Honesty/randomness verification at casinos

[YuraK]

As far as I see the main problem with online gambling is that casinos can manipulate results of any given game. There is an easy way to overcome it - casino should generate certain number of spins/card decs/dice rolls/etc, and send it to the player encripted in advance. After the game is over player gets password to encript the file and check the results. That really solve fairness problem IMHO.

I know a couple of casinos that offer such opportunities. Would you prefer such casinos over usual?
Why casinos (I mean big ones) do not implement any similar technologies?

[jetset]

Isn't this a similar concept to the Fairdice Project?

[YuraK]

Not exectly. At Fairdice they suppose to independently generate random numbers. Here everything is generated by casino. But results should be about the same (I mean trust increase).
Anyway, Fairdice poped-up year ago and nothing since that time...

[eek]

There is an easy way to overcome it - casino should generate certain number of spins/card decs/dice rolls/etc, and send it to the player encripted in advance. After the game is over player gets password to encript the file and check the results. That really solve fairness problem IMHO.

If anyone cracked it the casino would get murdered, and there's an entire community of h4xOrs out there that would try, so its risky.

How much data would be transmitted? 100 plays? 100cards?
It would have to be time limited to be hack proof.
(i.e. pretty much everything is hackable, but not within the time frame for plays from that data packet, say 10 minutes.)


This could have legs...

One transmitted play at a time however, would be subject to the same suspicion as the present system that has killed off the industry for a huge swathe of people who only play for entertainment.

If the data could be sent in 400 card packets for BJ etc and 100 spin packets for roulette kind of thing it would have legs.
...PGP is meant to be pretty hack proof...

...it's not a bad idea...

[GrandMaster]

Originally Posted by YuraK

As far as I see the main problem with online gambling is that casinos can manipulate results of any given game. There is an easy way to overcome it - casino should generate certain number of spins/card decs/dice rolls/etc, and send it to the player encripted in advance. After the game is over player gets password to encript the file and check the results. That really solve fairness problem IMHO.

I know a couple of casinos that offer such opportunities. Would you prefer such casinos over usual?
Why casinos (I mean big ones) do not implement any similar technologies?

There is no need to send the whole file of random numbers, it is possible to sign it digitally and if the file is requested later, it can be verified that it has not been tempered with. There is still the problem that extreme results will occur occasionally, and a player who suffered a loss which has probability 0.001 will still claim the casino is rigged and now may even use the random number file as evidence.

The Fairdice project should give the player much more confidence in the randomness of random numbers as long as the player's own RNG is good.

What I would like to see is a way to play offline so that I could play when I travelling on the train and update my balance when I come back online.

[eek]

Originally Posted by YuraK

.
I know a couple of casinos that offer such opportunities. Would you prefer such casinos over usual?

Which casinos?

[Aleksandr Lis]

Originally Posted by eek

Which casinos?

I believe YuraK meant some russian casinos

[YuraK]

Yes, you all are right . Right now I know just two (or three) Russian casinos.
Eek, you know, casinos tell us that our financial transactions are 100% protected. CC number cracked even in a year time is a great threat, so I hope 1024 key should be stable enough.
One of the casinos makes 1 hour file. Another makes MD5 signed file exactly as GrandMaster wrote.
About extreme results. We had an author on Russian forums which always said - you should be happy when 15 red come in a row, just imagine how much you can win betting on this streak!

[sirius]

Originally Posted by YuraK

As far as I see the main problem with online gambling is that casinos can manipulate results of any given game. There is an easy way to overcome it - casino should generate certain number of spins/card decs/dice rolls/etc, and send it to the player encripted in advance. After the game is over player gets password to encript the file and check the results. That really solve fairness problem IMHO.

I know a couple of casinos that offer such opportunities. Would you prefer such casinos over usual?
Why casinos (I mean big ones) do not implement any similar technologies?

Actually this is my idea too. I didn't know any casinos did this. I was hoping to have a few example games using this but haven't got around to writing any yet.

[sirius]

By the way, a new encrypted file could be sent each time someone logs into a game and the decryption key sent when logged out (or after a certain time period you are sent it and a new encrypted file sent at the same time). There are many ways of doing this. Even just sending one result at a time as eek mentioned isn't a bad idea either because at least it proves the result is independent of the bet size and player decision.

You could even send it in such a format so that it works for all the games and not just one separate file for each game but this would probably be more complicated for the player to understand but at least it wouldn't look so predetermined for some players because playing different games will alter the order of the results.The file could even decrypt automatically with no other program needed (asks for a password when opened and then show the results as a text file).

I have discussed this before with the Philip Kissane who is the head of Littlewoods Online Casino. The first time was in late 2002 and they didn't think it was logistically possible but I don't see why not. I even have a thread here: http://www.faircasinos.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31 about it but didn't want to describe it until I had a demonstration ready.