Fantasy Sports Betting Contracts for Immediate Payouts

bhoffman17bhoffman17 Member Posts: 6
Anyone else interested in helping to develop some contracts code for disbursement of fantasy sports league payouts?


  • kgkkgk Member Posts: 3
    How do you prove what the score was in the contract?
  • bhoffman17bhoffman17 Member Posts: 6
    You would allow the participants to choose the fantasy league they are in (i.e. ESPN + Football + League ID). You could then use an API from those sites to pull the info or scrape the scores in the contract code.
  • kgkkgk Member Posts: 3
    Contract code can't connect to the internet. That would be insanely insecure not to mention impossible to scale. You could maybe do this by sending a contract a transaction with the game score. But then how does the contract validate that the score it received was actually the score of the game...
  • Jam10oJam10o Member Posts: 61 ✭✭
    I'd suggest following the discussion on trusted data feeds :) It seems like it will be relevant for many of the contracts and services that will be in the blockchain.
  • bhoffman17bhoffman17 Member Posts: 6
    @kgk: I'm confused that you can't have a data feed. I clearly thought I heard Vitalik say that it could be based on data feeds.

    @Jam10o: I'm now following the discussion and need to know more!

    I guess I could build in logic to have the commissioners push value out of escrow, but I would like it to be algorithmically disbursed.
  • kgkkgk Member Posts: 3
    You can push data to contracts, but contract code certainly can't connect to an external server and pull data itself.

    Thanks @Jam10o! It could work similar to how SPV wallets work. A contract receives data from multiple data sources and trusts the majority. E.g. if 10 sources send you the score for a particular game, and 9 of them say the Packers lost to the Lions 7-14, then the contract ignores the 10th. The contract could possibly also keep track of how often each source gets included in the "right" answer and use that as a reputation score for each source.

    One option for your application @bhoffman17 would be to create a new contract for each bet, and program it to pay out based on whatever conditions you like. You set it up to contract to expire say 24 hours after the game ends. Then anyone can broadcast game scores to the contract. At the time of the contract expiration, it pays out based on what was the most popular score it received.
  • Jam10oJam10o Member Posts: 61 ✭✭
    I'm assuming what is going to turn out to be the case for data feeds is a ripple-style consensus "on top" of the blockchain, you have to trust *someone* for your data after all, may as well be many "people"...

    On a related note you'll need bots using the ethwire protocol/api that are "fed" like contracts in order to provide any kind of data feed.

    It will certainly be expensive, (relative to other contracts that is...) but it will probably interface with some sort of ether/usd/btc exchange anyways, and ether isn't exactly expensive (yet. And when it is, the costs scale down too, as described in the whitepaper.)
  • bhoffman17bhoffman17 Member Posts: 6
    I'm not really sure what all that means at this point I guess I have more studying to do, but I'm starting to realize there is a lot of human intervention still necessary. I'm really wondering what the true value of implementing this is if you still rely on humans and exchanges and it's expensive.
  • machinerymachinery Member Posts: 11
    edited February 2014
    I agree with bhoffman17. I think since the ethereum system is still under development, these are valid points that should be taken into consideration. Human intervention should be removed as much as possible. Everything should be as autonomous and self-enforcing as possible. If so, this has the potential to be something huge.
  • bhoffman17bhoffman17 Member Posts: 6
    So let's say everyone wants in on the pool with USD. There would need to be a third party who converts the fiat to ether and then when it was paid out, to convert from ether back to fiat? How does this get rid of the central exchanges? I mean the contract is in the cloud but someone still has to get you in and out of the currencies. Or am I missing something?
  • Jam10oJam10o Member Posts: 61 ✭✭
    In the case of bitcoin, a contract could contain an SPV client connected to the bitcoin blockchain, transactions between bitcoin and ethereum then become trivial, and so do exchanges. USD isn't a cryptocurrency, and although some services (*might*) have API's to enable simple transactions through ether, the nature of fiat currency prevents anyone from doing so without a middleman.

    If you moved everyone playing fantasy sports to transacting in bitcoin (or litecoin or dogecoin... whatever,) this could work amazingly. Otherwise you may be out of luck in terms of being "autonomous and self-enforcing".
  • SatoshiFantasySatoshiFantasy Member Posts: 3
    I've been working on SatoshiFantasy / fantasybit.

  • jamtodayjamtoday San FranciscoMember Posts: 13
    @bhoffman17 I am also very interested in this use case. For now though I am trying to start off with some very simple contracts and actually get them up on the blockchain. There are a couple small tools I have been working on and will release soon that should make some of this easier.

    @SatoshiFantasy thanks for the link. This project looks pretty interesting.
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