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How Provably Fair Works?
In a time when Bitcoin’s price is hitting unprecedented highs, the Bitcoin casino market is growing at an unstoppable pace, even faster than the number of Swedish gaming sites like Casinonetti.info or www.casinon.nu this year following reports on market liberalization in the country. And with Bitcoin players rapidly increasing in numbers, the need to understand the concept of “provably fair”, or how you can check the fairness of a Bitcoin casino, becomes increasingly important.
What Is “Provably Fair”?
A provably fair system is a cryptographic hash system that provides any interested Bitcoin player with the means to check whether a casino’s game is truly fair. By giving you data from a casino’s hash algorithm before and after you make a bet, the casino gives you a chance to use that data in any third party tool and see whether it matches, i.e. whether a casino has interfered with the outcome in any way. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that just because a game is “provably fair” it doesn’t mean it’s actually “fair” by any standards, as its payout rate can still be unfair to players despite its outcomes being entirely random.
How to Check Whether a Casino is “Provably Fair”?
To see whether a Bitcoin casino is indeed provably fair, you will need to find a hash calculator you can use for the check. You can do this by simply searching for an “HMAC Generator” online, if you don’t already know a site that offers a free hash calculator.
Once you find your tool, just go to your provably fair casino and find a game with random outcomes like a Blackjack game or a slot. When you load your game, play a single bet and then find the provably fair tool to get the “server seed” and “server hash” numbers.
Next, copy the “server seed” number and paste it in your generator in the “message” or “input” field. Then, copy your “player seed” or “secret/result” number from the game and paste in the in “secret key” field. After you finish, choose the SHA 256 or SHA 512 algorithm (depending on what the casino uses) and then generate a hash number with the controls of your free online tool.
The hash number you receive from the third-party algorithm should match the “server hash” number from the casino game you are playing. If it does, it means that the casino had no effect on your bet and that the outcome was generated randomly by a computer algorithm.
The “Nonce” Explained
At some casinos, you will also see a “nonce” number used in the provably fair tool that’s available in your games. The nonce is basically the number that specifies how many bets you’ve made in a single session since the original server hash number has been generated. Some casinos have 0 as the starting nonce number, while others use 1 instead. As you keep making bets, the nonce number will increase and you can thus use it to check the fairness of a game even after dozens of bets have passed.
