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Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

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Re: Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

#3

Post by jimmyfalcon »

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section.

As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

Re: Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

#4

Post by luweilu »

jimmyfalcon wrote: post #3

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section. As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

Thanks! Will take that feedback on board.

If you scroll down under the "Fair" tab, there's actually a "Calculate" button that links you to a hash calculator, with the inputs being the client seed + seq. Although I would agree that this is difficult to communicate to your normal user.

Re: Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

#7

Post by nnx »

jimmyfalcon wrote: post #3

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section. As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

This "provably fair" concept is quite common in the Bitcoin gaming world.

Not sure who was the first, probably https://satoshidice.com

Bitino.com has a nice page explaining the concept, including an example validation script in Python http://bitino.com/provably-fair-gaming/

Re: Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

#8

Post by mukyu »

jimmyfalcon wrote: post #3

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section. As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

That sort of provable rng isn't novel. tenhou.net [1] (a site for playing riichi mahjong) has been using sha512 of rng values/seeds since at least 2009.

[1] http://tenhou.net/man/#LOG (in japanese)

Re: Show HN: An MMO twist on Battleship where you bet Bitcoins

#10

Post by desdiv »

nnx wrote: post #7
jimmyfalcon wrote: post #3

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section. As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

This "provably fair" concept is quite common in the Bitcoin gaming world. Not sure who was the first, probably https://satoshidice.com Bitino.com has a nice page explaining the concept, including an example validation script in Python http://bitino.com/provably-fair-gaming/

I like to point out that this is only fair in the game theory sense of the word, not the economic sense of the word. There is nothing stopping the operator from waiting until the pot is large enough and then announcing: "Oops, crackers comprised my system and stole all the bitcoins. Sorry, guys. My bad."

In other words, every time you play you're losing to the house, even though the mathematical analysis doesn't show it.

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