Topic: Cypherpoker - Mental Poker (P2P Poker) (Read 2450 times)

Its much easier getting the poker community into bitcoin then it is getting the poker community away from pokerstars and any other sites.  Poker players go were the good games are at. Using bitcoin wont matter much to them its just like exchanging to casino chips.  Generally poker players online are smarter than average and understand computers better than average. 

The hardest part of this project will be to transition people from Pokerstars, which also means people will have to transition from fiat to Bitcoin.
Although if I understand well, people will still be able to use fiat to fund their hobby.
Again, getting the coding work done is only the tip of the iceberg, it will take much more to get a decent user base.

To start off with I'd like to thank everyone who has supported CypherPoker whether materially, in spirit, or otherwise. I'm amazed and thankful for the attention and excitement that the project has generated.
I was genuinely surprised that this subreddit managed to gather as many members as it has given that I didn't do much to advertise it. With one of my blogs, Toronto City Life, now heading into its 8th year (yikes!), I'm all too well aware of how difficult it is to find an audience let alone an interested community. To this end I have to extend extra thanks to certain members of the Bitcoin community for stoking the fire.
I'm also very happy to report that my local CypherPoker family has grown. Earlier this month I was approached by two gentlemen with a keen interest in the game and a willingness to support its further development. The fact that this support included a financial aspect was a great relief – Sarah and I have been living on vapours for some time now and the loss of my job a few months ago certainly didn't help the situation.
Kamal and Ben, the two gentlemen in question, have also provided some excellent input that has provided me with avenues to move beyond some of the looming roadblocks of the project.
With the completion of the main game code I began looking at cryptocurrency integration. For some time I've been mentioning an escrow system of some sort as being a part of the solution but didn't have too many details to go along with it. Skeptics pointed out that collusion could be a big problem for game verification and settlement but I put such comments on the back burner until I was ready to tackle the problem. Still, the commenters had some good points.
As I usually do, I started sketching out some pencil-and-paper concepts to see how the problem could be tackled. I would need something decentralized and highly collusion-resistant but every time I thought I had hit on a custom solution I was able to figure out a way to manipulate it. Maybe the solution would be found elsewhere.
An immutable blockchain-based system seemed like a good way to fill in some of the gaps so next I started looking into a purely Bitcoin-based solution. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the non-Turing-complete Script language (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script), was far too limited to perform the necessary mathematical operations, not to mention that the brevity of storage available on the Bitcoin blockchain would become a problem very quickly.
It was around this time that Kamal and Ben suggested that maybe smart contracts might be the way to go. I admitted that my experience with such technology was extremely limited but with the present dearth of alternatives it would certainly be worth a look.
Not wanting to put the carriage before the horse I'm not going to get into which particular solution we've been focusing on but the initial testing is looking extremely promising.
I'm sure that anyone following the project will be wondering what kind of timeline we're looking at so this is the part where I put on my prognostication hat. The project is pretty much all uncharted territory so it's important that I accompany any predictions with a big caveat but based on what I know I expect to have a working proof of concept in early 2016.
Working around the limitations of the smart contract solution will take a little longer and I'm sure that we'll want to do plenty of testing before releasing any such solution, but if I were being forced to provide a date for this I would guesstimate some time around April of next year.
Besides ideas and support, our new partners are providing some of the other desperately needed pieces to the puzzle so I have good reason to expect that 2016 will be a banner year for the CypherPoker project.
Personally I'm elated that we're able to vault the hurdles we're discovering as we go along and moreover that people are seeing some of the same possibilities that I've envisioned since the beginning of this endeavour. Even if we have to push certain technologies to their limits I'm more confident now than ever that the totality of the project is achievable, and I look forward to sharing the details with you once the wrinkles have been ironed out.
Once again I want to offer my heartfelt thanks for your continued support and feedback. Without you, producing a peer to peer game of any kind probably wouldn't make much sense.
Wishing you a sincerely restful and joyous holiday, and may the new year bring with it as many blessings as have been bestowed on me.
Patrick

With the last few updates to the software I've made liberal use of Adobe's Cirrus service to provide rendezvous functionality for players connecting over the internet. This is similar to a BitTorrent tracker which is used by the client software to initially discover other clients' presences on the network. Put more simply, the rendezvous service allows players to find and connect to each other over the internet - assisted peer-to-peer networking, in other words.
The Cirrus service, however, is intended primarily for development and testing, not to mention that it's Adobe-branded and centrally operated which makes it less than ideal as a decentralized peer-to-peer solution, so I've put together a guide on setting up and running a CypherPoker rendezvous server using the free and open-source MonaServer:
http://patrickbay.ca/blog/?p=821
RTMFP, the communication protocol currently used by CypherPoker and MonaServer, has many great features that will find their way into the software but it was never my intention to limit the game to just one or two methods of exchanging data.
Lots of work has already been done on SOCKS5-proxy-based protocols like Tor and I2P, and other protocols like XMPP and HTTP (relay) seem relatively straightforward to implement. There's plenty of work to be done before I can start thinking about incorporating these but adding MonaServer into the mix will go a long way towards providing independence to the game software.
Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns and I'll do my best to answer them in a timely fashion.

This is a stroke of a genius ! Glad it is open source !Looking forward to go ahead and check out the code! Mental poker seems like a great concept too.Death of the online poker ?Might as well take couple of years to do that .

The source code for the complete 1.2 beta version of CypherPoker, as well as accompanying documentation and wiki entries, are now available at the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/monicanagent/cypherpoker
This version contains minor updates for the recently-posted public demo and overhauls to class names and directories to more closely reflect current functionality. If you have a copy of an older repository it's recommended that you delete it and retrieve the newest one.
This update marks the completion of the code migration from my local repository to GitHub so updates should now be more regular.

Hi everyone,
I wanted to ask for your input on funding further CypherPoker development.
Recently I started a GoFundMe campaign and managed to raise a little money before they pulled it (http://www.torontocitylife.com/2015/11/26/that-was-quick/). Of course I'm disappointed but I respect GoFundMe's decision.
The response we received leads me to believe that crowdfunding of the project could be viable but I wonder if an Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign may not meet the same fate.
The Indiegogo Terms of Use (https://www.indiegogo.com/about/terms) only include gambling as a prohibited perk, and I have no intention of offering it as a reward. My fear, however, is that the project will be poorly understood and cancelled under some vague clause.
Kickstarter's Terms of Use (https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use) make no mention of gambling or gaming and again seem to focus on perks. Here too I'm met with some vague language but their list of prohibited projects doesn't look optimistic (https://www.kickstarter.com/rules/prohibited).
What are the chances that a CypherPoker campaign on Indiegogo or Kickstarter will be pulled?
Are there better alternatives? Maybe crowdfunding isn't the best approach?
Your input is greatly appreciated!
As are your Bitcoin donations: 1N5nkMSWf1vTkbekst4PvsGq3Q5eK38ga5

No longer will I need to provide unsatisfactory answers when people ask where they can go to play it. Here, I'll tell them:
http://cypherpoker.org/play/
Version 1.2 beta has had some large and obvious overhauls of the startup process and some not-so-obvious updates of the cryptosystem. As it turns out, in my zeal to produce "lean" code I'd inadvertently set hard limits on the data structures for the cryptosystem and any numbers larger than 736 bits were being truncated. In versions 1.1b and earlier this would result in catastrophic failures.
Having "unwound" so much code during Rochambeau development and subsequent updates, CypherPoker is somewhat fragile at the moment so please excuse its occasional hiccups. Optimizations have all been disabled for now but if it feels like something's stuck, right-click on the game and select "DEBUG >> Toggle log" to see if any progress is being logged.
The next steps are to branch the current GitHub repository and submit the cleaned-up v1.2b code. After that I'll be focusing simultaneously on design and user experience, Bitcoin integration, and optimizations + code hardening. More details coming very soon.

Glad someone invented this, I might try it as soon as I get off the lazy period

The CypherPoker project on GitHub has been updated with the necessary project and settings files for exporting and testing Android APK files.
The steps to compile a custom Android build of CypherPoker are almost identical to those required to produce the desktop AIR version (https://redd.it/3o8swq), but with two notable exceptions:

1) You must use the Android project file instead of the desktop project file: https://github.com/monicanagent/cypherpoker/blob/master/Lounge/InstantLocalLounge-android/InstantLocalLounge-android.as3proj
2) The exported APK will appear in the "bin-output/APK" folder rather than the "bin-output/AIR" folder.

I haven't released any iOS export instructions yet since I don't have any Apple products to test and confirm with. If anyone is interested in and able to help out with this, please get in touch.

Wow, this is an extremely cool way to securely play poker.  But yeah, this could mean every poker room that doesn't use a system like this will fall off and die.  Why is it called "Mental" poker though?

But yeah, this could mean every poker room that doesn't use a system like this will fall off and die.