Blockchain killing the stigma behind Game Gambling

Nikhil Singh
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

Till a few weeks back I wasn’t even aware if Blockchain can be used in the often disliked and frowned upon gambling sector. If you’d heard about a country in eastern Europe named Malta you’d probably now where I am coming from here , they are pioneers in gambling industry and have been looking to legalising the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for casinos and it would be interesting to look up in the coming few weeks to how it pans out for them

It started with me receiving a call to work for one of the most popular online gaming casinos in the world https://cryptogames.io/ although it wasn’t something that I was looking for at the time but it definitely got me curious to look deeper into this. They have the games that we used to play for fun like the mine sweeper , the wheel of fortune , the game of dice and many others. You pick a token , stake the most capital , the winner takes it all.

Provably Fair

This is probably the biggest selling points of these online casinos given the illicit behaviour at your local casinos weather it maybe the owners being partial to their regular customers, cheating their way to win etc etc , well not here.

Provably Fair online casino means that you can make sure all the combinations to be random at any time. In their games all the combinations are generated with Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generator. SHA512 hash is calculated out of Server Seed, Client Seed and Nonce summary before each bet. Then, first and last 4 symbols are taken from the calculated result and converted into a Seed for generator initialisation.

Server Seed is a random sequence of symbols generated by a server.
Client Seed is a random sequence of symbols specified by a Player.
Nonce is a number of bets made by Client Seed + Server Seed. This number increases by one after each bet.

Summing up the above two paragraphs it literally means any online gaming casinos have no interference in your combinations and its you who can make it as random as you want.

Cheap and Legal

When you use cryptocurrencies as a way to gamble its provenly more secure because you do it anonymously without any long paperwork , documentation and all those formalities. Sometimes you don’t really create an account even to stake and win depending on the platforms. They don’t charge any heavy transaction fees or deposit and withdrawals are instantaneous.

If you are new to gambling or a veteran cryptocurrencies have really gone out and made online gambling accessible , staying under the limits of law enforcements and going out of their way to make sure the customers really get what they are looking for.

Accessibility

As you’d probably know Gambling is banned in most countries for obvious reasons but online gambling is as accessible as to buying a chocolate at your local store, for anyone and everyone. Its you who decide the amount you want to stake, you can stop at a particular time rather than getting carried away by the inferiority complex when you are at a real casino, take help , calculate outcomes or just have some fun. You can stake Bitcoin/Ethereum as low 0.01 to the max you can afford.

Drawbacks

Each story has two sides to it so does this, Very recently there have been tonnes of startups getting their hands dirty in this field with very little success and thats just because of trust issues you might have staking your money there. Almost everyone is looking for ICO’s or for instantaneous profits without any long term aspirations and goals. That leads to the ever increasing number of phishing websites, scams and other non favourable outcomes.

If you look at it overall with a few exceptions it is slowly and steadily progressing towards a stage where it can restore stability for using gaming online as a way to earn your livelihood but at the same point of time it is still very far from it.

Nikhil Singh

Written by

I love building stuff. K bye

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