record plus the need to submit the proof immediately after the game ends (so that the timestamp of the commit is within a few seconds of when the game would have ended according to the input). Disregarding writing bots to play the game, the first cheat that comes to mind is locally speeding the game up 25%, building up an ever-growing rewind buffer, and then giving the cheating player a "back up a few seconds" button to undo some input at the cost of their buffer.

78 points by bpierre 10y ago

I suppose it's a step up from "honest Ponzis". https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contracts-in-practice.html https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...

heliumcraft 10y ago
serious question, why do you hate crypto (bitcoin, ethereum, etc..) so much? I see your username in a lot of places, from hacker news to wikipedia, always doing your best to criticize or stop these sort of technologies. I don't understand this obsession. I don't like say... angular.. but I don't go around trying to sabotage or bad mouth the project as I prefer to spend time on more productive things.
- wslh 10y ago
  Yes, it seems David chose specific community member characteristics to criticize the cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. So why not make a book about the community instead of the technology? If he is not clear about this, he is just following a classical fallacy.
- dpc_pw 10y ago
  I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast, yet the whole crypto-ecosystem is ridden with crooks and frauds trying to make money of suckers. Altcoins that are obvious scams, services that have "accidental" bugs and loose your money, services that get "hacked", and so on. As a rule of thumb everything in cryptofin should be considered a scam before proven otherwise. It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.
- tps5 10y ago
  Instead of calling him out over his "obsession," please try to respond to his argument. Is he wrong? Is he making incorrect assertions? I am genuinely curious. I don't know a lot about cryptography, blockchains, bitcoins, etc. I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but seeing two knowledgeable people civilly discussing the merits of these things would be interesting. Calling someone out for "being obsessed" isn't. To use your angular analogy, if someone went around criticizing angular everywhere, I'd like to see a discussion between that person and a pro-angular guy. Because I guarantee there are smart people and good points to be made on both sides of that argument.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    Well I'm sure someone has engaged him before so I don't think I would be particulary productive. Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses, regarless it's also very easy to criticize something and far more interesting to find solutions, you can critize the current decentralization tech much like you could easily criticize and dimiss this internet thing in 1984. I was just genuinely curious about his motivations. My example with angular is that even though I really don't like it, I wouldnt want to waste time criticizing it or stopping people who want to advance it.
    - tps5 10y ago
      >Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses Such as?
      - heliumcraft 10y ago
        for e.g the article claiming "100 bugs per 1000" takes a crapy contract and considers refactors as bugs, critizes well known things to take into account, and generally exagerates. Another example, is the infamous 'solar exploit' article (since then slightly modified due to criticism), which is written by someone with a financial interest against ethereum (due to owning a startup with a competing product) essentially makes a claim equivalent to saying the internet is broken because you can do this in nodejs http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg
- desireco42 10y ago
  I don't think 'not liking angular' is such a rare trait, it is more of a common view
- cashmonkey85 10y ago
  It's an amazing technology and I believe it's only going to get better. But let's be honest here. Ethereum is a scam and so are 90% of the projects of there.
- noio 10y ago
  I'm reading the article he linked and others on the site. It's super interesting stuff and he does paint a convincing picture.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Cryptocurrency advocates have, in the past, aggressively promoted the currencies with not just over-hyped arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reasonable criticism, but also tying it to a politically confrontational ideas that would be very damaging to society if they were actually successful. This has produced a lot of anti-advocates. Etherum combines un-upgradeable code with a lack of formal verification systems. As a result, the only way an exploit could be fixed in one of its largest and most heavily promoted use cases (the "DAO") was to fork the currency. Both forks are still trading, although one at greatly diminished value.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Fwiw, the Ethereum Foundation has someone working full-time on formal verification systems, and the online solidity compiler has a partial implementation of formal verification for smart contract sourcecode. Aside from that, the DAO disaster has made people realize they need to build backup plans into their contracts. Maybe you can't change sourcecode at will, but you can add emergency shutdown mechanisms, predefined paths for upgrading code via systems of modular contracts, etc. There's a tradeoff vs. trusting the admin, but for now it seems like a good one in many cases.
- empath75 10y ago
  I've played around with investing in bitcoin and I'm a strong believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchains as a technology, but there really are a ton of scams in the industry and it's worthwhile to point that out.
  - gertef 10y ago
    What are your investments that aren't speculations?
- davidgerard 10y ago
  It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays. No, here you go, actual reasons: * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative. * Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.) * Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself. * Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong". * Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone. * Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted. * Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise. * Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case. * Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't. * Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service. * I feel like it.
  - sayurichick 10y ago
    what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie. I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
- eternalban 10y ago
  Angular is not a construct based on, and promoting, socio-political theories. It is entirely fair to have a political stance regarding these systems.
kordless 10y ago
> Since blockchain enthusiasts had already self-selected for gullibility Just by that statement alone, it would appear some of your arguments against Ethereum/blockchains are based on fallacious arguments. Fallacies are a strong indication there is a conflicted view being held by one or more debaters. Not all "blockchain enthusiasts" are gullible, but there may be gullible people in the space and people who prey on them. There may also be a large amount of negatively biased individuals in the space who only observe and comment on the behaviors of the last two groups. FWIW, I've observed both in person multiple times. I always keep in mind the obvious polarization around cryptocurrencies when discussing them in public. I find it doubtful any arguments made with bias around the use of cryptocurrencies will have a serious impact on adoption in the future. Ethereum isn't used for anything important right now anyway, so any biased arguments made for or against it are rather pointless and a waste of good resources. What will affect the future usefulness of cryptocurrencies is yet to come.
madethemcry 10y ago
I voted you up. You could have written more instead of linking to an excerpt of yours. But after reading it with the great examples of bugged contracts you gave I must say: thank you. I especially love the GovernMental example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ghzhv/governmentals_1100_eth_jackpot_payout_is_stuck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ghzhv/government...). Small bug but the involved ether will stay in nirvana forever. I only knew about the failed DAO up to now. All those smaller failed contracts fit perfectly in the image the DAO left. I mean I love the idea of ethernet and its contracts but I see no solution to the inherent software bug problem. You can't do a hard fork for every bug.
EnFinlay 10y ago
Skill based cash tournaments are a thing far removed from the block chain.

dpc_pw 10y ago

I fail to see what's the point of ethereum/blockchain here. The proof of score must be given by the server (otherwise how would you prevent the score fabrication after the fact?), then owners of the service can always fabricate couple of nice high-scores for themselves.

rc_bhg 10y ago
Feels like just an experiment with this new technology. Maybe over time they can improve and upgrade to make scores more verifiable.
heliumcraft 10y ago
It seems they are using a (verifiable) oracle to verify the proof due to gas costs. A good alternative to this is to use something like a computation market http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/ http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/

bpierre 10y ago

They posted this article that provides more information, I should have posted it instead. Maybe the HN mods can change it? https://medium.com/@etherplay/what-is-etherplay-d51424674931 https://medium.com/@etherplay/what-is-etherplay-d51424674931

deweller 10y ago

Arcade style games will not work. As soon as there is value to be gained, someone will quickly write a bot to simulate player inputs and play a perfect game.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gertef 10y ago
They'll work fine for the purpose of extracting ether (== money) from unsuspecting rubes.
314 10y ago
Isn't that the point of Economics2.0, we should assume that the devs have read Accelerando and are investing heavily in lobster as we speak.

carl_corder 10y ago

I wanted to try playing the game (EtherSpace), so I added the MetaMask extension to Chrome. I noticed the account is initiliazed with 1.000 ETH on the Ropsten Test Network. However, the game requires you to play on the Main Ethereum Network for a price of 0.01467 ETH. Sadly, I have no ETH on this network.

brilliantcode 10y ago

This is what I mean by Ethereum is a solution looking for a problem. What possible use case here that should be adopted by the gaming industry? So the top score is immutable and verified by multiple 3rd party miners? Help me understand because I never get a good answer.

heliumcraft 10y ago
Ethereum, MaidSafe, etc.. are trying to be a solution to a specific problem: how to create a trustless decentralized internet (and perhaps even society), one that does not require centralized structures like it does now. It's not quite there yet, and there is a long way to go, but at least there is some progress.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  > how to create a trustless decentralized internet what evidence of demand is there? what compelling need is there for existing infrastructures to uproot their investments for some elusive buzzword?
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    Remember what happened to wikileaks.org ? A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. How do you create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible. You might not care but this is a problem that a lot of ppl do care about. By the end of this year with the release of swarm and ethereum naming system it will be possible to run a completly decentralized (no servers), uncensorable, 100% uptime website.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      that's not a widespread problem held by many nor evidence of consumers demand. Like you said, it's a problem considered by a few but outside of that there's very little reason to use ethereum. go ahead and downvote my critical views on Ethereum, I'm already used to it from /r/ethereum pumpers. But I'm taking away that there's no good rationale for adopting Ethereum or blockchain technology other than very micro and esoteric niches.

vessenes 10y ago

Naysayers are missing the point of this (admittedly very simple) proof of concept: a few developers wanted to make a game that allowed money pooling and tournament payouts. So they made it. Without any work getting payment processing, banking, a gaming attorney, and so on. This is such a significant competitive advantage for a small team that it changes the landscape of the possible -- the typical costs in time and money of those parts of the game would vastly dominate the development costs of an asteroids remix. In this case, probably most of the work was put into the game itself, not the Solidity/ETH side.

pampa 10y ago
Without a gaming attorney, chances are high that you will need a criminal attorney later.
- usgovatgug 10y ago
  I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.
deleted 10y ago
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Taek 10y ago
Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed. "Oh, they made an investment platform without any of the hassle of traditional investment platforms". Then someone found a bug, and poof it's all up in smoke. The danger of ethereum right now is that it's really easy to get something incorrect and broken operating at full capacity on the network. It's really hard to write secure programs, and when money is on the line there's a juicy bounty for anyone who finds a mistake. It seems like a significant competitve advantage but I don't think any serious product, idea, etc should be developing on ethereum while compiler bugs are still regularly being discovered, and while best practices are still regularly being updated.

robertcorey 10y ago

25% rake is too high. Game should be playable in "fun mode".

EnFinlay 10y ago
Agreed. Necessary if people are going to risk money. Give them the ability to practice.
gertef 10y ago
what's the minimum bet? 25% of 0.01p isn't bad

EnFinlay 10y ago

I cofounded a startup based around a similar idea. We were (attempting) to make an API that mobile game developers could plug into their games to add skill based cash tournaments. Mine was called Foosler. There were a couple others - Cashplay and Skillz. Shut 'er down after a couple years of hard work and lessons learned. It's a hard business to make work. Good luck to Etherplay :)

Torgo 10y ago
Were the problems primarily regulatory?
- EnFinlay 10y ago
  Problems: 1. It was my cofounder and I's first startup and we lacked marketing skills 2. Most causal players perceive that for a given game, there are many people out there way better than them, so they didn't want to risk any money 3. Mobile game developers are quite happy playing the freemium lottery 4. Google changed their ToS and our stuff was written in Java 5. Startup newbies make bad decisions

CoryG89 10y ago

I have often thought about trying to build something similar to this for a while using either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Although I have been discouraged by laws against online gambling in most US states. Does anyone know if this sidesteps gambling laws somehow? Or is this based in a jurisdiction that doesn't have laws against online gambling?

Kiro 10y ago
I don't know about the laws in the US but in Sweden it's not classified as gambling if it's skill based.
- openasocket 10y ago
  It is the same in the US. In fact, that's how fantasy sports sites can operate legally in the US.
  - CoryG89 10y ago
    I'm not sure I understand how fantasy sports sites or anything like that are anymore "skill-based" than say poker or blackjack, I guess those are legal under this definition as well?
sibwijjs 10y ago
Wow, try to contribute to the community and my comment shows up auto dead. HN mods certainly know how to silence those they hate usgovatgug 4 minutes ago [dead] [-] I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer. The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life. Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.
10y ago

dihibbvd 10y ago

Well I give up. Fuck the mods and fuck censorship.

sctb 10y ago
There are some restrictions for brand new accounts that are implemented in the HN software. Sometimes legitimate posts get caught by those filters, but it can take a bit of time before the community or moderators see those and vouch for them (as was just done here). You can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com any time for help.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago

Hrm...apparently the "proof" that the game was played is the combination of the player's input record plus the need to submit the proof immediately after the game ends (so that the timestamp of the commit is within a few seconds of when the game would have ended according to the input). Disregarding writing bots to play the game, the first cheat that comes to mind is locally speeding the game up 25%, building up an ever-growing rewind buffer, and then giving the cheating player a "back up a few seconds" button to undo some input at the cost of their buffer.