Jordan Wong is having a busy day at work. The game developer is only a few days away from launching the ICO campaign of his game project, iDice. Our knowledge of this new project is very little, but we have a certain understanding about its possible outcome. An Ethereum project – in fact, one of the many Ethereum projects – which is proposing to “revolutionize” gambling with decentralized smart contracts technology. It sounds too familiar for a moment, and we start to think of having only a few usual questions from Jordan, given he has only provided us a 15-minute window. A conversation begins:
NewsBTC: Gambling ICOs have begun to feel like an overpopulated sector all of a sudden. What separates iDice from the rest?
Jordan: iDice is the world’s first mobile gambling app. As a matter of fact, we are primarily focused on mobile development. Right now, there isn’t a single mobile gambling app that exists. Users have to deal with really clumsy and unoptimized mobile versions of desktop apps in order to play any of these games. I think the mobile gambling segment is a huge market that’s been neglected. When I first came up with the idea of a mobile gambling app, I was really surprised to see that there was nothing like it that existed.
Mobile devices make up around 68% of all internet traffic, and users in the US spend 71% of their digital minutes on their smartphones. That is a lot of potentials and a huge opportunity for us. iDice will essentially have a monopoly over this huge market that everyone else has been ignoring. We don’t expect this monopoly to last forever, but it will give us a lot of time to develop our platform further by introducing other game types. We will years ahead of the competition and be able to develop the iDice brand as the leader of mobile gambling.
But don’t you think a gambling-based mobile Dapp could always face resilience from marketplaces like Apple Store?
We expect to see this type of resistance from the Apple app store and Google Play. Their guidelines on apps are extremely tight. We don’t plan on releasing our app through central marketplaces, as it goes against the philosophy of what Ethereum is. Ethereum is a decentralized currency that isn’t controlled by any one entity. We plan to circumvent the strict regulations by letting users download our app straight from our site and installing it as a third party application. Android users are able to do this pretty easily by simply allowing 3rd party installations on their phone settings. iPhone users have to bypass Apple through a process called sideloading. It’s going to be a very secure and 100% process. We plan to have our app 3rd party audited and verified before it’s released. We’ll have a very detailed guide on our site on how to do this for all of our Apple users once our iDice mobile app is released.
How do you plan to attract the non--Ethereum, non-Bitcoin gaming population to your app?
As you know, a lot of countries outlaw gambling. I think Ethereum and Bitcoin actually provide the residents of these countries a loophole for them to gamble. It’s completely decentralized and can’t be controlled by the government. As a matter of fact, we have gotten a lot of interest from Chinese investors who believe that our app will be a huge success in China since gambling is illegal there. It will be hard for governments to censor our app once it is released. All it takes is someone to post it on the internet and all of a sudden, millions of people have access to it. We’re not encouraging people to break their local laws regarding this, but I think in a way, we’re converting a lot of non-Ethereum and non-bitcoin people into believers of the idea of cryptocurrency. They see that they are being oppressed in an unjust way and they are able to enjoy things that they normally couldn’t. I think our app will be very successful in countries with strict laws and regulations.
What are the benefits for people who participate in iDice ICO?
People who participate in our crowdsale will get iDice tokens. These are standard ERC 20 smart contracts that we’ve coded to split the profits of our gambling games. They’re like preferred shares that pay out dividends. iDice token holders have the right to a portion of iDice’s total profit. That also includes the official release of iDice mobile and desktop platforms. It’s a great way to invest in the Ethereum since token holders have our house edge on their side. They’re statistically likely to make a positive return on their investment.
And how is the security of their funds ensured?
We don’t touch our players’ funds at any point, nor do we have any server side architecture other than our web-hosting servers. Our players can play on iDice mobile and desktop versions by directly sending their Ether to the game address. The game itself is a smart contract that computes the result of the game through an oracle that provides random numbers from random.org. This makes us hack-proof if any malicious 3rd parties try to steal our players’ funds. We’re not an online wallet. We don’t get any of your private keys or any of our player’s info. We don’t require our players to make any sort of accounts or fund anything. They can just open the app or website and start playing immediately. It’s a very secure and simple process.
My final question is my most concerned one: how do you ensure provably fair gaming? What kind of PRNG methods are applied to ensure an unguessable outcome?
This is a great question. For one, our source code is open source. Anyone can look at it on etherscan.io. Because everything is coded on the smart contract and running on the Ethereum blockchain, we are completely trustless. We use an open source blockchain based Oracle called oracalize.it to retrieve random numbers generated by random.org through TLSNotary. The iDice contract then performs encryption on the number and the IPFS address of the TLSNotary proof to compute the game result.
Because we’re using trusted 3rd parties like random.org, we can remain provably fair. This method is the safest and fairest method to generate random numbers without any sort of 3rd party interference of the game’s final result.
Our Social Networks: Facebook Instagram Pinterest Reddit Telegram Twitter Youtube
