Re: gambling machines

[mccoy@io.com (Jim McCoy)]

> From: M.Gream@uts.EDU.AU (Matthew Gream)
> 
> `Jim McCoy' wrote:
[regarding online gambling]
> > For people with beta digicash clients, try http://gamezone.io.com/
> 
> To exercise my ecash software I had a few goes at this and found at
> least one problem; payments not honoured.  [...winning hands not paying
> out...]  Admittedly, four other small payments
> succeeded, with values of less than and equal to 2.00 (for two of a
> kinds and so on).

This is basically caused by the lack of a to-be-implemented-RSN (tm) part
of the ecash server: the ability to have have a merchant "wallet" maintain
a set balance of coins in the wallet.  What happens is that every time
money is given to the merchant to play a game it gets directly deposited
into the bank, payoffs for winning hands come out of the wallet.
Eventually the wallet runs out of coins to make the payment but there is no
automatic way to keep it supplied from the coins that are deposited to
play.  The DigiCash user clients seem fairly well developed, but they are
lagging behind on the server-side of things (both merchant servers, and the
bank server.)

> I assume this is caused by some kind of bug, not any
> deception on behalf of the operator; but it does illustrate a potental
> problem as I really don't have any `proof' with which to challenge.

Well, at some point we need to finish up some of the reliability code.  It
should present you with a "receipt" number during payoff that will be
linked to the game database, the game is not removed from the database
until the money exchange clears so if there is a problem the user can
present the number and we can look up the game results.

jim