Trust me bro

Don't trust, verify - is a common saying in the bitcoin groups and they usually talk about the ledger of transactions and that anyone can run a bitcoin node, although not sure why anyone would when there's literally no incentives in doing so. The idea is basically that now that we have blockchain technology you don't have to rely on trust any longer.

Imagine all the things that require trust in this day and age.

Trust in your government, they have the best in mind for their people.

Trust in your banks, they'll keep your money secure for you.

Trust in your police, they're here to protect you.

Over time things get muddied out I feel like, if you leave people to it they'll eventually sway away from doing things the way it's meant to be done and start thinking more of what's best for them.

Anyway, I'm not one to talk much about the above mentioned because I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge in those fields, how governments operate exactly, what the banks are doing with your money and if the police actually care to be good to their people and if it's just a few rotten apples that get all the attention and make everyone involved look bad to the public.

One thing I do care about however is that the need for trust is abolished as much as possible here in platforms that use the blockchain system. For instance, let's look into the @hbdstabilizer program. Would you trust anyone to run it? It usually has an active stake of 300-400k HP on it at all times, constantly being unstaked to provide liquidity and some additional services for the @hive.fund. It is currently entrusted on @smooth that he keeps his word and only uses it for that, and while I don't believe he's going to go and break it, it's not something I would trust most people on this chain as it is a big amount of value and depending on market conditions could go up to almost a million $ at previous all time high of hive. This is just an example, btw, don't mean to bring any attention to @smooth with it, he has more than 20x that stake himself so there's no need to not trust him with this project that's been doing its job for years.

There are solutions to this on Hive already, to remove some of that trust required or at least diversify it in the form of multi-signatures. This means that for a transaction to go through that requires the active key (witness voting, transfers, unstakes, delegations, etc) you could assign up to 8 different accounts that'd need to use their own active key to let this transaction proposed by one of the key holders to go through. @stoodkev has been working on making sure multi-sig works and is easy to be used for others in the future through a DHF proposal funding for his work.

Now let's go back to what I wanted to discuss in this post.

There's another cryptographic solution which is called "provably fair", it is usually well known in the gambling sections of the internet, primarily in the newer ones. I personally remember stumbling upon this first time in my early bitcoin days on websites like just-dice. What it does, is basically attempt to ensure that the owners of the website aren't fudging the outcomes in their favor for you.

I'm no technical person so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in the comments, but to give you a simple explanation, let's say you have a coin and you throw it in the air and you're supposed to bet 10 hive on the outcome, will it be heads or will it be tails. You bet on heads and if it lands on heads you will have 20 hive but if tails then you'll have 0 hive. In this scenario it's quite easy, it's either heads or tails but in a practical usecase of this you as the better would think about things like, okay but who's the one throwing the coin in the air? Is this person affiliated with the website? Does he gain by me losing, has he done this throw many times before, how high is he throwing it? When you do this coin-flip on the internet you're not entirely sure if things are being done fairly on the backend to determine your outcome.

This is basically where provably fair comes in. The outcome is determined by a lot of different factors and one of those factors allows you to take part in it as well. When you think about casino's they don't really care if they're using Provably fair technology or not because most games have a "house-edge" which means that over a period of bets they will always win in the end. The more you bet the lower your odds of coming out on top.

Let's say however, this one day you've decided to go all out, some kind of very important situation like that one guy that went to vegas and bet it all on red to save his company or whatever the backstory was:

If you decide to do this online, you wanna make sure that the casino owner behind his screen isn't going all "oh, this one user just deposited $1million, let's make sure he's going to lose all bets today".

In the previous world of web2, there was very little proof that owners of certain services weren't fidgeting with outcomes. You had to rely on trust in most cases and give them the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't scam you. Even with audits and other workers involved in those services it'd be difficult to prove that someone within wasn't altering outcomes for their customers, etc.

Thus this technology shows you all the cards, basically. It tells you that for the outcome to be what it was, you needed this number in the equation, this number that only we know and then this number that only you know and can change at any time. Meaning there's 2 to 3 different inputs in the equation to generate your output which is the outcome of the bet. If you as the player had access to the number only the site should have, then you could calculate all future outcomes to ensure you profit on each of your bets.

Again, I'm not the most technical person, I do know however that @splinterlands does use this technology and it's something we're going to add to @holozing Alpha Vials as well. This is to ensure that no (more technical person) involved in the team can go rogue by creating alt accounts, etc, and spoof which vials or timings to open theirs up to receive favorable creatures and items that may sell for more than what the vial cost to begin with.

For a community-driven market this is going to be important, especially fighting off bots as much as possible after the game goes live as well to prevent in-game materials and assets to be earned by little to no effort in quantities no single person could ever amass themselves.

Too much time has passed where we've allowed literal companies and giants to go without transparency and fairness while us customers being the ones taken advantage of it. Here's a newsreport where a factory worker had been caught stealing large amounts of rare pokemon cards during printing and the only reason he was caught was because he was dumb enough to try and sell them all at the same time, basically. It begs the question how often this has happened in the past without anyone noticing and it's also very fucking sad how no one even asked what about the customers that bought all these packs with no hits and if they're going to be compensated somehow.

https://www.pcgamer.com/man-steals-pokemon-cards-on-the-job-in-largest-theft-the-game-has-ever-seen-tries-to-sell-his-haul-but-the-law-is-super-effective/

Anyway, just thought I'd make a random post about this after some discussions today. It's time to change things up. There's no reason the physical world of collection shouldn't have the same transparencies as the digital one has, especially nfts. I collect physical cards as well but there's no way to know what the supple of some rare ones is, if they're going to stop printing new ones, if some have gotten stolen, etc which gives the company so much leeway for abuse and shitting on customers even harder, especially since this is the one method for them to participate in the popularity of the game and ecosystem by being able to re-sell or hold rare collection items but never knowing exact odds or supply, etc.

Time for change.