I can’t wait to see compute added. 
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me as well. Will it be possible to do anonymous computing as well? I read something about secret sharing algorithms etc. Don’t know if that could work on SAFEnet. Would be quite magic, you are running an App that let you create some great CGI effects and buy some computation on the network to get it done Or what about something like Second Life. That would be magic as well.
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Just make sure there’s plenty of farmable coins set aside for compute and bandwidth, since storage is going to be the cheapest going forward.
As far as the casino making money from watermarking the images and getting paid 10% of the fee for each image load, I would assume that the images would get locally cached for each player, so this is going to be a minuscule source of revenue. Still going to need a house edge built in to pay for casino development, security, and maintenance. I just don’t see the watermarking with no house edge working out in the way its been described here.
I think whatever the edge is, if needed, would also have to be substantially cheaper than any of the other currently available sites in order to get anywhere. If it isn’t, then there is little incentive for most people, who would also prefer a more populated site with a lot of “action” - definitely for Poker anyway as it improves chances of winning for any decent player - more “fish” in the sea, so to speak… 
The one thing I was wondering though is how available or easy to make is a truly random algorithm thingy? Do we send the cards through XOR space or something?
Ok… I’m probably giving the game away as to my level of technical knowledge here…
Confucius said:
“Never Gamble. If you don’t know you will win, you are a fool. If you know you will win, you are corrupt.”
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Lol…I don’t think he did, but he did talk a load of bollocks anyway…
In fact, speaking personally, life is all about chance and it’s the not knowing that keeps me going for one…far more interesting than certainty. I wouldn’t want to know I was going to win, neither that I was going to lose…that’s the fun bit, the not knowing… in everything really…nature of reality etc - Anuway, I’m not corrupt and I don’t think I’m a fool really…so there you go…that’s where he talks bollocks in this particular “deepity.”
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I had thought about the caching “issue” in this instance. Maybe it won’t cut it, but its worth a shot. Even of it was a miniscule cut, it would be better than current setups. Cache only lasts so long though. Between one day and the next it would fall out. We’ll see. So far I have no plans to develop this. It was just a thought.
However, the “miniscule” revenue as you call it might just be enough to live on. No server cost. No bandwidth costs. No storage costs. Only development and bug fixes. That doesn’t cost all that much in the grand scheme of things (after initial development of course)
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What I was thinking was copying www.just-dice.com1. You probably have heard of satoshidice, it is similiar with one unique difference. If you are not familiar with the concept, I’ll explain. It is a gambling site which gambles on a number that is randomly generated by the site. Granted a random generating number gambling program is not exciting in and of itself, the unique concept is how it is funded. Anyone with Maidsafe coin would be able to invest their tokens and share in the profit or loss (near impossible to have a loss over extented periods of time, as long as a maximum bet is implemented) with the “house % edge”. For creating the site we would take 1% of the profit from the investors when they cash out. Just-Dice was very succesful with bitcoin and had over 50 million us dollars deposited at one time at its peak. They were forced to shutdown, and recently relaunched with a new currency called “clams”, due to local laws.
The reason I am so excited for this concept on the SAFEnetwork is that unlike sites such as just-dice, and other interest/profit bearing sites, there is no need to fear that the site will steal the investments (if the SAFEnetwork handles the deposits and payouts). When farmers and developers earn safecoin, they will have an option to invest those coins with almost a promise of a return. Now the only options are sit and hold or liquidate. Not sure if this would be able to be done inside an app, but if it is popular, the creator would also receive tokens for the app usage (depending on the final incentive scheme). We could automatically deposit the tokens as investment and earn profit on our profits.
Sorry if I haven’t explained myself too well. By fooling around on their site you will get a good idea of what I’m talking about.
If anyone wants to help bring this idea to fruition let me know! Need Coders!!!
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I understand what you mean and we can build a regular just-dice app fairly quick. But for safe network, it is still unclear how the app would work since there are no stable API yet (how to handle payout, deposit, escrow modules etc.)
@dirvine I admire and respect your social commitments and see how careful you are with how you opine.
Gambling is big business and, when done right, can be of great benefit to the underprivileged. In Canada we have lotteries that fund education and sports and give back to communities. North American Native Indians are huge benefactors of Casino initiatives that allowed profits to rebuild long neglected communities…
There is no doubt gambling is the source of many problems across all demographics.
Education, awareness programs and ongoing community support is key to making sure addictions to gambling, alcohol and the like are dealt with efficiently and effectively.
Maybe the SAFE Network Casino can be designed to actually HELP the “desperate poor people”
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Agreed. Maybe a casino could make it on membership fees. I.e., create a completely trusted House that has no reason or ability to slant the games or take a cut, and the players would just give an periodic fee to belong. Wouldn’t get the proprietor rich, probably, but might be an okay business model.
Or, like any other game of poker, the house takes a certain toll on each hand in payment for running the game. The odds are the same for everyone and the house is just paid for its services directly.
I can’t see any substantial income coming from the network itself for this, except that perhaps as a factor of app usage.
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SecondLife had real problems with the casinos in game, they basically had to shut them down, and this is what in reality stunted the growth of SecondLife. Along with the EU demanding VAT be added on virtual land sales (crazy but true!!!)
So I wonder if there is an way to replicate a SecondLife server on SafeNet. Obviously all the content for the VR would be easily hosted on the network, and then you have the messaging, the only issue left is the interaction with in-world objects like a slot machine.
Big advantage are that people could gamble if they wish since there is no central server or authority, and also they won’t need to pay VAT on virtual purchases (I think virtual to virtual crypto item trading is exempted right? in any case there is no company with a VAT number…)
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I’ve been thinking about games on SAFE, whether of pure chance like roulette or stochastic games like poker. And the way to start is to create seemingly trivial ones such as tictactoe, then build on that into arcade games and gambling.
EDIT: And let’s not forget text-based games such as Zork, and Dungeons and Dragons, as a building-block to this field.
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I think much of this discussion is overlooking something more fundamental. Life is risk and chance. An online casino is something fun but what is more fundamental is having a gambling and randomizing engine that WORKS. You can’t have a casino on SAFE without it but then you can’t have a lot of OTHER games or other projects on SAFE without it either. As @bluebird just mentioned there are tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons that depend on an element of randomization and chance. Card games of any sort usually depend on chance to one degree or another. In fact it’s hard to think of a game, especially an electronic game, that DOESN’T require a randomizing engine.
Then we have other projects like insurance. Insurance for all intents and purposes is a gamble, a bet. It’s a glorified bookie system. Much of our society is based on insurance. What if that was decentralized and broken down thanks to a simple casino and betting app? Okay you modify the odds based on varying degrees of risk but at the end of the day it’s STILL just a bet.
Consider for a minute that SAFE is a resource economy. People can farm safecoin so they can get money far easier. And what’s the absolute worst that’s going to happen? We’ll get a bunch of gambling addicts that will get addicted to devoting resources to the network that can constantly feed their addiction by farming safecoin? So long as they get enough computer resources to earn enough safecoin to maintain their fun it’s little more harm than a World of Warcraft addiction.
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Good point that gambling segues into insurance, and, I might add, commodities markets, which exist in order that farmers might “hedge their bets” by locking in a price for their products. We will see a proliferation of insurance products/gambles once the state cannot intervene.
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I spoke with a guy from Brazil discussing this topic recently and this is one method of sort of crowd sourcing a random number from a network of peers which he has written up into a paper.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/228
I would be interested to know if it is possible to implement this in SafeNet, or if there is some other ways given how the network works (it seems that peers are assigned to “random” groups, how does that work?)
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Just-dice.com also has a good system of proving random generator works. Check out the “Fair?” tab. Pretty slick.
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Random generators need a source of entropy, as does crypto. The degree to which it is truly random determines how big the search space is for an attack on the crypto.
I can’t think of a better way to introduce randomness into a SAFE-hosted game than to harness that employed by the underlying encryption algorithms of the network, since there’s no point having a game that has better randomness than the underlying network. It might be as simple as hashing the addresses of all of ones group.
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