Online casinos have become very popular worldwide, reaching from $21 to $38 billion depending on which sources you look at. But no matter how much money is invested in design and marketing, all the online casinos share the same fundamental problem: trust. Since its origin in 1994, players have worried whether these casino games are truly fair and safe to play. In traditional online casinos, all the game logic and data is stored on the casino’s servers. Players must trust that the casino isn’t tweaking the odds and never makes slot games impossible to win. And that is a tricky question because players give their personal and financial information and want to be sure that their data won’t be compromised or sold to 3rd parties.
Unfortunately, history has shown us that this trust is not always the case when it comes to online businesses in the iGaming industry. And it is not always the casinos fault because not even a multi-billion businesses are 100% safe from hacks and data breaches. Major data breaches have hit gambling operators multiple times with millions of dollars in losses and thousands of accounts compromised and stolen. An extraordinary attack on 888 Holdings in 2017 exposed the data of over 7 million users including their full names, addresses and even credit card details. That was one of the biggest data leaks in the history of the niche and incidents like these happen almost every other year showing how vulnerable centralized casinos are to hacking. The second deal breaker is so-called RNG or random number generators that actually generates the outcome of each session and each spin in the slot games. While regulators and license providers usually audit them, players have zero understanding of how these algorithms work and whether they were audited at all or it is just a claim. As one gaming analyst says: “the entire structure relies on faith in the casino and the auditors”. So once you place a bet, you’re “trusting the screen” without any way to verify the result independently.
No More Secrets Behind the Algorithm
One of the most player-friendly innovations that blockchain introduced into the iGaming world is provably fair gaming. The so-called provably fair concept means that the fairness of each game outcome is proven to the player using cryptography, rather than just promised by the casino. In a blockchain-based casino, the software doesn’t just spit out a result. Thanks to blockchain it gives players a tool to verify that result independently. The downside is that it costs some money to put everything on the blockchain but on the other hand it gives you 100% guarantee that the casino is not rigged.If you want to better understand how a provably fair bet works, here’s a small example. Let’s imagine you want to make a couple spins in your favorite slot game and when you do, the system generates a secret random number and stores it on the blockchain. Then it sends you a special cryptographic hash of that number. This hash is like a piece of puzzle with the game result locked in a box of glass: you can see the puzzle but you can’t see what is written on it. You then play the round using a random input from your side and when the round is over, the casino reveals the original seed. You can now hash that server seed and compare it to the hash you were given before the round. If they match, it means that the casino didn’t change its chosen number in the middle of the game. The result you got was indeed based on the pre-committed, fair random draw so that every spin or draw becomes an “open, checkable” sequence that anyone can verify.
The technical details happen behind the scenes and many blockchain casinos provide one-click tools to let players verify outcomes without doing the math themselves. The key point is that you no longer have to blindly trust the casino’s RNG. As one analysis put it, traditional RNGs relied on trust and oversight, whereas “provably fair systems don’t ask for trust; they deliver evidence”.
Using provably fair algorithms is one nice answer to address manipulations made by many casinos of the past. Literally, now every move and decision is in the code or smart contract now so nothing is hidden from the players. And if you are tech-savvy enough, you can even check it yourself even without using a built-in tool from a casino. Such an option gives a piece of mind to everyone worrying about how fair are the casinos you usually play at. You can spin a slot or draw a poker hand and be 100% sure that it’s random and fair because the system provides mathematical proof of that.
Provably fair gaming benefits honest operators as well because it allows them to prove to skeptical players that they are running a clean game. This builds trust and helps new casinos like 777 fun attract a global audience that is skeptical about playing in offshore casinos. When every card flip or dice roll can be checked, this gives you a piece of mind and lets you concentrate on the game rather than thinking whether this all is set up just to lure you in spending more money. Most of the iGaming brands who use blockchain to implement the provably fair mechanisms turn it into a selling point. It is expected that when most if not all iGaming brands will turn to using provably fair mechanisms, the industry will only benefit from this and will be capable of attracting more players because of the trust this technology generates. And all this would not be possible without blockchain as a core technology behind the improvement.
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