Blockchain and casinos is a good match. ETH blockchain smart contracts is the perfect match. Many benefits are added to the industry — absolute transparency, anonymity, instant deposits/ withdraws and more.

As much as this sounds exciting, connecting the casino to the blockchain creates one huge problem — slow randomness generation. To fully generate randomness, identify a winner, make a payout and make sure that everything is absolutely transparent takes up to 2 minutes. And most probably, you wouldn’t a play game if there would be a 2 minutes waiting time after each bet. This is one massive flaw from user experience perspective. There is no way such a product can compete with fiat casinos or faster bitcoin casinos.

For our previous casino project (it’s absolute transparent slots) — www.etherslots.win we used slot interface to hide waiting time.

To break down the connection flow:

Casino -> Oraclize -> random.org

This method is used by other ETH casinos. Timing issue remains the biggest problem. Random.org works as a random outcome generator for the casino and it’s connected through 3rd party service Oraclize. Currently Oraclize is the most trusted party which connects blockchain dapps to non-blockchain services.

From this graph you can see that all process requires 4 requests to ETH blockchain. 2 times requests are related to ETH cryptocurrency movement and other 2 times are necessary for randomness generation — (RNG). And to make all these 4 requests and get confirmations it takes around 1–2 minutes.

The final result we have:

ETH blockchain which doesn’t have required transaction confirmation speeds for gambling dapps +

Time which takes to pass an information through Oraclize +

Time to get a number from random.org -

Currently there is no know way you can have properly working gambling game which is fully integrated on ETH Blockchain. We realised that we need to ditch that mechanism which we used for etherslots.win and start from scratch. That is how an idea for Edgeless was born.

For Edgeless casino, we don’t use blockchain to generate randomness using random.org (it’s way too slow), instead randomness is generated in our casino’s server so we can save enormous amount of time.

You might be wondering how if the random number is generated in your server, how this is more transparent than other casinos. And that’s the genius part of our model — transparency mechanism is using player’s seed/input number and casino’s seed/input number to generate a random number. Seeds are blended in order to generate a random number (it’s the same method currently used by most online casinos).

However, the players and casinos input values/seeds are marked/hashed and sent to the blockchain. This part is essential if we want to have fully transparent mechanism, even if randomness is generated in a closed server. In comparison, etherslots.win has q time issue because randomness is guided by the blockchain and this task takes too much time.

In Edgeless, internal server generates randomness (using player’s seed), however smart contract hashes/marks/logs activity in the server and uploads it to the blockchain. Casino cannot change any values in the randomness mechanism without being spotted. It’s like public eye constantly watching and monitoring casino’s server. Any suspicious activity is immediately visible on the blockchain. In this case Edgeless can run games really fast.

From this graph you can see that all mechanism needs only 2 requests to the blockchain in prior method which required 4. Also these 2 transactions are ETH cryptocurrency related, not RNG (randomness generation) related and we can generate randomness without any additional requests to the blockchain — which gives us fast speed.

To sum up the main difference and reasons why we have casino speeds which are required to proper gambling:

Etherslots.win and other ETH casino randomness solution:

4 requests are needed to the blockchain. 2 are currency related, 2 are RNG related. All process is absolutely transparent but it takes 1–2 minutes.

Edgeless randomness solution:

Only 2 requests to the blockchain are needed. Both are currency related, not RNG. Randomness is generated inside our server which gives us speed. Smart contract hashes/ marks/ logs activity in the server and uploads it to the blockchain to make sure everything is absolutely transparent.

And what are your thoughts on randomness generation speeds using blockchain?

Continue reading “0% house edge Blackjack and 0% house roulette, what’s a difference in casino profitability?”

QUICK LINKS:

Website: www.edgeless.io

White paper: http://bit.ly/2jHIb7T

Slack: edgelessethcasino.signup.team

Reddit: reddit.com/r/edgeless

Twitter: twitter.com/edgelessproject

Facebook: www.facebook.com/EdgelessCasino