When we think of gambling, we think of casinos. Additionally, we think about losing money. The two associations are not coincidental. Online or offline, you’re pretty much bound to lose, but blockchain might change this. While it can’t be your lucky charm, it can make the odds fair.
At a typical online casino, the house edge – which is added to the odds of the house winning – can vary between 3 and 15%. This means that instead of you and the house both having a 50% chance of winning, you might get only 35% and the house 65%. However, blockchain is renowned for revolutionizing most diverse industries due to its manifold applications. HackerNoon writes that online gambling might be another case in point.
One instance of this is the blockchain-based online casino YOUnited. On this platform, odds are stacked evenly among the players since there is no house. Instead, its income comes from the blockchain fees – 0,1% transfer fee and 1% smart contract execution fee to the post-game winnings.
Another advantage of blockchain in gambling is transparency. While the randomness factor in the real world is automatically created through the spin of a roulette wheel or shuffling cards, in online casinos it has to be generated artificially. This is done through a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). The problem is that the players cannot see the history of the generated numbers, meaning that they have to trust the institution and external regulators that the PRNG was fair. Still, casting one glance at the long list of untrustworthy casinos is not exactly encouraging. As an alternative to this, true blockchain casinos keep an immutable record of every bet, roulette spin, generated number and transaction, which players can look at and verify.
People gambled even before there were casinos – they gambled against each other. This required a certain amount of trust among the players. Similarly to banks in financial matters, casinos arose as an institution in which the players can place their trust, making all of them equal – except the institution itself. Know when to hold them, know when to fold them… And know when to go blockchain.
