Today I decided to visit fair.poker to see what has changed since May. I may be wrong but it looks like there were no major changes there. I mean something like an opportunity to test the site without registration would be nice to have. It's not necessary to implement a faucet with real money, just give players some worthless chips so that they could test your platform.
Also, while exploring the site I encountered this scary message:
When a player enters a table, he automatically puts down a security deposit equivalent to his buy in. If this player attempts to disrupt the poker protocol, he loses his deposit.
First of, it would be interesting to see an example of an attempt to disrupt the poker protocol. An secondly, regardless of the possibility of such an event, I think that potential scammers should be dealt with some other way, and this text should be taken out from the site because there are big chances that it scares off potential users.
Hey there, the security deposit is needed to disincetivize offending of the poker protocol. Offending the protocol means that a player is not executing the steps of the mental poker algorithm as required. In this case, the cryptographic operations would not complete successfully and the face-down cards of the players, as well as the board, would not be able to be opened. This would make the hand impossible to play.
By default the application which you find on
https://fair.poker always executes the protocol correctly and there is no danger of penalty. However, a malicious player might hack into the client-side application and change how his computer interacts with the game. As this would disturb the game and make playing the hand impossible, we must penalize him for that. The penalty varies depending on the size of the pot and the stakes of the game but it is always high enough to fully disincentivize bad protocol execution attempts.
