Don’t we all enjoy a little game of chance every now and then? Nothing feels worse than the feeling of being cheated. Despite most of the online casinos and gambling sites being fair then not that many of them can prove it. Luckily for each one of us the greatest invention in the gambling field of this century is the provably fair games. We are dedicating our following article to let you all know how provably fair gaming works and what makes it special.
OMG! I feel like this game is rigged!
While you are gambling online and hit a streak of bad luck it could easily spike up the thoughts about how you are getting cheated. It has a lot to do with human psychology since you aren’t actually seeing anyone perform the shuffle and the deal. We are not blaming anyone for this but here is where provably fair games make a huge difference.
Hashing
Nothing more complicated than a digest message from one destination to another. It is impossible for you to know what was the original message without having huge computing resources and time in order to bruteforce the answer. For the sake of this example we are going to use term „hello“ in Sha256 which translates to „2cf24dba5fb0a30e[..]” by adding space to the end of this you are going to receive decryption of “5e3235a8346e5a4585f8c5[..]” despite change being small it results in a completely different string. Hashing is only one way always and completely unpredictable which means that upon using a long string of digits it will be close to impossible to call out the original numbers. In theory it is possible but will require you trying out all of the numbers ranging from 0000.00 up until 9999..99 which is impossible with a big search sample, at least with current resources. Hash is tamper resistant since there usually isn’t another number which would give you exact same hash string with a small exception which happens 8.64e-78 amount of times and is called hashing collusion but this statistical phenomena would not happen in real life.
Provably Fair
If you are following everything up until now then great! If not, go ahead and read first paragraphs a few times more until it sticks. And now let us continue by giving you an example based on the blackjack. House can show you the hash for the deck but this wouldn’t confirm more than that the cards were not swapped out, while they could have been since inception. Solution for the player is to be able to influence the results of the deck and this is where provably fair gaming shows its uniqueness. hash(DealerSecret+PlayerSecret)=outcome As long as this is public then results can be verified in many different ways since hashing is based on random mapping. Randomly generated secret is hashed by the house, which could be done in any way they wish but in case that this would not be random then effectively player could beat the house, while being prompted to the player. This is the proof that site is not changing their secret after player ships his secret to the site. Now if this would not be random then player could beat the house which would result in bankruptcy and makes rigging the games to be with negative expected value for the site. Player secret is usually generated in browser and most common way to do that is using javascript, while allowing players to specify it for themselves. Some blockchain games use transaction ID’s to perform this. Player must be able to change his secret and this is possible by not sending out the transaction they do not like, reasons for that may be whatever.
Provably Fair but Without Player Secret
Games where there is not too many variables can be hashed without player secrets. For example if the crypto gambling is done on a simple game of „Coin Flipping“ where you can bet either on tails or heads. Now if house has changed the algo for tails to hit 55% of the times then after performing statistical analyzes you can start betting on that outcome and make house go bankrupt. Yes if house is ran by more sophisticated black hats then they could make the opposite outcomes fall more often depending on whether you bet on one or another how ever even this can be exploited by shifting your wager amounts and still result in house going bankrupt.
Provably Fair Gaming is The Best
Provably fair gaming allows players to verify that the results of each calculation have been truly random. We hope that we have helped to clear up for all of you how provably fair gaming works and why this should be your only way to gamble when it comes to Ethereum or any other crypto gaming.