Online Casinos

. Online casinos allow arbitrary users to remotely participate in mental game playing, such as e.g. Mental Poker or Mental Black Jack. Two recent developments have brought the realization of online casinos closer to reality: On the one hand, cryptographic research has come up with practical solutions and corresponding protocols to the problems of how to play games mentally and how to spend money over open networks, and on the other hand, the Internet has become a globally accessible packet-switched (inter)networking infrastructure that provides support for multicast communications. This paper overviews the basic principles of mental games and digital payment schemes, and proposes a model that can be used to set up and run online casinos within a multicast environment, such as e.g. provided by the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone). The paper also addresses a prototype implementation that has been done at the University of Berne. 1 Introduction If one area exists where stand-alone com..