Edgeless Interview: Casinos Can Be Profitable With A 0% Edge

When the Ethereum network was launched, cryptocurrency enthusiasts already knew that it had the potential to change many of the things we do daily. Edgeless emerged as one of the projects that seeks to take advantage of this game changing technology to revolutionize the online casino industry. The online casino industry is a good choice, since it is big enough and still growing, promising an opportunity for edgeless to carve a niche for itself within it. With its innovative features and a 0% edge promise, Edgeless could well go beyond its own niche and into the core of the industry. The following interview clarifies how this project aspires to do so.

Edgeless: Casino Profits in a 0% Edge Era

Bitcoin Chaser: You have probably one of the most disruptive ideas in the online casino space. How did you first come up with it and why did you think it would be a good idea?

Edgeless: As blockchain enthusiasts we are really excited about the rise of Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. Smart contracts are a total game changer for society. However, it will take a lot of time for them to reach their full potential. We wanted to do something tangible with the technology right here and now and the casino industry was simply a no-brainer. Smart contracts solve a huge transparency issue for the industry as well as also reducing casino operation costs and increasing transaction speeds and the best part is they can be programmed to do this today, that’s what we’re aiming to do.

BC: Edgeless has the potential to effectively make the online casino business a 0-profit business. How do you prevent that?

EL: Edgeless is certainly not a 0-profit casino! Actually, we aim to be one of the most profitable online casinos. Our 0% house edge games will be luck + skill games such as Black Jack. In order to reach a 0% house edge players need to play according to an optimal strategy but that’s not always the case for an average player who makes mistakes. This creates a natural edge equivalent to a pure luck game with a 0.83% house edge. Secondly, we plan to provide some traditional games such as Sports Betting with a wig of 4 – 5%. And that’s how we will monetize.

The Opportunity in the Edgeless ICO

BC: If you have the potential to bring the casino industry’s margins to the lowest level possible or even eliminate them with the 0% house edge, how do you convince people to invest in your ICO?

EL: We’ve had some Investor feedback that we can share with you here: Investors are confident in us because we have a very clear product that we will be able to launch very soon after the ICO ends, we also address a very specific problem in the industry and there is no doubt that there will be an audience for the product since online gambling is so popular. We have now reached $1,000,000 investment so our business model is resonating with people. Additionally, our token is backed by a “profit sharing lottery” and since our roadmap is relatively quick, edgeless business will start generating value really fast making sure that investors are benefiting too.

BC: Edgeless is basically an answer to the lack of transparency in the online casino industry, but provably fair gaming was already a transparency feature brought by bitcoin gambling. How does Edgeless compare to provably fair gaming?

EL: People don’t seem to be aware that bitcoin casinos are fully centralized casinos and they have full power to cheat against their own players, or delay payments. The main difference between bitcoin and traditional casinos is that bitcoin casinos accept cryptocurrency – and that’s pretty much it. Their transparency mechanism can have a lot of flaws. We’ve written an article on exactly this topic. The main principle of Edgeless casino is to use an Ethereum smart contract for randomness generation. In a nutshell, the smart contract guides all related information to a randomness generator and immediately uploads it to the blockchain, therefore the casino cannot cheat without being spotted publicly.

Edgeless Developers on Ethereum Governance

BC: You have chosen Ethereum to launch your ICO. What is your opinion on how the decision makers handled the DAO attack on the network?

EL: Before DAO people did not really understand what an Ethereum smart contract was. Also, DAO was an extremely complex smart contract system which didn’t help matters. No one took into account the possibility of human error. The DAO was hacked because programmers had a lot of security loopholes in their smart contracts and didn’t know how to properly test them. However, it was a good lesson for all Ethereum / Solidity developers because it proved that a smart contract with bad logic cannot function properly and that the more complex a contract is – the higher their chance of error. The benefit to us is that we took well tested contracts from other successful Ethereum ICOs such as Golem and Melonport as the basis of our operations. Secondly, we kept our smart contracts relatively simple and had them audited several times by 3rd parties.

My personal opinion on the DAO attack is that we evolve and learn through our failures. It’s an extremely important biological concept that leads us to become who we are today. I am not surprised that a DAO had an error in its code – it’s just human and the way we handled it is not surprising either. We moved to stop an error, learned from the mistake and moved on. I don’t see anything wrong in that, even if people claim that stopping DAO hack is an ‘act of centralization” and goes against ideology of ‘decentralization’.

BC: Do you see any governance issues on the Ethereum network affecting Edgeless in the future?

EL: It’s very hard to predict the future with a such an experimental technology such as Blockchain. However, we feel supportive of and confident in the Ethereum Foundation.

Edgeless Business Prospects

BC: In which regions or countries do you expect to grow the most in the next 2 to 3 years?

EL: USA gamblers using VPN, Russian Gamblers, European Gamblers.

BC: Will you consider expanding into other cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin or perhaps even Litecoin, Dash and Monero?

EL: Not in the near future. However, there is a really ambitious project called Rootstock which promises to combine bitcoin with a smart contract. If it can be shown to function properly, we will adapt our smart contracts to bitcoin too. We believe that would be a killer product. We also hope that the bitcoin foundation will manage to solve the slow confirmation issue.

How Uncertain is the Future?

BC: What do you think will happen with Ethereum in 10 years?

EL: Again, it’s very hard to predict the future. Especially 10 years in the future, but I do believe that smart contracts will take over a lot of economical processes and make our world much more efficient and resource saving.