I know it’s been a while since I posted an update but I couldn’t resist enjoying some of that fantastic summer weather, the occasional patio, and some much-needed R&R.

Nevertheless, I’ve been quietly mulling the problem of game costs on Ethereum and I believe I’ve finally solved the last major problem, the part that will allow CypherPoker to be played for a real-value cryptocurrency (Ether), without an exorbitant cost to operate — unless the value of the game is so high that paying to run it on the security of main blockchain is deemed desirable.

To achieve this I‘m looking at services like oraclize.it

This third-party service transfers information between blockchains, among other sources, using a variety of traceable and transparent mechanisms. This means that a deposit could be made to a relatively simple deposit/withdrawal contract on the Ethereum mainnet and then registered as an available balance on a testnet like Ropsten “revival”. From there, gaming happens on the testnet.

Adding game contracts and running games is currently free on Ropsten because there’s so little hashing power being invested to keep the network safe; the trade-off being that low-value games played on Ropsten don’t come with as strong of a security guarantee.

However, I believe that this situation will alleviate itself as running games on Ropsten still requires testnet Ether which can be, for the time being, gotten through GPU mining, possibly faucets and maybe just for the asking.

If one were to sell a Ropsten Ether at a US dollar they’d be providing about 4 games, or a game a quarter, based on the current cost analysis of running a game. Mining a block on Ropsten results in a 5 Ether reward (average), or about 20 games. There would probably be plenty of room for discounting as blocks are generated an average of every 12 seconds. That means that there are roughly 7,200 Ether up for grabs every 24 hours, or 28,800 full CypherPoker games from mining alone.

A competing Ethereum-based network can be started up — not as difficult as it may sound — and the same techniques applied to provide a cheaper, albeit lower-security validation network for CypherPoker games. Here, Ether might be worth a penny so a US dollar would buy 400 games, much more affordable because the network may not have many independent miners, is new, or there are still questions about its reliability.

Games between known players could use entirely private blockchains so that there would effectively be nothing but the oraclize.it fee (additional US$0.04 to $0.06), when performing a final cash out in the main Ethereum network.

In addition, oraclize.it may also work as an escrow for Bitcoin at some point in the future so there may not be a need to get any real Ether purchases using Bitcoin, just operational Ether on the testnet; maybe that could be covered at the time of buy-in.

There’s little doubt in my mind that these factors will help to bolster the lower-value game network while creating robust competition in security promises.

There may be other, more direct and elegant mechanisms for this in the future and I’ll always be scanning the horizon for what’s next, but I think that this is a good a place at any to plant a stake in the ground and declare that CypherPoker will be open to affordable real-cyphermoney gaming. (You can play games on the mainnet now but they’re very expensive)

I’m presently aiming for mid-September to have a working version running, albeit with some rough edges. By mid-October, most of those edges should be smoothed off. I’ll keep smoothing as reports come in. I’ve learned that this is an evolving process so these timelines may not be exact —this project has had challenges at every turn — but I’m both hopeful and rested.

Once the game is fully up and running I plan to work on some content on the topics of:

1) setting up a private CypherPoker blockchain validation network, for free and from scratch

2) building on CypherPoker’s widget system — not confirmed yet but I think I’m going to try my hand at writing a poker bot widget. This’ll be my first time… we’ll see how that goes!

In the meantime I’m going to finish up some of the outstanding issues in CypherPoker and continue to work on the mobile version.

The live previews you’ve seen so far are probably going to change as I’d like to make this a much more one-button experience. This means there will be more defaults which should make it easier from a player perspective.

The additional material I’ll be producing will open up the software internals anyway so that you can give your own software special features, ones that you can share at your discretion and in a manner you prefer.

So get yourself some Ropsten Ether and check back here for news on what’s been updated. I should be able to make a dent in the to-do list with the end result being play for real games — what it’s all about! That’s a neat end-of-summer milestone.

Thanks for hanging in there. This release is going to mark a major milestone in a project that’s been a long time in the making and it will be well worth celebrating! I hope you can join me :)