New tool makes the Obyte Sports Betting Bot far more user friendly

The popular Obyte Sports Betting Bot has just become much more appealing thanks to BB Odds.

Prior to the launch of BB Odds, users first needed to download the Obyte wallet and add the Betting Bot to view the available sports fixtures. Doing this was not difficult and did not take long, but it was still a hindrance to getting people to even try it.

Telling people they can bet on sports using Obyte smart contracts was good, but now thanks to BB Odds, we can show them in real time exactly what sports and fixtures they can bet on, and what the odds are.

Having easy access to available bets is important because some sports fixtures are announced in the bot at the last minute. For example, MMA fighters are often changed at short notice which would mean the bet would have to be cancelled which is bad for user experience.

Now newcomers to Obyte or cryptocurrency in general don’t even need a Obyte wallet to see what we are talking about (but they might well want to download one after).

A picture paints a thousand words:

how to bring up the fixture inside your Obyte wallet

BB Odds has other useful features too:

Three types of odds format

In the USA and most of the world people drive on the right hand side of the road. In Britain, Australia and several other countries they drive on the left.

The situation is more complicated for betting odds! As such, BB Odds displays odds in three different formats, decimal, fractional and moneyline. Decimal is used in Europe, Australia and Canada, fractional is used in Great Britain and Ireland, whilst moneyline is used in United States.

Sports filter

You can filter by sports. So if you have seen enough of Neymar rolling around on the pitch during the soccer World Cup, maybe it’s time to get back to that timeless American favorite, baseball (basketball, football, ice hockey and mixed martial arts are also available when these sports have fixtures).

Tutorials

See the ‘About this website’ link in the top left of BB Odds for links to tutorials on how to use the Obyte Sports Betting Bot.

Who built this?

A massive thanks to Tarmo from the Obyte community for building this. Also thanks to another community member Papabyte who built the Sports Betting Bot and helped Tarmo with some of the backend integrations to make the new tool work.

crawling ape to private, trustless sports betting

The story of how sports betting has progressed over time on the Obyte platform is worth noting:

First there was the Sports Oracle Bot. Users had to find their own counterparty on the Obyte Slack (or somewhere else). As a minimal viable product this was a great start, but was unlikely going to be widely adopted in the real word.

Next came just the Betting Bot. This was a much better experience as users no longer needed to find their own counterparty themselves, and actually making bets became much easier (basically point and click). More sports were also added. But for the outside world (people that did not have a Obyte wallet) it was still rather hidden away, as fixtures and odds could not be viewed until installing both the Byteball wallet and the Betting Bot.

Now the Sports Betting Bot has teamed up with BB Odds to create sports betting heaven!

Sure improvements can be made, and they will be. However, right now lets celebrate and promote that we have a wonderful product that uses Obyte smart contracts, is now very friendly to not only use but also to demonstrate to newcomers to Obyte or cryptocurrency in general.

Incredibly for a cryptocurrency, its actually being used in the real world. The volume of bets made using the Betting Bot has picked up significantly during the FIFA World Cup, and this was before BB Odds was built.

Next time a cryptocurrency or Obyte sceptic (yes, strangely they do exist) asks you ‘but what can I actually DO with it?’ you know what to say and where to send them.

Why is peer-to-peer betting using Obyte smart contracts a huge deal?

Sports betting with the Obyte platform is like betting with friends you trust using cash (there is no need for an intermediary to hold funds). The difference is that you can bet with anybody and you don’t have to trust them to follow through on the bet because the funds are locked with a smart contract.

Smart contracts on Obyte follow simple boolean logic conditions. Funds can be unlocked to be spent by either side of the counterparty only when independent sports oracles have posted the event outcomes to the Obyte DAG.

You can’t do that with cash (without having an intermediary who holds the funds), nor the US dollar nor any other fiat currency.

But you can with Obyte!

So what are you waiting for?

Heard of smart contracts but never used one? Make a bet then! The minimum bet is only 1 Megabyte (around $0.02).

Don’t want to risk $0.02 but have a Twitter account? Then please tweet this to help spread the word of Obyte.