Petar Mitchev

Bottom line: This is not “mental poker” in name only. The crypto is the real deal — distributed, verifiable, commitment-bound, on-chain enforceable, dealerless Mental Poker. PS - I know it is ugly. I am not a designer.

Looking at my own work with complete honesty, I can readily admit that my design skills are dreadful. The interfaces are ugly as hell. If aesthetics were the measure of engineering, I would already be convicted. Fortunately, software is judged by whether it works. By tomorrow, I expect to have the system loaded and integrated so that the wallet, the game layer, and the supporting infrastructure operate together as a coherent whole. There are still multiple configuration options and some areas where the integration can be refined, but that is largely a matter of presentation and convenience rather than functionality. The essential point is one that critics seem determined to overlook. The difficult part already works. The mental poker system works. The underlying protocols work. The trustless interactions work. The cryptography works. One can always hire a designer to improve appearances. It is rather harder to hire someone to invent a functioning trustless mental poker system. As one as Satoshi might have observed, there are only two kinds of software: software that is beautiful and does not work, and software that works and is eventually made beautiful. I know which category I would rather inhabit.

The Bitcoin white paper is eight pages long. Its objective is stated in the abstract: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system allowing payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution (Nakamoto, 2008). The word “directly” is doing the work. The system was designed to eliminate intermediaries from electronic value transfer. Not to reduce them. Not to replace them with different intermediaries wearing different labels. To eliminate them.