Under a decentralized poker heads-up scenario, I would imagine that hands could be bound to some sort of contract or lock time. If one player leaves the hand for an extended period of time, the funds would be released to the opponent. However, peers would need to operate via Tor or I2P. Without this additional secure layer, one player could simply DDOS the other if they are heavily invested in a hand they can't win. They could then simply claim the other player left the table.
I would also be interested to know how collusion could be solved in a decentralized setup. Even the large poker sites have not completely solved the issue, and give a false sense of security to some degree.
I could live with pure P2P heads-up NL. However, latency may be an issue with the additional security layer. I love fast HU.
I'd guess that you solve collusion by
a) matching people to tables randomly
b) requiring people to pay an upfront, nonrefundable fee to enter a table
Then you hope that the cost of searching for your buddy's table is higher than the profits from collusion.
Hmm... I suppose you set the fee by targeting some mean number of hands before players switch tables.
If you fall short of the target, bump up the fee.
Of course, if you only have enough players for one table you are shit out of luck. Maybe you bootstrap the system with 1v1 games?
BTW Sergio, great project. Very interested to learn about the details. Is there a white paper?