Trust and Transparency in Online Gaming

Transcript

you hey everyone first I wanted to thank

each CC for letting me do this remotely apologize for not being able to be there in person my name is Ryan gitelson and I'm the CEO and co-founder of virtue poker and my presentation today is about trust and transparency in online gaming with a specific focus on poker so to begin I'm gonna tell the story of the rise of online poker through the lens of a hypothetical recreational poker player named Joe poker he hails from Canada he's about 34 years old unfortunately he's generally a net loser when he plays online and he generally plays five to six times per month for entertainment

purposes and years he was active is from 2003 to 2015 in 2003 online poker ignited when an unknown accountant named Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event for two and a half million dollars after winning his $10,000 entry fee via an $86 buy in an online tournament on PokerStars as you can see this ignited poker especially with in the World Series of Poker with entrants in the event going up tenfold over the next couple of years millions of poker players around the world including players like Joe poker decided to give it a shot and created accounts on these sites to try to win big what

this led to was millions and tens of millions of dollars of players deposits being spread across a small number of sites all of these funds were held in trust by these operators who were largely unregulated during this time and players were more than happy to send each of these sites money transfers because they wanted a shot to win big and then the first scandal hit online poker in 2007 it was discovered by players themselves that there was a super user who was winning around 14 standard deviations above the mean this player was essentially unbeatable over the course of three years and was repeatedly reported to absolute poker and ultimate Beck and was ignored for the longest amount of time finally the site's decided to do a bit

of due diligence and figured out that a company Insider had hacked their software and gained access to a master account that allowed him and his co-conspirators to view all players cards on the platform over the course of the three-year scandal 15 million dollars worth of player funds were stolen by these by these cocoons co-conspirators and then over the course of the next five years a series of unfortunate events led to a significant distrust in online poker first the UI Gea was passed in 2006 which made it illegal for any operator to process payments in relation to online gambling activity and in 2011 the Department of

Justice shut down the three largest operators filled Tilt Poker Stars and Absolute belt bet and when they seized the assets of Full Tilt they discovered that 350 million dollars worth the player deposits were actually used for operational expenses by the company essentially the operator was commingling player deposits with their operational funds job poker essentially logged on at this time and found out that he was locked out of his account and he couldn't access his money then over the course of the next few years there was a rise of third-party softwares there are things like heads-up displays session Lords sharp scope and then there were automated program spots playing

online Joe realized essentially that he was being bum hunted by professional players who knew his exact skill level in his playing behavior so the job pokers of the world decided to quit online poker because he doesn't trust the sites that he plays on online poker is broken in order for the global poker economy to grow the following function must be true net deposits must be greater than raked Plus withdrawals this model requires a constant supply of redeposits to survive professional players have a net positive on their withdrawals while recreational players generally have a net positive on deposits creating balance in the ecosystem but unfortunately in recent

times semi professionals and professionals are winning at higher rates and recreational players are depositing creating a strain on this poker economy so what's the problem how can we get job pokers of the world back playing online well the problem is recreational players don't trust online poker their centralized storage of player deposits there's non transparent random number generators that are used to shuffle the decks of cards deck of cards on the platform and there's all of these unfair third-party tools so that's where we come in so what is virtual poker we were incubated beginning in 2015 and from consensus and we employ a peer-to-peer card shuffle and protocol that involves

all players seated at a virtual table online and shuffling the deck of cards for each hand played on the platform we offer transparent payments with all payments being done through a combination of main net etherium smart contracts and our own deployed side chain and on our platform players are always in control of our funds our vision so our goal is to remove player deposit risk solve the trust issue regarding game play and create a fair and balanced poker network our ultimate goal is to get the dormant Joe pokers of the world back playing online so how do we work so the way that we remove player deposit risk is players fund their own digital wallets and send buy-ins to

virtue put theory on main net contracts that then are forwarded to our own sidechain players then buy into each individual table by sending their buy into a smart contract on the virtue poker side chain which holds the funds in escrow while the game is being played each individual table contract has its own custom parameters the by an amount the number of players the payout per the payout percentages and the game rules we employ a mental poker protocol for shuffling on the platform so this is done fully peer-to-peer there's no centralized random number trader generator or server involved in the process and the way it works is the following so let's say we have three

players playing online Bob Alice and Joe and Bob is the dealer he starts with the deck of cards he shuffled the shuffles them and this only happens on his computer no one else can see it he then encrypts the deck he passes the deck to aus who does the same thing shuffles the deck and encrypts the deck allison passes the deck to joe who does the same thing shuffle the deck and encrypt the deck the deck is now in its final ordered state 1 through 52 bob removes the shuffle encryption key that he just placed on each individual card and replaces a new encryption key unique to each card you can think of this as B 1 B 2 B 3 all the way to beat 52 he passes the deck to Alice who does the

same thing encrypts each individual card with her own key allison passes the deck to joe who does the same thing so each individual card as you can see here is encrypted by each player so how do each player see their cards while bob possesses the keys to his own cards but no one else's so Alice shares keys corresponding to Bob's cards so think of it as Bob as than Lumbergh cards 1 & 4 in the deck Alice pass or 1 & 2 in the deck Alice passes a 1 and a 2 over the Bob and Joe passes J 1 and J 2 so that Bob can see his cards and no one else and vice versa each player does this with each other all players share their keys for community cards so that

everyone can see them and this process continues until the end of the hand where the result is then reported to the smart contract on the on our side chain so where did we come from and where are we going so we originally started in November of 2015 out of consensus the first couple of years was mostly prototyping but we completed our first token sale in May of 2018 we raised 18 and a half million dollars in our first token sale we then partnered with three of the world's most famous pros including brian rafts who's won four World Series of Poker mate World Series of Poker bracelets Phil

Ivey who's won 10 World Series of Poker bracelets and Dan Coleman who's won one World Series of Poker bracelet we launched a private beta in May of 2 with about two thousand players and we had about five hundred nine thousand hands played I'm more recently in November of 2019 we launched an open beta and I've had over three thousand players compete and over over one and a half million hands played we submitted our gaming license application to the multi gaming Authority and are expected to complete the licensing process by late spring of this year and our real money launches to follow so our announcement is this is our final round

of beta so while we've been in beta the app is free to play and we give away crypto prizes so just by logging on registering an account and participating you can a see how we work and be compete for over three hundred either worth of prizes five million BPP we're going to give away one World Series of Poker Main Event entry worth over $10,000 we are gonna buy phil ivey into one of the largest tournaments in europe in May the Triton Montenegro tournament and we're gonna give away our piece of his action to one of our players and in addition just by participating and playing and helping us test the software over the next couple months we're gonna give

every single player a real money bankroll that you can unlock and play when we go to main net which is expected to be early summer so I know I went quick here I would have loved to have asked answered a lot of your questions but if you want to get involved you can download the app and play as of today virtue that poker you can join our community on Twitter or join our telegram and if you have any questions again sorry I couldn't be there in person but you can contact me at Ryan at virtue dot poker for any follow-ups partnership opportunities anything like that we're always open to opportunities and I know I went very quickly here but

thank you guys for your time I hope you guys enjoyed Paris stay safe and thank you very much [Applause] so we're gonna have a talk in 10 minutes with