Meet The Radically Fair Online Casino
Give us your money and we’ll run a calculation — which you can’t see but we promise is fair — to decide how much money we’ll give you back.
So far, that’s been the not-so-valuable value proposition of traditional online casinos. Their calculations are what’s driving the virtual processes behind your online gameplay.
Compare that with a real-life, physical casino. Foul play always possible, but you are more likely to spot it when you are standing there watching the games in person. You can see the roulette wheel spin, for example, and judge for yourself that it hasn’t been rigged somehow. Or you can watch the dice fall and decide for yourself that they haven’t been shaved.
That means that if you’re playing in an traditional online casino then you have a bad deal for two reasons:
- First, your odds probably aren’t based purely on chance. Your odds are what the online casino calculated to keep you winning just enough money in the short term so that you lose as much money as possible in the long term.
- Second, even if the online casino is giving you fair odds, you have have no way of verifying that they’re fair. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are at recognizing unfair gameplay when you can’t see the processes behind it. They’re inside a “black box” running on the online casino’s servers.
But fortunately there’s still hope for online casinos, thanks to blockchain technology.
Blockchains can make an online casino’s gameplay processes provably fair.
For an online casino wanting to prove that the algorithms behind its games are fair, blockchain technology is a natural fit.
Blockchains are transaction ledgers that are accessible to everyone. An online casino can therefore use a blockchain to keep a comprehensive record of the results of the list of coded instructions that caused the win or loss.
Using a so-called blockchain explorer, anybody can view a casino’s record of any win or loss and verify that the algorithm associated with it generated a random — and therefore fair, because neither the casino or player knew it in advance — result.
To ensure randomness, provably fair casinos use various methods, some of which rely on the unbreakably unpredictable hashing that is an integral part of any blockchain. Ethereum is the blockchain most provably fair online casinos use for this purpose.
Provable fairness is a great step forward in the world of online casinos. Between a traditional, “black box” online casino and a casino relying on provable fairness, the latter is obviously the better choice.
But there’s still a problem:
Just because a game is played fairly — even provably fairly — doesn’t mean it is fair by design.
Consider the idea of a handicap in golf. A golfer with better skills agrees to play at a disadvantage to the other players so that the game is more competitive. The design of that particular game, therefore, is not fair.
But the golfers will still follow all the other rules. No mulligans or foot wedges allowed, and so forth. Therefore the game is played fairly — but the game isn’t designed fairly. You probably wouldn’t agree to play at a handicap when there is money at stake!
Unfortunately, that is exactly what traditional casinos and even provably fair online casinos expect you to do. In roulette, for example, the rules are typically designed to give you a 1/36 chance at winning even though there are 37 possible rolls, including 0.
An ideal casino, therefore, doesn’t just guarantee provably fair gameplay. It should also deliver fairly designed games for a complete, “radically fair” user experience.
BlockStamp Games runs on top of a blockchain purpose-built to make the casino fair on every level.
The concept of the radically fair online casino is a key idea behind BlockStamp Games and the BlockStamp blockchain.
BlockStamp is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain and can therefore be similarly used as a distributed ledger of transactions, i.e. an alternative to the traditional banking system. And the BlockStamp cryptocurrency, the BST, can be mined in a similar way as Bitcoins are.
But the BlockStamp blockchain has an expanded set of features that make it more suitable for a radically fair online casino. BlockStamp Games runs on the BlockStamp blockchain and therefore offers:
1) “In house” provable fairness.
Like all provably fair online casinos, BlockStamp games relies on a blockchain to prove that the processes are executed fairly. Unlike other provably fair online casinos, BlockStamp games uses its own “in house” blockchain specifically designed to process e-gaming transactions. Most other provably fair online casinos use the Ethereum blockchain, which is also being used to process many completely unrelated (and often heavy) transactions related to contracts and ICOs, for example. Online casino transactions using Ethereum are therefore less elegant and more expensive compared to BlockStamp.
You can use the BlockStamp explorer here.
2) Truly free use. No house edge, no gaming fees, and no house revenue whatsoever from any source.
That’s right. BlockStamp Games does not exist to turn a profit! It exists to disrupt online casinos the way Bitcoin was designed to disrupt banking.
The only fees involved with wagers on BlockStamp Games are the transaction fees that are part of any blockchain. As mentioned above, BlockStamp has been specifically designed to minimize these transaction fees. Compare with a more “general purpose” blockchain like Ethereum.
Users can see that we’re not driven by profits in two main ways:
1) Game designs — not just gameplay processes — that are fair.
BlockStamp Games’ roulette has no 0 (or 00) and there is no artificially limited payout related with the odds of rolling 0. At other casinos, whether with provably fair processes or not, is that you lose everything if you roll a 0 without having bet on 0. And these casinos limit your potential win to 36/1 even though there are more numbers on the roulette. At BlockStamp Games, we see that as an obvious design flaw and have fixed it. If you bet 36 times, the statistics say you will win once.
2) Your losses are lost to everyone, including the casino.
If you lose at another casino (and their games are designed to ensure that you do) then the casino will typically keep your loss. When you lose a bet on BlockStamp Games, the BlockStamp blockchain has been designed to “lock up” your lost BST, effectively destroying them. In practice that design would only work, by the way, if the design of the games was in fact statistically fair. If the games were not fairly designed and players had the odds stacked ever so slightly against them, all the BST in the blockchain would be gradually locked up. With the fair design, over time the BST “destroyed” will be balanced out with the BST won.
At BlockStamp Games the same rules apply to everyone — including its developers!
Fundamentally, BlockStamp Games is an open-source gaming platform where everyone, ourselves included, has equal access to information and equal odds of making money. A programmer can’t make money on a clever odds manipulation algorithm here. And there are no unfairly designed games with “provably fair” window dressing. The only way to make money from the platform is to play! And that goes for the platform’s developers too.
To get started with BlockStamp Games, you can trade BTC or ETH for BST on picostocks.com as of September 16th, 2018. The current price of BST is available on picostocks.com and the BlockStamp homepage. You can also download a wallet to use for your wagers and store your BST.
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed by the BlockStamp Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. Designed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk, BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, and a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System.
