Author: Samuel

Posted on

Edgeless

What is Edgeless?

Edgeless is a pioneer in its field. The first ever casino that is powered by smart contracts. There is always a lot of uncertainty and mystery in the gambling industry.

Most people simply take what they get and call it a day. Many are the cases where casinos get away with outright theft, and some even lock out their customers when they raise valid pertinent claims about wrongdoings on the part of the casinos. However, Edgeless is out to change this.

This is a casino, next-generation casino, that uses autonomous smart contracts to regulate all the actions involving customers and the games they play online.

What is the problem that Edgeless Solves?

Anyone who has been a gambler or who knows the ins and outs of gambling will tell you the age-old adage, The House Always Wins. Fairly or not, it seems it is always impossible to beat the house when you are gambling, at least not until Edgeless came into the picture.

You might wonder what all the fuss about edge is. Well, the edge is a specific built-in profit that casinos always create and maintain in all games.

What this means is that the house must win something, whether you are winning or losing. Even if you win and think you beat the house, there is always a small percentage that they keep. Casinos keep between 0.5% and 15%.

Edge, therefore, is a tactical mathematical advantage that the house will always have over you as you keep playing on their system. this gives them an assured return, and an assured loss for you on anything you bet, win or lose.

If you look at the house edge from a different perspective, it makes sense, especially for those who wager huge amounts. In most casinos, you are given free meals, free drinks, entertainment shows all through the night, travel deals and so forth.

Some casinos even offer instant deposits and withdrawals. Therefore, for these services, the casino might be inclined to charge something off your wagers to cover their spending on keeping you entertained, and making your gambling experience amazing.

The question is, do online gambling sites really need to have an edge over you? They do not offer any of the benefits mentioned above. Other than the gambling experience, there is nothing more to it. No free meals, no free booze, nothing. In this case, what is the point of having an edge when gambling online?

This is essentially scamming, and this is what Edgeless is out to fight. They do not charge an edge and operate in a transparent manner. Edgeless is built on Ethereum, upon which the foundation of trust is built. It gets even worse because in most cases you have to wait 2 – 3 days before you can receive your money upon initiating a withdrawal.

Casinos are business enterprises. They have financial advisers. Therefore, the longer they keep your money, the more they profit from it. in the 2 – 3 days, they would have probably invested your money in some hedge fund, or some stock, or forex, turned in some profit then send you the money. These are some of the challenges that Edgeless is trying to fix.

The other concern is house transparency. When you are gambling, either in a casino in Vegas or online, you have to rely on the casino infrastructure whether it is efficient or not. More often the house plays the odds so they can increase their chances of beating you. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to keep them in check.

How does Edgeless Solve the problem?

The team at Edgeless is out on a mission, and their concept is very simple – to create a platform where the house has no edge.

This means that they are leveraging the Edgeless platform in such a way that gambling is going to be all about luck and skill where applicable, and choosing the name Edgeless makes a lot of sense.

The idea behind Edgeless is to operate an online casino where the house has no edge. When playing, gamblers are able to monitor the transactions and games going on to make sure that there is no manipulation taking place.

True to the Ethereum commitment to transparency, Edgeless maintains that they do not charge an edge, and this is sure to be a game changer in the gambling industry. Edgeless offers 0% edge when you are gambling on their platform, so this solves the edge problem. What about transparency?

Ethereum smart contracts play an important role in this. The smart contracts determine the payouts by assigning random numbers. These are implemented in public on the blockchain. Nothing is hidden away from you. Everything from the bets, the sums, the transactions and the randomness mechanism is open for you to view, audit and raise any concerns that you might have.

Should any casino try to mess around with the odds, it will be evident immediately. Let’s look at a scenario where you have won your bets. These are transferred to you automatically. This is one of the good things about smart contracts. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop that. Smart contracts are coded in such a way that they automatically perform the tasks that they are supposed to.

What makes Edgeless better than the competitors?

Low Cost

Edgeless is running on the Ethereum blockchain. One of the goals of any product or project that is running on blockchain is to do away with high costs that are inherent in the conventional industries where the project is built to operate.

It follows, therefore, that there are very low costs of using Edgeless as compared to gambling online or walking into a casino.

0% House Edge

The 0% house edge is the one thing that stands out about Edgeless, and probably the reason why so many casinos out there will not enjoy this revolution. Edgeless is taking back control from the casinos and handing it to the one person who matters, the gambler. If you are going to win, win fairly and out of luck. If you are going to lose, lose fairly and because you just had bad luck. No one should have a role to play in your results, scamming you in the process.

Decentralization

One of the key features of blockchain that has made it appealing to a lot of people and projects is decentralization. There is no central authority involved in this gambling platform. This means that cheating is a thing of the past. Any of the players can study the transactions and games that are taking place in real time. Other than that, in the unlikely event that there is a suspicious transaction taking place, all the users have the opportunity to intervene.

Smart Contracts

Edgeless is built on Ethereum. Ethereum uses smart contracts. The way these contracts operate is that only the actions that they are designed to perform will take place. What this means is that there is no room for manipulation. For the gamblers, this gives them a confidence boost in the sense that the house will hold its end of the bargain, and they cannot be cheated out of their wins.

Fairness

When gambling, there are three things that players hope for, speed, fairness, and transparency. Edgeless has a Random Number Generator, RNG which produces the outcomes of all games. It is fast, intuitive and helps to uphold the concept of fairness. True to the Ethereum blockchain concept, gamblers are able to audit the RNG to determine whether there is any foul play. This is all in a bid to make sure that all games are played fairly.

Personal Information

When signing up on any other gambling platform, you will always be required to provide a lot of information about yourself, information that in most cases gamblers are not comfortable providing in the first place.

Other than that, most of these platforms barely allow customers to understand how the information they collect is being used or how they are supervised. With blockchain, users are able to enjoy complete transparency.

Multiple Users

One of the other benefits that gamblers have come to enjoy about using Edgeless is the fact that it is built to support multiple users at the same time. This makes it a stable platform, and players can look forward to competing against one another without worrying about the system failing.

How can Edgeless be categorized?

Edgeless is an online casino that is powered by smart contracts, built on the Ethereum platform and offers 0% edge on all the games that gamblers wager their money on.

What’s Edgeless’ vision on security?

When it comes to gambling, online or otherwise, security is always a priority. There is a lot of money at stake, and the brands involved need to make sure that their customers trust them, and keep coming back to stake their money with them. This is no different with Edgeless.

When creating an account, you have to go through the usual KYC and AML procedure. The sign-up process and verification are all in line with the general KYC and AML regulations that you would expect when investing your money anywhere, so this does not come as a surprise for a lot of people. The concept here is to prevent fraud and to make this a safe and enjoyable experience for gamblers.

There are some jurisdictions where Edgeless might be blocked from operating. In this regard, most people would decide to use VPN services to circumvent the geographical blocks.

Through KYC, you have to present documents that indicate your identity, and this will also help in warding off challenges in the future.

By design, Edgeless has a seamless, fast and user-friendly GUI. The pleasing graphics make it very entertaining for users. The speed with which gamblers can enjoy having a good time on this platform is commendable.

Examples of Edgeless use cases/applications

There are two classic games that gamblers all over the world are familiar with, and it only makes sense that these would be the first ones to come onboard Edgeless; Dice and Blackjack.

Thanks to blockchain technology, gamblers are now able to enjoy these games comfortable that there are no shady deals behind the scenes where the House gets to fleece them, putting them at an unfair disadvantage.

The games have been designed in such a way that there is a chat window, where players can engage one another as they gamble away.

Dice

This is an intuitive game, and anyone who might not have an idea about how to play it can easily pick up and learn the ropes in minutes. It uses a Random Number Generator (RNG). The RNG works in microseconds, making it perhaps the fastest dice game leveraged on smart contracts in the market at the moment. The role of the RNG is to create random numbers that determine whether you have lost or won the game.

Users can play in two options, automated batting or manual betting. With automated betting, you simply choose your preferred parameters and then let the game play automatically until you stop it. With manual betting, you have to play each round physically.

Blackjack

Blackjack is another fan-favorite that has been a characteristic of the gambling industry for years on end. There is virtually no casino in the world that does not have blackjack.

The game mechanism is the same as you would expect when you walk into any casino. The gaming interface is smooth, easy to understand, and makes it an exciting game to play.

This game builds on one of the best features of blockchain, transparency. When you are playing Blackjack on Edgeless, you can rest assured there will be transparency in every aspect of the game.

You can check the game history to see the games that you have played or the games that have been played by someone else. All the information about your games is also available, including the profits, payout, bet amount and the time you played.

Resources

https://coincheckup.com/coins/Edgeless

https://edgeless.io/

https://casino.edgeless.io/games

https://www.edgeless.io/blog
https://medium.com/edgeless

https://medium.com/edgeless/ultimate-edgeless-faq-22081ae768aa

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sXxVywcUWNYD1mGTrb7c86Ml_ZQA9pHm/view

 

Posted on

Gulden

What is Gulden?

Gulden is a crypto coin. However, this is not all there is to it. Gulden has built an ecosystem that includes an app and a payment system. This is meant to ease the conversion between legacy currency and Gulden. Gulden derives the name from the Dutch/German word, gold coin.

Gulden is a cryptocurrency based on Scrypt that uses Proof of Work (PoW). It is based on the same algorithm as Litecoin and several other altcoins and is mined in a similar manner. Gulden allows users to send money directly to any IBAN account.

What is the problem that Gulden Solves?

The current blockchain implementations have several challenges that have made them fall short of expectations that people would expect from currency they need to use from time to time. Some of the challenges have become so obvious on platforms like Bitcoin.

Double Spend

One of the biggest challenges facing Bitcoin and other projects built around it is double spend. Double spends create an avenue for attackers to have a field day. An attacker would send two similar transactions to different people. One of these transactions will be accepted by the network, at which point, one of the recipients would have already been stolen from.

At least 50% Attacks

The largest possible attack on the blockchain network is a 50% attack. This is only possible if an attacker were to gain more than 50% of the hash rate on a network. If this happens, the attacker gets the following advantages:

  • Censorship – This allows them to deny some transactions on the blockchain, by refusing to mine or acknowledge any blocks that contain those transactions.
  • Denial of Service – An attacker would simply mine empty blocks, which eventually denies services to the network.
  • Double Spend – The attacker is able to out mine the entire network, allowing them to perform double spends at their pleasure.

Selfish Mining

It is expected that miners release the blocks they mine to the network. This, however, assumes that all miners are honest. Since there is no restriction in this concern, the miners can delay broadcasting the blocks to the network as long as they please. At the same time, they can also start mining another block that is related to the one they are hoarding, without broadcasting it. This is used by some miners to gain an advantage on the network.

Theoretically, once a minor gets a hash rate of around 33%, they can have enough power to attempt executing a >50% attack.

Side Chains

Since a miner can create and hoard blocks secretly without broadcasting them to the network, they are able to secretly work on attacks without any risk of exposure. By the time an attacker has their side chains complete, there might not be much that can be done about the attack. This is the method that people who use double spends prefer.

Centralized Mining

Over time, it has come to light that block mining is becoming a preserve of a few people on the network, who have the equipment that can handle this. As a result, several parts of the ecosystem are weakened, which leave it vulnerable to attacks.

How does Gulden Solve the problem?

There are several attempts that have been made in the past by different projects to address some of these challenges.

Gulden has put in place some measures, including the following:

Alternative Hashing Algorithm

The concept behind using a different algorithm is that the platform becomes less susceptible to the widely publicized vulnerabilities that are associated with Bitcoin. It becomes difficult to execute a >50% attack because the attackers do not have sufficient hash rate.

Altered Block Targets

Bitcoin uses a very slow block target, and the longer a transaction stays unconfirmed, the higher the chances of compromise. Gulden, like most other projects, is using faster block targets. If the blocks are available more frequently, the blockchain can perform more transactions per second, reducing the risk of exposure to attacks. Blocks occurring more frequently also means that the users do not have to wait longer for transactions to be confirmed.

Proof of Stake

Proof of Stake simply replaces the hashing algorithm that is used, for example in Bitcoin, with a new one. Through Proof of Stake, a miner must own a given number of coins in the platform of choice before they can mine. There are other factors that are involved in determining the chances of successfully mining.

This is important because an attacker would have to amass at least 50% of the coins on the platform for them to execute an attack, instead of 50% of the computing power. This further disenfranchises attackers, because naturally, you cannot attack something where you already hold a majority stake.

What makes Gulden better than the competitors?

A lot of people who have come across Gulden will almost certainly have heard about Bitcoin too or used it at some point. Of course, Bitcoin is the default cryptocurrency that most people are aware of. But, why would you consider switching from Bitcoin to Gulden? The following are some of the reasons why Gulden offers a better alternative than Bitcoin.

Transaction Capacity

By design, Bitcoin was meant to become an alternative payment system. However, and as has been proven so many times in the past by a lot of projects that have come up to fix problems with Bitcoin, technically, Bitcoin is unable to handle as many transactions as people would love to use it for.

Bitcoin is built to handle around 7 transactions per second. For a platform that should be accepted worldwide as an alternative payment system, this is too low. Gulden, on the other hand, can handle more than 100 transactions per second, and that is in the Netherlands alone. At the moment, the low transaction threshold is one of the bottlenecks that is hindering the development of Bitcoin. This further brings forth the issue of delays, mainly because the Bitcoin platform can also not handle all the transactions at once.

In the current state, Gulden is able to handle up to 40 transactions per second. However, since it is scalable, this can be increased as per the user’s requirements. This is another front where Gulden beats Bitcoin hands down. It is virtually impossible to make changes to Bitcoin.

Cost of Transaction

Bitcoin has always been castigated for being too expensive. Each time a transaction is carried out, users must spend to compensate the miners and to help them add more transactions to the blockchain, and maintain the network. Other than that, there are lots of other factors in the Bitcoin ecosystem that shore up the cost of transactions.

Look at it this way, in Bitcoin, those who pay higher fees get their services rendered faster. The more the number of transactions, the higher the cost. In retrospect, Bitcoin becomes irrelevant for people who want to conduct small transactions, because it will be too expensive. Even for those who conduct larger transactions, it is still expensive.

Irrespective of the level of traffic on the network, there is a standard fee that users pay to push transactions on Gulden. You do not have to worry about the cost being scaled up depending on the number of transactions you conduct.

Time to Confirmation

Completing a transaction on Bitcoin can be a nightmare. In most cases, you are left uncertain whether the transaction has been completed or not. You need around 6 confirmations on the network before the transaction is rendered complete and irreversible. This can take you at least an hour.

However, depending on the network capacity, you can wait several hours or even days before you get confirmation for your transactions, especially for those who pay low fees. If you are making regular payments, this can be a bother and quite the inconvenience.

Gulden is bringing the convenience that users are used to when confirming normal debit card transactions. Upon release, transactions on Gulden would take no more than 15 minutes. Prime I update was rolled out, and this was slashed to 150 seconds. After Prime II update, transactions are confirmed almost instantly, with confirmations expected in 0 seconds.

Community

There is a lot of secrecy that hovers around Bitcoin, and with time, conspiracy theories will come up, which might eventually affect the long-term perspective of Bitcoin. Let’s start with the founder, for example. Bitcoin is the brainchild of one Satoshi Nakamoto. However, no one has come forth to say they know who he or she is.

This level of uncertainty means that people are simply using a platform that was created by someone or an entity that is not known to anyone. In short, no one knows who is pulling the strings behind Bitcoin, and why.

Rijk Plasman is the face behind Gulden. He is also a member of the core development team. Other than being actively involved in the development and management of Gulden, he has also brought on board several people and entities that share the common goal of developing and pushing Gulden to the next phase in the crypto revolution.

Gulden is also backed by a very large community of users, developers, and enthusiasts. Therefore, there is always someone you can ask questions, get in touch with, seek clarification and so forth.

The development team at Gulden also interacts with the community and share in their criticisms and opinions, which go a long way in improving Gulden.

One thing that will never happen with Gulden, therefore, is paralysis, or conflict of interest among investors, miners, and users. Bitcoin, on the other hand, might have a lot of users, but there is no established community around it.

Ease of Use

There is a nerdy feel to the use of Bitcoin that has in the past locked out a lot of people from enjoying the benefits. In terms of user experience, the standard Bitcoin wallet is nowhere close to what an average user would appreciate.

Gulden has been designed for the utmost usability from the beginning. The idea here is to make sure that anyone who comes across it is able to use it to further their agenda.

Crime and Fraud

Bitcoin has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. A lot of people and companies have found themselves on the wrong end of the crypto experience after hackers and blackmailers opt to receive their ransom in Bitcoin. This gives not just Bitcoin, but the entire crypto space a bad name.

Gulden has in place KYC and AML protocols. This is to make sure that users are safe, and certain that they are not dealing with frauds or criminals. There is a limit of 5,000 Euros per month, that you can transact. In case you need a higher limit, you must provide official identification details.

How can Gulden be categorized?

Gulden is a digital currency used as a payment system. Through Gulden, users can wire money to one another, send it to Gulden merchants in exchange for services, or wire the money to their IBAN accounts.

What’s Gulden’s vision on Security?

Gulden uses a Double Key Witness System to protect the accounts of the users. This gives a surety of 100% to users because the money is locked away from spyware and hackers while it is in use on the blockchain platform.

Gulden also works round the clock, implementing upgrades to make the ecosystem safer and convenient for all users. One of the biggest challenges on the blockchain is time before transactions are completed. The longer this takes, the higher the risk of compromise. By reducing the time before a transaction is completed, Gulden makes the platform safer for users.

Examples of Gulden use cases/applications

Epoch

Epoch is one of the long-term scalability projects for Gulden. The idea behind Gulden is to reduce the disk space usage, the bandwidth required the first time you are running Gulden, and to reduce the time required for syncing. Epoch is meant to prevent problems that users have with runway disk size needs, which become evident for blockchain users over time.

Unity

Unity allows users to migrate all their desktop and mobile wallets to one unified back end, which is better than using different codes for each of the wallets. This also means that users can apply bug fixes across the board, instead of doing it separately, thereby improving the performance and reducing battery usage on mobile devices.

Alias

Alias allows users to receive payments by unique identifiers that they can remember, such as an email address or a username instead of the complex blockchain addresses that Gulden uses. This is a means of bringing Gulden closer to the average user who finds Gulden addresses uncomfortable.

Nomad

Through Nomad, users are able to connect to software on the Gulden ecosystem and conduct transactions in a decentralized manner through https, without worrying about firewalls and complicated port configurations.

Resources

https://coincheckup.com/coins/Gulden

https://gulden.com/

https://dev.gulden.com/archive/

https://gulden.com/frequently-asked-questions

https://github.com/Gulden/gulden-official/raw/master/technical_documentation/Gulden_PoW2.pdf