bitZino claims to verify an honest card shuffle

Larry Taad, owner and lead developer of a new online casino branded bitZino, claimed in a Fortune magazine article this week that he has provided players with a technological means to independently and immediately verify the authenticity of an online shuffle.

He has accordingly positioned a ‘Provably Fair’ button on the site that enables players to interact with cryptographic techniques that ensure verification.

Taad explained to Fortune that bitZino is deploying a cryptographic hash function (SHA256 algorithm) to create a fingerprint of an already shuffled deck. Since the SHA256 hashing algorithm is one-way and there’s no way a player can use that hash to figure out what the shuffle of the deck actually is, the casino can let players look at the hash before the game starts.

“Then, the deck is reshuffled using the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm with the random numbers generated from the Mersenne twister algorithm that was seeded with a hash of the combined server seed and client seed,” says Taad.

“The second round of shuffling only serves to ensure that neither the server nor client could possibly know the final deck before the game starts.”

Finally, the initial shuffle and the server seed are provided to the player for verification.

The operator correctly notes that one of the largest hurdles to creating a good provably fair system is explaining to users exactly what it is.

“When developing our provably fair system at bitZino, we put a lot of effort into making sure we were able to accurately portray to our users how it all works,” he claims, adding that the idea will catch on if history is any indication, and pointing to secure shopping sites as an example.

Taad claims that any single-player game can be made provably fair, and says that bitZino currently offers single-player video poker, roulette and single-player blackjack that are provably fair, but that multi-player games will be offered in the future.”