Various other gambling services exist on the net, that utilize provable fair betting. This is not new. And these services aren't rolling in cash. While the market for professional, highly marketed, casinos likely do make a lot of money, I see little incentive for them to switch their systems to PP. You may have a better system, but you're taking money off the top, so for a casino operator, your solution offers negatives rather than positives, since you would be cutting into their profits.
How do you market this technology so that casinos will want to adopt it? If their system already works fine for them, and their audience sees that it is fair, what is the difference that PP is going to give them that makes them want to switch? Switching back-end technologies is surely painful for these operators. I don't see anyone lining up to do this, so they can share their profits with the world. Probably be a book keeping nightmare come tax time.
Thank you, those are good questions.
The Peerplays network has two different gaming models- trustless "on-chain" gaming, in which games are programmed directly into the native blockchain code, and "server-side" gaming, on which games can be played on hosted servers.
Peerplays is not trying to get existing casinos to switch their back-end. Casino card games will be programmed directly into the native blockchain code, so there is no need for any 3rd party service at all. Actually, Peerplays will be directly competing against these casinos. Because of this, the question should be asked "What will Peerplays offer users that existing casinos cannot?" One a glaringly obvious answer is that players can keep 100% of their winnings in a cryptographically secured account which cannot be accessed by any outside agency or authority. I will leave it to the reader to analyze the implications of this statement.
For server-side gaming, the option for adding Peerplays to the back-end will appeal mostly to existing gaming websites that do not currently offer wagering. Peerplays will allow them to outsource the liability for operating a gambling server, because no wagering would actually be happening on their server, but rather across a distributed network with nodes around the world. Essentially, Peerplays server-side model allows players to register and wager on a game, and elect a 3rd party (the gaming company) to report the winner to Peerplays. Another example for third party integration is existing eSports gaming websites, who can simply add Peerplays as a wagering option for their users by integrating with Peerplays through the blockchain API, offering their users the same benefits as addressed in the paragraph above.
Fees charged by Peerplays for server-side gaming will be set at a competitive rate to reflect the value of the service that Peerplays is providing to the hosting company - namely the ability to outsource the wager payment processing and the tournament management and bracketing. These companies will naturally be able to charge their own fee (built into the blockchain contract) for playing their games, offsetting whatever minor fee they are charged by Peerplays and creating a net gain for them.
Finally something we have not yet discussed in detail is Sports Betting. Here is a quick preview, from the
DAO proposal we published yesterday:
"For sports “bookmaking”, on-chain smart contracts automate the entire process, but to settle a particular book or bracket the bracket creator must pre-select a neutral 3rd party (a specialized business, a multi-sig consortium, or even a chosen friend in a private fantasy
league) to publish accurate game and player statistics to the blockchain."
The implications of this are quite staggering. Peerplays will make the publishing of accurate statistics a business opportunity in and of itself. In this case, the notion of needing 100% decentralized oracles for this task would be overkill. Because of free market competition, centralized businesses are perfectly capable of handling this, and there are plenty of safeguard measures if you want more security, like taking the median of [ x ] number of feeds, or simply choosing a service that offers "insurance" in the event of accidental mis-published information. What this means, in a nutshell, is that in addition to everything else, Peerplays will be able to tap the single largest source of gambling revenue in the world - sports betting.
