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Comment by jimmyfalcon | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea of "provably fair" (not sure if it's original), but you could probably elaborate more on that in the How It Works section.

As I understand it, a sha256 digest is generated from a pre-generated hit sequence. But it's not 100% clear how average players can benefit from that information.

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This "provably fair" concept is quite common in the Bitcoin gaming world.

Not sure who was the first, probably https://satoshidice.com

Bitino.com has a nice page explaining the concept, including an example validation script in Python http://bitino.com/provably-fair-gaming/

I like to point out that this is only fair in the game theory sense of the word, not the economic sense of the word. There is nothing stopping the operator from waiting until the pot is large enough and then announcing: "Oops, crackers comprised my system and stole all the bitcoins. Sorry, guys. My bad."

In other words, every time you play you're losing to the house, even though the mathematical analysis doesn't show it.

I don't think this is right. I assume the odds favor the house anyway. They can make money without scamming anyone.

I assume the game is "fair" in that they decide where to bomb before you place your battleship, and that can be proven.

Thanks! Will take that feedback on board.

If you scroll down under the "Fair" tab, there's actually a "Calculate" button that links you to a hash calculator, with the inputs being the client seed + seq. Although I would agree that this is difficult to communicate to your normal user.

That sort of provable rng isn't novel. tenhou.net [1] (a site for playing riichi mahjong) has been using sha512 of rng values/seeds since at least 2009.

[1] http://tenhou.net/man/#LOG (in japanese)

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