Betting sites and online casinos have been on the scene since the mid-90s. The convenience of playing at home, the allure of winning and a degree of privacy have attracted many to these sites as they continue to evolve.
But the ride hasn’t been as smooth as you may think. The industry has not been without problems. So far, the randomness of play and perceived fairness have been the most common problems.
And that’s where blockchain technology comes in, offering a workable solution in provable fair gaming.
Mistrust Of The Traditional Models
Mistrust of online gaming sites by consumers has been quite high. It’s no surprise, the relationship between the house and the player has always been foggy and uncertain. A survey in 2013 revealed that 91% of over 10,000 respondents in an interview want reputable third party reporting to guarantee fairness of play. Open source, hashing and blockchain based code are making this possible for them.
What Is Provably Fair?
It essentially means that the mechanisms for generating results on the platform can be vetted independently for randomness and authenticity. Before the blockchain solutions, users had to trust that online casinos were generating results without any alterations according to player bets and other arbitrary factors.
By knowing how players bet and broadcasting unfavorable results as per user, the house stands to win more. In blockchain based gaming however, information about bets, the results and outcomes are stored in a public ledger and algorithm verified by the user.
Players can now prove fairness on their own by using randomly generated hashes and seeds instead of relying on a website’s claim of ‘third party verified gaming’. Words like provably fair by themselves do not denote a trustless system. Sites have been known to rig outcomes when users are not careful. Blockchain’s innovation takes things beyond ‘just trust us’.
Transparency Is Paramount
Not every website advertising itself as being provably fair is so, what’s important is to exercise caution. Gamers and online gamblers aren’t programmers and wouldn’t know how to verify things without useful tools to help them. Trustworthy sites include links to open source tools for users to check seeds and verify results. Sometimes the tools are found on the sites themselves. Beyond these tools, algorithm for generating randomness should be clearly defined and open source.
Where information is not transparent, platforms can gather client browser data and analyze their gambling patterns and avoid payouts. That’s why transparency is of utmost importance and why it’s necessary to manually generate new seeds for each play session.
Less Trust Equals More Reliability
Blockchain innovation continues to evolve provably fair gaming and betting. New ideas keep on popping up. One such is atomic, on chain betting that seeks to eliminate trust aspect from transactions. Even on the provable fair sites player is still required to trust that they receive payout after a win. With the opcode OP Checkdatasig, it’s possible to remove this element by making the entire system automated from start to finish.
Fair Money Fair Play
Blockchain is revolutionizing entire industries. Permission less systems have become the norm and are revolutionizing the way we conceptualize fairness. Traditional norms were based on trust. Today we are getting rid of the same. And the results are system, so transparent and understandable that scammers and bad actors have nowhere to hide.