Hello, a lot of you have probably seen me around here more than once, generally saying something about provable fairness. I've looked into this for a while and the community really needs to understand what it is.
When provably fair was first implemented as an idea, people trusted it because it was backed by sound math. Nowadays when I see provably fair, it seems like it's more of a fake thing used as a selling point for people who don't understand it.
I'm not here to tell anybody how they should implement a provably fair system. Provable fairness is defined in its title in that it is able to prove beyond a doubt that no results are being manipulated by the operator of the service by using strong proven cryptography. It's not something you can add a bunch of random looking numbers to and say "It looks like its random, let's just leave it at that".
I know some of you have PM'd me asking for verifiers for your sites and I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to you, I've been swamped and have had little time for bitcoin things.
That being said, my main point in this thread is we as a community have begun to get lazy with this. There are sites out there that claim to be provably fair but are not. If you look through my trust I'm sure you'll find at least one.
I cannot protect everybody from these sites and people need to learn what constitutes true provable fairness. A couple easy checks could follow something like this:
- What variables are used to create the random roll? (I would say 90% of provably fair systems derive their results directly from a hash of a few things)
- Does the client control at least one of those variables?
- What does the server use as other input to a hash function? Is it something that they can change by a small amount, test to see if the new roll would benefit them and then substitute without the user knowing?
The above is a major point in which many people fail to look atAgain, I'm not here to tell people that they can't gamble where they want. If you win money from any site, congratulations. You may have won money or maybe you were just a part outside the extra few percent the owner manipulates.
Here is a great example of abusing the term provably fair.
So finally I ask everyone here to please, please please please
get somebody that knows what they're doing to look over the site for you, and tell you whether or not it's provably fair.
Bitcoin was created so that you could use strong cryptography to secure your money. Why would you go around and say you believe in that money only to use sites that don't use strong cryptography to prove themselves fair when there are so many out there?
Thank you, and please discuss.