Why should I care about provably fair?
When you stroll into a casino, approach the cash desk and leave with a handful of chips, you do so for one reason and one reason only. You have faith that you can leave the casino a winner. This faith comes from the belief you have that the outcome of the bets you are about to place will be random, thus giving you a completely fair chance of getting 'lucky'.
You walk to the roulette wheel and place your bets on the table in the sure knowledge that neither yourself nor the person spinning the roulette wheel has any influence over the outcome of the spin.
This is not always the case online. You find a site, complete your due diligence and make a deposit. You play and you lose, you play some more and lose some more, and eventually a thought crosses your mind… what if the site you are playing on is not fair?
How do you know that the casino you are playing at online is not simply generating any outcome that guarantees them a win?
The answer? Provable fairness. The newest and more up-to-date casinos are embracing ground-breaking technology to completely remove this doubt from players’ minds. To generate a random outcome, gaming sites utilise a seed and run this through an algorithm. A seed is simply a starting point to generate a random number. Then an algorithm is a series of steps taken to convert that seed into a pseudo-random result.
In a Provably Fair gaming environment, the site publishes to the player the seed they are using in advance of the game, however they do so using encryption, so that the player is only able to determine the seed after the game has taken place. In a Provably Fair game, the player also provides their own seed to the server which is used as part of the random number generation process.
Once the game has taken place the player can decipher the seed belonging to the casino to verify that the outcome of the game they have just played was completely fair. That is, the casino generated the most random result possible without unfairly influencing the outcome in their favour.
Simply put, Provably Fair gaming is the fairest way of gambling anywhere online in the world.
Which is why when you play at a Provably Fair gaming site, you know the money you wager is in safe hands.
What is Provably Fair Gaming?
Before we may begin to understand what makes a casino provably fair, we need to study how the basis of online gambling works. Simply put, players bet on the outcome of randomly generated numbers.
Formerly, these random numbers were generated solely by the host of a game, leaving complete control in the hands of operators. Participants had to trust the host not generating results in favor of anyone. Casinos operating on these merits caused conflict of interest for those seeking a fair gambling experience.
Due to lack of transparency, the essence of provably fair gaming was born. Corresponding concepts provide a way for both the operators and players to contribute to randomisation, which in turn removes any possibility of deception or cheating.
The foundation of fair gaming algorithms were laid by pseudorandom number generators, utilising seeds which determine the outcome of wagers.
A seed shall be equally influenced by players and hosts, meaning that the result of each bet at a provably fair casino is a team effort. The house is no longer in complete control of randomisation.
So, wouldn't this mean that players are able to manipulate results in their own favour?
Commitment Schemes
To prevent malicious behaviour, hosts must not show us their actual seed at first. Instead, they present a commitment of their own seed to us. Similarly to envelopes, these commitment schemes seal and conceal messages contained by them. They cannot be altered or revealed without consent from the sender. For example, hosts may commit a seed by using a one-way hash function or public key cryptography.
Hosts shall provide transparency and proof of authenticity by revealing their actual seeds at the end of each game. Anyone in possession of a host's commitment may verify the immutability of the corresponding seed.
Bets shall be reproducible once the host seed gets revealed. Players can constantly audit the behaviour of hosts by comparing random results calculated by a host and themselves.
Proving that the outcome of a wager is computed fairly and transparently should be performed by anyone at any time. We strongly believe in widespread use of provably fair algorithms throughout the gaming industry.
If you would like to learn more about the technical workings of provably fair algorithms, you can download my whitepaper found here.