@Easternbloc
You make some decent points, but I don't agree with your overall assessment of Peerplays (which seems to be that it is a dead end project.)
Re: Live bettingSpeed Concerns: dPoS is a highly efficient consensus algorithm. dPoS blockchains have irreversible transactions after 60 seconds (with 30 witnesses and 3 seconds per block). This amount of time is sufficiently fast enough to enable a lot (majority?) of bets that can be conceived for live betting. In slower sports such as Baseball or American Football, pretty much any conceivable live bets would be possible.
Data Feed Concerns: I think that you understate the availability of free live statistics for sporting events on the internet which can be sourced from non-gambling related websites. Sure, the data will not be as instant or detailed as the data that the live sports betting giants have access to, but it will be possible nonetheless to have a "dumbed down" live betting market.
Market Share Concerns: Even though implementing live betting will certainly be hard (or in your words- impossible), there is still quite a big gambling market outside of live sports betting. The Bookie dApp covers only one facet of the gambling industry. 1% of a trillion dollar industry can still make a lot of money for Peerplays shareholders. I'm not only talking about non-live sports betting, but also regular sports betting, prediction markets, casino games, and slots. I think you are focusing too much on sports betting, which does indeed pigeon hole the project if that is all they planned to implement. But I think their plans are much bigger than only sports betting.
Re: SlotsYou seem to be under the misconception that slot games are impossible to concept on a decentralized peer to peer blockchain. I think that you are wrong. Effectively, for a slots game all you would need is your own blockchain (or sidechain), and a cryptographic protocol to autonomously generate random numbers, autonomously "police" the game, and autonomously control the house's bank roll. Modern-day slot machines are in essence just fancy RNGs. I will explain how a peer to peer slot game could work. A similar system can be utilized to implement any game of chance you could conceive (casino card games, slots, etc.)
Leverage a network of Masternodes (or delegates) to generate random numbers. Each of them puts up collateral so they have something at stake to participate honestly for a percentage of what the house wins over the long term. The more Masternodes (or delegates) that are included on the generation of one random number results in the random number being more secure (more likely to be random) and less efficiently generated, and the less number of Masternodes (or delegates) that are included on the generation of one random number results in the random number being less secure (less likely to be random) but more efficiently generated. A happy medium can be found through beta testing as far as security versus efficiency.
As long as one participant that participates in the generation of any one certain random number is honest, then the number generated will be truly and provably random. This can be done using multiple very basic and studied cryptographic protocols, such as the ones proposed here:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/412/verify-product-without-revealing-multipliers/10553Split the total supply of the blockchain in two parts, one part will be autonomously controlled by peers in the network on behalf of the house, and the other part will be distributed to shareholders and gamblers. This creates a bankroll that is autonomously controlled for the house, and tokens that investors can invest in and gamblers can buy to gamble with.
Let's take for example a very simple slots game whose jackpot has 0.032% chance of hitting (5 reels with 5 symbol with 1 line), then we can expect to hit the jackpot in the long run once every 3125 spins. Generally, top tier jackpots are somewhere around 90% to 95% percent of the amount of spins it will take on average to hit them, so, let's say we pay out 95% of the total spins it takes to hit the jackpot of the long run for every 1 coin wagered (or 2967.80 coins). Now that we know the odds of winning the jackpot, and the amount we will payout if the jackpot is hit, we can now calculate our EV (expected value from each spin as the house):
99.968% of the time the house wins the user's bet amount of 1 coin.
0.032% of the time the gambler wins the jackpot winning 2966.80 coins (the 2967.80 coin jackpot, minus 1 coin he wagered to win it)
The house's EV = [99.968% (chance of winning) * 1 coin (profit if the house win)] + [0.032% (chance of losing) * -2966.80 coins (profit if the house loses)]
0.99968 - 0.949376 = The houses EV from each 1 coin spin = 0.050304 per coin wagered
This equates to a house edge of 5.0304%. Thus, following the Kelly Criterion (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion), the house should never risk more than 5.0304% of our bankroll for every spin the gamblers do. Delegates will continuously publish price feeds of the Peerplay token value (or a Peerplay sidechain) as in Bitshares, and the median price feed is used to then calculate the max bet. After every spin, this max bet is continuously calculated and updated.
Say the autonomously controlled house bankroll is worth $1,000,000 and each coin is worth $1. Following the kelly criterion for optimal bankroll growth, the max win should be 5.0304% of our bankroll- or $50,304. Since 1 spin can possibly 2966.8x the gambler's money, the max bet would be $50,304 divided by 2966.8 which equates to a 16.95564244303627 coin max bet. To account for blockchain confirmation and network propagation delays, the max bet can be further reduced to stay on the safe side.
Once the autonomously controlled house bankroll grows above $1,000,000, gamblers/shareholders that own the other $1,000,000 half of the coin supply can vote what happens with the profits. They can choose for the profit to be paid in dividends to gamblers/investors, or for the surplus to be added to the autonomous house bankroll which results in the allowance of slowly increasing the maximum bet. There are benefits to both choices. In the former, profits made by the house are immediately paid out to investors/gamblers. With the latter, profits can increase over time as the maximum bet increases and whales come along to utilize the increasing maximum bet limits.
In summary... slot games, card gambling games, etc, are all possible in a decentralized peer to peer manner. I think that it is the intention that after Bookie is released, Peerplays will go after other gambling markets since sports betting is only one facet of a bigger overall industry.
Re: MarketingYou argue that since Peerplays doesn't have a huge marketing budget it will go no where. However, you failed to deduce that cryptocurrencies (or DACs) work differently from centralized privately controlled companies. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, NEM, and Litecoin have generated >$1 billion evaluations with no marketing budget. The answer is simple... cryptocurrencies are marketed by word of mouth and the network effect. By allowing people to invest in a cryptocurrency or DAC, they are then sure to at least tell a few people about their investment. One of these people invest themselves and tell three of their friends. This network effect grows parabolically as more people hear about it and invest, or when gamblers share how little house edge there is, how the games are provably fair, and how they don't have to worry about shady centralized/offshore gambling companies (many of which have took the money and ran or operated on fractional reserves and eventually imploded.)
Furthermore, once the media starts picking up and investing in the cryptocurrency or DAC themselves, this parabolic curve intensifies. Once Peerplays has a working product, assuming it is the first to market in the cryptocurrency industry, then I venture to say it will get a lot of attention from gambling-oriented media.
Re: Gambling Industry ExperienceIt is more important that the Peerplays DEVELOPMENT team have the technological chops to implement their ideas. The business part will figure itself out through community involvement and user feedback. I'm sure they have general business experience anyways, and with enough time spent researching any industry is digestible. There are a lot of great minds around, and as long as the developers digest and consider what is brought to their attention, then I think there are no problems there.
Re: The Chinese MarketI think that you bring up a good point about the Chinese market and their superstitions. Similar to Bitshares, since Peerplays is built on Graphene tech, different front ends will be fairly easy to implement. So, a frontend in Chinese with all of the proper colors and such won't be too hard. Did you know that Bitshares and Graphene tech is pretty popular in China compared to most other ALT coins? I expect some of this popularity to trickle down to Peerplays. bitCNY historically has a higher market cap and daily volume than bitUSD by a long shot (for instance- today bitCNY has $608k volume and bitUSD only has $208k.) Also the Chinese account for a large amount of activity and volume in Bitshares. For instance, today China accounts for about $23 million of Bitshares' $38.8 million total volume. Bitshares is one of the most popular ALT coins in China, if not THE most popular one. The Chinese subforum on Bitsharestalk has 38,749 Posts
in 3471 Topics... I am sure a decent amount of the Chinese Bitshares community invested in the ICO and will have incentive to garner local interest.