From the turn of the early 2000's until 2006 one of the biggest markets in the world was online gambling.
In 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) with the purpose “to prevent the use of certain payment instruments, credit cards, and fund transfers for unlawful Internet gambling, and for other purposes”. The impact was swift as “several large publicly traded poker gaming sites such as PartyPoker, PacificPoker and bwin closed down their US facing operations. What if it was at this very moment, in 2006, that gave birth to Bitcoin? While cypherpunks helped build Bitcoin, the genesis of the idea may have come from developers and entrepreneurs from the casino gaming industry. If this all sounds a bit far-fetched to you, consider that the first public release of Bitcoin v0.1 included a poker table.
I believe on January 3, 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin. It was to create a online currency for gambling but when his 50 coined became a million before the end of the year he changed his path and the course of Bitcoin, leaving unfinished business.
So now you have an market still waiting for life, some type of revival and from the dust you get Funfair.
Funfair! Funfair! Funfair!
Amidst a sea of ICOs busy shoehorning tokens into business plans, one project stands out for having its business model and technology aligned in harmony: FunFair ($FUN). In a nutshell, FunFair will license its Ethereum-based gaming technology to casino operators.
Firstly, founder Jez San. For those old enough, the name should ring a bell. Jez is a legend from the video game scene of the 80s and 90s with hits such as Starglider and Starfox. Later on he founded online poker site PKR. To have someone at the helm with decades of experience building and leading teams to deliver consumer facing technology across the video and casino gaming industry is a real boon for Funfair. Already executives from William Hill and PokerStarz have joined as the team grows towards 50 people with a focus on delivering a great user experience. The interfaces are written in HTML 5, WebGL and JavaScript, so they can be delivered to any modern browser whether on desktop or mobile.
Many cryptocurrency projects are published under liberal open-source licenses, but those parts of FunFair which provide a competitive advantage will be under lock and key. In particular, FunFair’s state channels (called “Fate channels”) which serve two main purposes: (1) enable real-time updates, similar to Bitcoin-style payment channels where the blockchain only needs to record the opening and closing of a session (2) act as a high-quality source of randomness (pseudo-random) needed by the game itself.
We may never discover the origin story of Bitcoin, but of the possible truths out there, FunFair could very well be finishing what Satoshi originally set out to achieve when publishing the Bitcoin paper 10 years ago.
FYI FunFairs official beta release is the first quarter of 2018.
Sited: BitCartel, makebitcoingreatagain.com, funfairblogs, onlinegamblingblogs