University Students from Trinity College Dublin have developed a unique new BTC poker room that can operate without a central authority or thrusted 3rd party. The decentralised poker room relies on cryptography to ensure the fairness of each game and players use bitcoin so there is no need to involve payment processors. The students think their peer-to-peer poker software has the following advantages over traditional online poker rooms... Since the poker software is peer-to-peer and not hosted on a central server it can't be shut-down, unlike sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt. Real money players from the United States and other countries that prohibit online gambling can play anonymously at the site. Rake is 0% making it the lowest rake real-money poker site on the planet. All shuffles and deals are Provably Fair, which means cheating is not a possibility. Thanks to bitcoin, deposit and withdrawal fees are a fraction of what you would pay if you use a Visa or Mastercard.
to be honest, i'd rather pay a couple of percent rake to play at a properly developed and maintained poker room. it's going to be pretty hard for a few students or open source developers to create something like the pokerstars client.
In the beginning bitcoin poker was being promoted as the low rake option but most of the biggest bitcoin poker sites now charge 3% or 4% rake so I think there is room for a decentralised poker room that charges 0% rake.
i don't agree with the "decentralize all things" mantra. some things operate more efficiently when they are centralised. companies like pokerstars and partypoker have done a pretty good job of developing decent poker software without involving the open source community. the big problems sportsbooks and poker rooms have is accepting payments from players in countries like the united states. this is because money has been centralised into a number of centrals banks and financial institutions which are easy to control. developing a peer-to-peer decentralised poker site is a nice project and i encourage it but don't be under any illusions about where the real problem is - banking.
I completely agree. There are ICO raising large amounts of money to decentralise things like Reddit and GoDaddy but I don't know why. It is worth decentralising money because central banks are incompetent and governments are greedy, but I haven't met anyone who has a complaint about how Reddit works.