@Jake

@Jake 4 March 2020

A Quick Tour of Blockchain.Poker **Contents:** **Overview** **Registration** **Deposits & Withdrawals** **Cash Games** **Tournaments** **Hosting a Tournament** **Hotkeys** **Affiliate Program** **Rake & Rakeback** **Playing on Mobile** **Downsides** Overview Blockchain.poker is a web-based poker site that supports play with three different cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Bitcoin SV (BSV). Standout features of Blockchain.poker, when compared to other sites, are the low rake, ease of registration, and extremely fast processing of deposits and withdrawals. https://blockchain.poker/#/?affiliate=95a154e27e4e91f0e63ad4e11adda91d%23cash *Note that all chip amounts on the site are denominated in satoshis (fractions of a bitcoin). The 1/2 tables are not $1/$2, but are microstakes playing with stacks less than a penny.* Registration The registration process—or lack thereof—is one of the most attractive things about the site. Upon visiting the site for the first time, an account is automatically created for you and you are given 100 satoshis (a fraction of a penny)... enough to sit down at a 1/2 (satoshis) table and try the site without having to make a deposit. There are also several daily freeroll tournaments you can use to try to build up a bankroll.  Clicking the hamburger menu in the top right of the screen will show you your account details. New users are automatically assigned a random username, which can be changed in the settings area. The settings menu also allows you to change the visual theme of the site, use a four-color deck, change standard bet shortcuts, and set a password. If you intend to deposit any amount of money on the site that you wouldn’t feel comfortable losing by mistake, please set a password to make sure that if your browser cookies are wiped, you’ll still be able to access your account. **Note that at no point in this process are users asked for any personal information, nor is any geolocating used to block users in certain jurisdictions.** This will be a big plus for people who live in areas that restrict access to online poker. **Deposits and Withdrawals** Another surprising feature of the site is the speed at which deposits and withdrawals are completed. Clicking ‘deposit’ in from the drop-down menu displays the following prompt.  Deposits made using Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV are credited to your account balance immediately. BTC deposits require waiting for 1 confirmation before the amount is credited. If you don’t have BCH, BSV, or BTC, you can also deposit using a number of other coins by clicking the ‘Deposit Other Currencies’ button, allowing users to deposit through SideShift.AI (another highly recommended service!) https://sideshift.ai/a/yZTmjtSUZ If using the SideShift deposit feature, please only send coins from a wallet that you control. If you request a withdrawal from an exchange, the exchange might take a long time to process your withdrawal and your rate quote will expire, creating a headache for you to get your funds back. For my test, I deposited 100 JPY. Less than 2 seconds after hitting the send button in my wallet, the amount was already credited to my account. (I actually sent three deposits trying to get the perfect screenshot, confetti included.) Withdrawals are just as easy, and in most cases also process instantly (the only time it hasn't been instant is when withdrawing a larger amount. Even then it only took ten minutes.) Withdrawals incur no cost when using BCH or BSV, but you do have to pay a transaction fee when using BTC. **Cash Games** With my modest bankroll of $2.50 ready to go, it’s time to sit down at a table. The table selection screen is as follows: I’m doing this test in the middle of the night during US/Europe hours, so there’s not much activity right now. I sit down at the 1/2 table, as that’s the only one open right now. I could also create a new table at higher stakes and wait for someone else to sit, but for the purpose of this report, the microstakes will do just fine. The UI of the site will be familiar to anyone who’s played online poker before. You have your hole cards, action buttons, and on the table you can see the bets of the other players. When it’s your turn to act, the previous action buttons are replaced with a fold button, a time bank, a bet slider, and preset bet-sizing buttons. One helpful feature is that mousing over any chip amount will show you the USD equivalent. This works not only for the pot, but also for player stacks and inside the text log of hand action. **Tournaments** I’m a big fan of the tournaments feature on the site, although as a consequence of being a relatively unknown site, the prize pools of the tournaments are usually quite small. The way the blinds are structured on the tournaments means that each tournament lasts for ~45 minutes to an hour. Customizable blind structures have not been implemented yet, but are listed on the site’s roadmap. If you bust out of a tournament, multiple entries are allowed! Even freeroll tourneys can be re-entered for a small re-entry fee.  As you can see, there are plenty of freeroll tournaments throughout the day to choose from. These can be entered for free but offer real money prizes. Most tournaments are not offered by Blockchain.poker but are created by other users of the site.  **Hosting a Tournament** This is another very unique feature of Blockchain.poker: the ability for users themselves to organize tournaments. If you market your tournament and get enough players, you can even make money by organizing them. When creating a new tournament, you can set the name and upload an image to be used on the table felt. Some people use this to show a logo and advertise a service, others just use it to be funny. The next page lets you set the guaranteed prize pool amount and either the buy-in cost or to make your tournament a freeroll. The preview slider shows a hypothetical prize pool, profit, and prizes based on how many players join.  5% of each tournament buy-in is collected as rake, half of which goes to the site and half of which goes to the tournament host. The other 95% goes to the prize pool. The amount guaranteed by the host is only the minimum prize pool. If 11 people register for my tournament, their buy-ins will cover the entire prize pool, and I will actually earn 275 satoshis in profit.  Unfortunately, if only five people register, then I’ll be on the hook for covering the remainder of the guaranteed prize pool. The next page is for scheduling your tournament. It uses your computer’s clock for the time, so don’t worry about figuring out what time zone it’s supposed to be in. You can also make your tournament a recurring event. You can optionally make a password protected tournament if you’d like to host a private event. You can include a sponsor name and a link of your choice. The final screen shows a preview of everything else. Note that the maximum number of players in a tournament is 250, although this number will likely increase as the site grows. It was recently raised from 100 players to 250 to accommodate the growth of the site. I actually went ahead and made this a real tournament. It will run once per day for one week after the publication date of this post. You can check out the details here: **https://blockchain.poker?tournament=8356&affiliate=e3442498aa0df53ec8e815b81450d341** **Hotkeys** A number of hotkeys make it possible to play entirely using your keyboard, in case you get tired of clicking with the cursor. **Affiliate Program** If you get your friends to visit the site using your affiliate link, they’ll count as one of your referrals and you’ll earn a share of all the rake they generate playing on the site.  **Rake & Rakeback** The site offers a very competitive rake structure. At the lowest stakes, it’s about on-par with all the major online cardrooms, but as you move up in stakes the rake becomes lower and lower. The lowest possible rake is 0.1% capped at 1 million satoshis per pot, or ~$3.30 if playing on BCH tables. For comparison, most online poker sites charge 5% regardless of the stakes you play. source: **https://www.yourpokerdream.com/the-big-rake-comparison-of-all-online-poker-sites-2018/** Under the Rewards tab in your drop-down menu, you can see the site’s rakeback promotion. Each hand you play earns you a certain number of points, based on how much rake was paid during that hand. You can get some money as rakeback for as low as 100,000 points, but if you play for long enough you can work your way up to 50% rakeback, cutting the rates in the above chart in half. *Note that you must spend your points in exchange for the rakeback.* Redeeming for a lower rakeback percentage will decrease your points by that much, so if you really want a certain rakeback percentage, you have to save those points. **Playing on Mobile** Because the site runs in your web browser, you can also play from any phone. The UI is a bit more compact but all of the same features are available. **Protip:** If you add the site as a home screen widget, it removes the URL bar from the top and it more closely resembles playing in an app. **Downsides** Of course, no poker site is perfect. It took me a while to get used to the UI of the site, but I think that’s just because I was more used to the user interface of America’s Cardroom before that.  I’ve experienced very few bugs in more than a year of playing on the site, but they do happen from time to time. Mainly just minor display bugs, but nothing that’s ever caused me to lose money. I’ve only experienced site downtime on one occasion, which is infinitely better than the uptime of ACR. The biggest downside of playing on Blockchain.poker is that because it is still a relatively unknown site, the player pool is small and it’s hard to find games at the stakes I’d like to play. That’s why I’ve written this guide, in the hopes of attracting more people and getting some games going.  The good news is, the site *is* growing. They have a pretty cool statistics tab to see how the site is progressing over time. If you’d like to try to organize a game at higher stakes, you can join this Telegram channel: **https://t.me/joinchat/Aw5xDlePT7rq0h5k8NiPTw**  Thanks for reading, and good luck! **Click here to use my affiliate link for Blockchain.poker****!** If you don't want to use an affiliate link, you can click here instead. https://blockchain.poker/#/?affiliate=95a154e27e4e91f0e63ad4e11adda91d%23cash

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@Jake 23 January 2020

Some thoughts & questions on Jiang Zhuo'er's miner funding announcement The announcement in question. **tl;dr** *Five large mining pools on BCH have announced their intention to donate 12.5% of block rewards mined during a six month period to a newly-established Hong Kong company which will then disperse the funds towards developers building Bitcoin Cash infrastructure. The controversial part is that they've announced their intention to orphan the blocks of miners who don't participate in this scheme, essentially making participation mandatory for other BCH miners.* https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e This proposal doesn't come out of the blue; in fact, some Chinese miners have been pushing for some kind of "development tax" from the block rewards in one way or another for a long time. I understand the rationale behind their arguments and agree that there needs to be some kind of funding mechanism in place for infrastructure developers, but I am also somewhat apprehensive about the implications and down-the-road effects of this plan. https://news.bitcoin.com/bch-miners-discuss-funding-development-with-a-fraction-of-block-rewards/ That said, I don't view this as an explicitly coercive "taxation" (in the sense of state taxation), because the decision to mine and participate on the Bitcoin Cash network is always voluntary. And one of the fundamental assumptions of Bitcoin is that miners can (and do) enforce rules and incentives, so I'm not convinced that this breaks the social contract of Bitcoin. However, the announcement from Mr. Jiang leaves me with more questions than answers, and regardless of the merits of the plan itself, the way in which it was suddenly announced is already proving to be a PR nightmare. Questions unanswered In an attempt at getting more information, I got Jiang to agree to do an AMA on /r/btc, though his answers do little to bring clarity to the proposal. Some of that can be attributed to Jiang not being a native English speaker, but many of his answers indicate that the idea is still very much in the incubation stage and many key aspects have yet to be fully decided. https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/esoi5s/ama_jiang_zhuoer_author_of_infrastructure_funding/ Some of the more common questions I'm seeing from the community include: Who will manage the funds held by the Hong Kong entity? Which projects are eligible to receive funding? On what criteria will funds be dispersed? How will the organization be held accountable to the community? What transparency measures will be in place? Would this proposal create new attack vectors or increase the possibility of a chain split? Mark Lundeberg outlines one such scenario here. (It's been noted that the four mining pools who signed the article only account for 28% of total BCH hashrate.) https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/esebco/infrastructure_funding_plan_for_bitcoin_cash_by/ffapqej/ https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1220251072863719425 Will the funds only be used for funding protocol development, or will they also be invested in projects that benefit the ecosystem through the community, marketing, application-layer software, and education? Some of the pushback that this plan is receiving could have been mitigated by having a more concrete plan in place from the beginning. The people behind the plan were surely aware that it would be controversial and should have done more to anticipate the reaction of the community. The silence of the other three signers, Wu Jihan, Yang Haipo, and Roger Ver, has not helped. My thoughts on the proposal, alternatives, and the community's reaction While I don't think the plan itself is inherently a bad one (that's not to say I think it's a good one, either), I do think that the PR consequences and potential new attack vectors opened up by it are real costs that must be weighed against the benefits. Is the reputational damage to Bitcoin Cash, and the risk of an unforeseen chain split, worth a one-time capital injection of $6 million to the developers? I'm not convinced it is. The proposal is clever in the way that it uses the hashrate dynamics between BTC and BCH to cause BTC miners to subsidize the "tax," but this comes at the expense of a lower hashrate for BCH. As Jiang points out in his article, BCH currently having 3% of the hashrate of BTC means accepting a drop to 2.6% of the hashrate in exchange for the funding, but what happens when BCH has ten or twenty percent of the total hashrate of BTC? A 12.5% handicap on mining profitability will make it more difficult for a hashrate flippening between the two chains to occur. I also understand that the proposal includes a sunset clause that would cause the subsidy to expire after six months, but what happens after that? Presumably, the teams will use the money to pay for more developers. Will they be able to sustain their larger teams after the conclusion of the scheme? Is this setting a precedent to make such a fundraising scheme permanent? If the five mining pools who signed the statement believe that giving $6 million to developers will have a significant positive impact on the Bitcoin Cash network, **why not establish a fund and raise $6 million to be used for the same purpose?** There's always going to be some concern about the free-riders who benefit from the funding without contributing to it themselves, but I think at some point we just need to acknowledge that we'll never get 100% participation on such an initiative and that some level of free ridership is an acceptable cost to bear. Bitcoin.com recently announced a $200 million Bitcoin Cash ecosystem fund. If Bitcoin.com believes that $200 million is an achievable target to raise for funding businesses building on Bitcoin Cash, then surely $6 million is a much more manageable goal. Jiang's post mentions that corporate donors have an undue influence on developers, and I understand the weariness about creating a Blockstream 2.0, but Blockstream was funded by legacy financial institutions that have every incentive to see Bitcoin fail. I don't doubt for a moment the skin in the game or the commitment to creating P2P cash from the four miners who signed the proposal. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-com-to-launch-200-million-bch-ecosystem-investment-fund/ To the miners who produced this plan, you guys really need to work on your PR skills. Had Jiang's post been introduced to the community as a proposal and not a signed declaration, you would have been able to test the waters and gauge the community response, giving you time to tweak the proposal and build support for the idea. As Jiang mentions in his post, endless debate results in inaction and at some point decisions need to be made, but I don't think the way this was published as a *fait accompli* was the best way to go about it. To the community, some of you guys need to chill with the hysterics. Bitcoin Cash wouldn't even exist if not for the work of Jiang Zhuo'er, Jihan, Roger, and Haiyang, and it likely wouldn't have survived BSV's hash war attack without the proactive vigilance and efforts of these four men. To call these guys supporters of Bitcoin Cash would be an understatement, so I'm not sure why their motives are being doubted. This proposal isn't meant to activate for several more months, so there's plenty of time for discussion and for the plan to be walked back if it's decided to be truly untenable. [sponsors]