Pre-Proposal: Trustless Gambling & Academic Master Thesis

Would you support this proposal?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1 50.0%

  • No

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • Total voters
    2
Ossel

Ossel

New member
Intro & Problem
In my point of view the DASH ecosystem is positioned pretty well in terms of:
Core protocol development
technology
Comunity
& Marketing Efforts
The lacking part is the user adoption. You can see that if you compare the number of transactions from DASH and Bitcoin. The Bitcoin notwork processes almost 2000 transaction every 10 minutes. The DASH network processes roughly 30.
From my point of view the lack of user adoption is caused by a lack of merchant adoption and a lack of services using DASH as a payment option.

Proposal
I plan to create a new service to reach a huge market: the gambling economy
& to write my master thesis about DASH and the development of this project


Trustless Gambling Service
I've come up with the idea of a permissionless, trustless and more or less instant gambling service solution that uses DASH.
I created a first working prototype that can be found here: [removed]
And a mockup of the integration into the mobile DASH wallet: [removed]

The key featuers are:
* No registration needed, KYC my ass
* Payments are instant and transparent, because of DASH and the blockchain
* You don't have to trust the service. The randomness of the winner selection comes from the blockchain.

I want to create this gambling platform as an open source project so that anyone can host the service and improve it.
It's not about making mony with the platform. It's about delivering a 100% fair service to the gambling comunity.

The development budget would be handled by me and could be distributed to developers that want to contribute.

Academic master thesis
Because of my fascination about DASH I want to write my master thesis about this project.
It would be focused on open source development, this awesome new way of crowdfunding and the DASH InstantSend feature.

Return Of Investment
The ROI of this proposal is hard to measure.
A lot of people love to gamble and will use a currency in their daily life that allows it as easy as possible. With the mobile wallet integration gambling will be possible with only one click!
Some investors evaluate a cryptocurrency by looking at the number of the transactions on the network. Using only this metric DASH could look a little overvalued.
Increasing the average transaction amount would enhance this metric and attract new investors into the ecosystem.
The ROI from the exposure in the academic world is hard to measure as well. Attracting new developers and talents into our ecosystem is priceless. University is the best place to start!


Budget
3 month of development: 3 * 10 DASH
* open source web application (with instansend & nice UX)
* open source web service interface (to make third party integrations as easy as possible)
* integration into the android wallet app as a hidden feature
Money for the bank (will be used to join pots if no player is around): 10 DASH
domain registration & hosting costs in a gambling & regulation friendly country: 5 DASH
proposal fee: 5 DASH
----------------------------
Total: 50 DASH


Why am I quallified to lead such a project?
Check out the prototype. Even for a prototype it looks already pretty nice.
I studied information technology and have several years of working experience as an application developer.
I have contacts to developers and UI/UX designers.

That's my proposal. I hope you can see the value that it would bring to the DASH ecosystem.
Please give me feedback!

Regards,
Ossel
 
Last edited:
I like the concept, but as I understand it, I think "provably fair" would be a better word to describe this solution instead of "trustless." Trustless would imply that I do not need to trust that the service is not going to fail to execute the transaction properly after I send the dash to an address that is under the service's full control. Making it fully trustless would require some kind of smart contract. This service looks similar to what was previously offered by directbet.eu, before they went offline.

Also, could you clarify whether the service uses a future block hash, or whether it uses the block hash from the same block that the final transaction is included in? There could be an issue if it does not always use the hash from the block the transaction is included in.
 
TroyDASH said:
I like the concept, but as I understand it, I think "provably fair" would be a better word to describe this solution instead of "trustless." Trustless would imply that I do not need to trust that the service is not going to fail to execute the transaction properly after I send the dash to an address that is under the service's full control. Making it fully trustless would require some kind of smart contract. This service looks similar to what was previously offered by directbet.eu, before they went offline.

Also, could you clarify whether the service uses a future block hash, or whether it uses the block hash from the same block that the final transaction is included in? There could be an issue if it does not always use the hash from the block the transaction is included in.
Click to expand...

You made a solid point. To be truely trustless you need a smart contract.
The service is almost trustless because the app that consumes the webservice can monitor
  • the payments going into the pot,
  • the order of the participants prior to the winner seletion. The service will hash the order and write the value to the blockchain. (check .pdf slide 2 - 7 https://ufile.io/r039o)
  • the winner selection by the future blockhash
  • and the payout.
This means the app can check if the service behaved correctly for previous pots. If the service would behave malicious, the android app would warn the user and turn off the gambling feature.
But of course you are right. You don't have any guarantee that the service won't behave differently for the next pot.

I think a better word would be "transparent" instead of trustless. I will adapt the proposal title to "fair & transparent gambling".

I plan to uses a future block hash. Please check out my pdf slides 2 - 7.(https://ufile.io/r039o) They discribe a little better how the order of the participants will be locked in a transparent way.
Does this address your concerns? And if not could you explain why there could be an issue?

Thank you for your valuable feedback!
 
Ossel said:
You made a solid point. To be truely trustless you need a smart contract.
The service is almost trustless because the app that consumes the webservice can monitor
  • the payments going into the pot,
  • the order of the participants prior to the winner seletion. The service will hash the order and write the value to the blockchain. (check .pdf slide 2 - 7 https://ufile.io/r039o)
  • the winner selection by the future blockhash
  • and the payout.
This means the app can check if the service behaved correctly for previous pots. If the service would behave malicious, the android app would warn the user and turn off the gambling feature.
But of course you are right. You don't have any guarantee that the service won't behave differently for the next pot.

I think a better word would be "transparent" instead of trustless. I will adapt the proposal title to "fair & transparent gambling".

I plan to uses a future block hash. Please check out my pdf slides 2 - 7.(https://ufile.io/r039o) They discribe a little better how the order of the participants will be locked in a transparent way.
Does this address your concerns? And if not could you explain why there could be an issue?

Thank you for your valuable feedback!
Click to expand...

I think it could work as long as the algorithm always uses the next block (or any fixed number of blocks) after the one where the payout order is written to the blockchain. Just wanted to make sure that the service, in case the service is also responsible for the last entry, can not arbitrarily select a future block.

I'm not really sure about paying for this solution though. IMO, the dice service previously offered by directbet.eu was superior because it was also provably fair, and it did not require multiple participants. Although, having multiple participants can be beneficial because it ensures that the entire payout funds are accounted for and available, without needing the service to maintain a reserve or take a cut for profit.
 
Hi Ossel

It is quite hard to reach out to new users with a new service. How do people find out about this?

Best,
Gaurav
 
TroyDASH said:
I'm not really sure about paying for this solution though. IMO, the dice service previously offered by directbet.eu was superior because it was also provably fair, and it did not require multiple participants. Although, having multiple participants can be beneficial because it ensures that the entire payout funds are accounted for and available, without needing the service to maintain a reserve or take a cut for profit.
Click to expand...

We could offer both options: with and without other participants. It is totally up to the community which features should be implemented. I want to develop the service in an open source way so that everyone can contribute and bring in new feature ideas.

IMO our service would be superior compared to directbet.eu because there will be nogambling fee. I suppose directbet.eu took a 1% cut on each gambling transaction because they had to pay for the development and hosting costs of their service.
In our case the development, maintance and hosting costs of the service will be sponsored by the DASH network. Even the payout transaction fee is currently covered by the service. No other commercial gambling service can deliver such good conditions to their users!
 
Gaurav_Gupta said:
Hi Ossel
It is quite hard to reach out to new users with a new service. How do people find out about this?
Click to expand...

You are right! Getting new users will be challenging.
I would add the service to the https://www.dash.org/merchants/ page.
We could also create a discord channel that contains a pinned website link. This channel could be used for feedback and bug reports as well.
I would not market the service directly (= no advertisement) because otherwise the DASH branding would get a shady gambling image. We already have the bad instamine image :)

The service works even with only few users because they can play against the bank. There will be no gambling fee because the development, maintance and hosting costs of the service are sponsored by the DASH network. No other commercial gambling service can deliver such good conditions to their users!
 
I canceled this budget proposal because of missing positive feedback.
My thesis is now about bitcoin and ethereum. Nevertheless I still inegrated DASH into the gambling platform prototype. See https://github.com/ossel
 
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