http://provablyfair.org/
Was done way back in 2013
One of the brains behind classic Nintendo game Star Fox is launching a blockchain-based online gambling service that could leave regulators stumped – and says he has raised $200,000 from the public to launch it. Argonaut Software founder Jez San’s Funfair project aims to put online gambling onto blockchain, the technology …
"You can be sent a link, click on it and you’re in a game.”
In its purest form, gambling is redistribution of money between the players, and the house with organised gambling. In the future, will you know who the other players are and what you're actually gambling on?
Now we have the internet there are other ways to exercise one's arm.
Just remember, darts/slot machines with one arm and beer/other activities with the opposite arm. Otherwise...
Taking poker sites as an example, I don't think that the general online player has an actual problem with the transactional nature of the financial side because (most) of the larger sites employ methods where the "cash" aspect of the game can be audited and there are methods of comeback in the event of issues.
The problem I see, and tjhat that stopped me from playing online is that players simply don't trust the numerical or RNG'ing engines being used to power the sites; and there are many pieces of detailed analysis that have been done where the long-term card odds from online games have been found to be highly suspect when placed alongside standard live table games. As a previous poster also pointed out, this also doesn't seem to protect the player against organised poker "bots" or internal admins from skewing the games in other ways towards preferred players, or the house.
Perhaps this is a solution - but from the detail given in the (albeit limited) article, it doesn't sound like it.
Further reading required I guess.
Poker is very different to other games, being a game requiring perfect play in order to achieve the stated odds.
Roulette, craps, fruit machines, etc. do not.
If you're playing poker online, you need to know that you're playing perfectly in order to avoid bots, etc., in which case there are much easier ways of winning a poker game (e.g. play against random people in real life).
In almost all other games, there's no point in playing as you have no contorl over the situation and you may as well just be putting "£5 at 0.3 probability" - it's essentially the same and the "game" has no effect on the outcome. With poker, it's actually worse. You play perfectly and you might get those odds in the long-run. You don't, and your odds are indeterminably lower.
Seems like the digital equivalent of buying casino chips and gambling with those instead of cash. I also fail to see how it will affect the ability of employees or the online casino from cheating.
The chance of winning anything in a casino depends to a very large degree on the fact that the order of the cards, roll of the dice, spin of the wheel etc. are all random. You can have high confidence in that randomness when you can see the mechanism that is determining the outcome, but I have to take on trust that a digital simulation is producing random results - and the person I am trusting is the person who has everything to gain by making it NON-random.