Provably fair, what is it and why should i care?

5 min read

Provably fair, what is it and why should i care? 

Provably fair is a frequently used term thrown around nearly all crypto casinos in some form or the other, it’s actually quite essential and it’s somewhat surprising mainstream casinos haven’t adopted this methodology however it is often poorly understood, here I will try to clarify what it actually is, what you should look out for, and why it matters. Firstly, i would refer you to [CryptoGambling.org](https://cryptogambling.org/articles/category/provably-fair) — the crypto foundation of which duckdice is a listed casino, it has a lot of useful information and covers much of what I’m going on to discuss now as well as showing you other casinos that also operate good provably fair schemes like we do at DuckDice 

What is provably fair? 

Provably fair in essence means you can check your outcomes against a verifier and prove that outcomes were generated in accordance with a seed pairing. In most iterations this will mean you have two seeds; one being the client seed, and one being the server seed. 

Think of these two elements like a lock and key, when combined with your outcome number ‘nonce’ and an algorithm based on the hashes of the pairing once you have all these elements you can outright prove that your bet has not been altered and has only played out in accordance to the seed pair. You can check out the iteration here fairness Most places will obscure either the client seed or the server seed from the user until after they have ‘randomized’ (changed) their seed pairing. This is because due to the nature of how this works if you had all elements you can actually check your outcomes ahead of time. 

One very famous incident of this was demonstrated by the infamous Hufflepuff on Prime Dice in 2014; here is an article on that here — the very simplified story is that he found an exploit that allowed him to obtain his seed pairing and took the house for a lot of money before they clued on. 

What to look for 

Now the majority of casinos that implement provably fair are doing so properly, however, some will ‘claim it’ but not actually provide the resources and tools to check your bets, or make unnecessary work to get to that information. 

Does my seed pairing change every bet? 

If you are playing on a casino which changes your seed pairing there is very little good reason for this to be the case, especially on the basis of one roll or very few rolls, this increases the chance that something fishy could be going on; for example, fronting seeds that they know run against your outcome, or holding various seeds and ‘loading in’ outcomes. Though this sort of trickery is hard to prove, the point of provably fair is to remove this concern. 

Can I find my seed pairing easily? 

Obviously, you can’t verify your bets if you’re not provided with the information to do so; if you have to for example go through a waiting process through support just to get the information on your bets and they have a long wait times for the information, it’s worth considering why would it be the case? 

Are there any unnecessary or changeable elements? 

Make sure that there are no elements introduced to the algorithm or seed pairing that could be manipulated in any way, the only elements required should be set in stone and based on something outside of the casino's control; for example, many modern iterations might use a blockchain time-stamp, taking information at a specified time or block for live games (like our lottery). This is absolutely fine, however, if it’s based on something within the casino's control (even if just theoretically) you again would assume this to be unnecessary and cause for concern. 

Can you verify your seeds independent of the casino? 

There should be no element of the verifier that cannot be reproduced separately from yourself; though this takes some deeper knowledge, all the information should be available and thus re-producible to code your own verifier, this is the ideal situation. A good operator should be providing you the code of their own verifier transparently making it easier for a coder to either reproduce or spot issues (or in the case of a robust provably fair, find none) 

So does DuckDice meet these requirements? 

Of course :) which is why are we happy to be listed amongst other trusted casinos by the crypto gambling foundation. We actually go above and beyond in some areas; for example, being able to write your own client seed and allowing users to keep their seeds for pretty much a lifetime of betting. 

But people always say it’s rigged! 

Gamblers love finding something to blame, but do your own research into these concepts and see why people making such claims either don’t understand or don’t wish to understand how it actually works. 

Summary 

Personally, I would only ever play in casinos where I can prove my outcomes in this manner; I am very skeptical now of mainstream casinos that do not offer this functionality to their games and I would love to see it become more common. Though I suspect the number of bad actors who actually would do their customers harm by manipulating outcomes are actually very few, there are famous cases like super users (google ultimate poker, absolute poker ‘super user’) as well as suspicious exits from suspicious provably fair operators by the likes of 999dice and luckygames where it was clear they had implementations that only increased doubt rather than remove it. 

So it is important to be vigilant :) Hope you found this helpful and Stay safe out there gamblers!