Its only possible because of Ethereum and the Blockchain.
Trustless gambling can be done in bitcoin as well, although it's kind of awkward. I have worked through the logic of how to do a trustless 50% win, 50% lose bet (with arbitrary payouts) on a napkin, and believe it would work
-- I would love to see someone try and do this with Bitcoin, fully decentralized.
SD did already. They are the benchmark for Decentralized blockchain gambling. But even they needed a server architecture for randomness.
Building this with Ethereum has been an absolute delight. With Bitcoin it would be an absolute headache. Not sure why you'd bother when Ethereum exists.
We love Bitcoin. But above all we are tool builders. And we are not Bitcoin maximalists.
Quote
Nobody touches your money. You dont have to trust anybody with your money. Its just you and the Smart Contract. We believe this is the future of gambling.
If so, it doesn't sound like a future I'd want to invest in. If it's trustless, there's no need for reputation, and if it's a smart contract it can be trivially duplicated.
I however think the biggest issues are going to be UX ones, it's going to be hard to complete with the sleek experience offered by gambling sites when you are interacting with a smart contract, and waiting on blocks (even if they're every 10 seconds)
The Smart Contract is what requires reputation. As you are sending your bet Tx only to that. So it is reputation of code, NOT people.
This trivially duplicated argument for code is pointless. Bitcoin can be "trivially duplicated" too. Just ask Charlie Lee. An experience is more than just its code base.
In terms of UX, well; the game functions EXACTLY as Classic SatoshiDICE for Bitcoin. That did pretty well.
Did you ever play that pre-2013.Otherwise, the bet processing times need to come down. That is a fair point.
We're already testing new proofs with our Oracle. We will have that down to 3-5s on blockchain, by the end of the year.