And then, we play!

As you can see from these general definitions of how Vigless will work, there are many may components that need to be built, each with their unique set of challenges. I will be working tirelessly to make it a reality with a low time frame mentality.

Ideally however, a few or perhaps many other individuals will join and help building this open source project so that it can be delivered much faster. I believe that such an effort would be fun, challenging and rewarding for any type of contributor. If it comes to fruition and gains market adoption over time, it will have clear impact on the world.

If you wish to join this project or to assist in anyway shape or form, please comment on this note or contact me by encrypted DM. I highly recommend contributing in a pseudonymous manner to this project due to the regulatory grey area it would operate under.

All offers to help and assist, whether big or small, direct or indirect, are more than welcome. Furthermore, any feedback on how to improve the theoretical definitions here outlined in the previous thread would be greatly appreciated and extremely helpful. Thank you.

Finally, the “The Bet Outcome Settlement Process” will be done via the usage of open source Large Language Models (LLMs) in order to ensure that the decided upon outcome is transparent, deterministic and consistently correct.

LLMs are containerized software technology optimized for answering Natural Language prompts accurately without ulterior or hidden motive.

Therefore they are perfect for dictating the outcome of a sport event in a factual and neutral way when given with the necessary information with respect to any specific concluded sport.

In essence, the bet that users are actually placing is something like “Once the agreed upon hypertext of returned by this url is provided to the LLM model at this specific point in time along with this standard text prompt, the LLM will respond with this team's name”.

Technically, the bettors are betting on the response of the LLM model itself, which with the current performance of LLMs retrained for this specific purpose, should always match the real world outcome of the game. The outcome stated by the LLMs once the prompt has been executed will be publicly announced and attached to to the sport event in question, so that the Routing Lightning Node previously described acting as the arbitrator of the bet can programmatically settle the bets for a specific sporting event by releasing the payments to the users who’s bet selection matches the output of the LLM.

I have attached some screenshot examples using ChatGPT-4 for illustration purposes. You can try examples yourself with similar prompts to validate that LLMs currently have this capability. In practice Vigless will only use an open source LLM model such as Mosaic’s MPT-7B model or Meta’s LLama 2 model and only after said LLM has been backtested on thousands of historic sporting events to ensure that it has a zero level error rate. The open source nature of these models would ensure that they can be run hosted free of licensing costs and in a distributed fashion.

The url whose html will be passed to the LLM as well as the accompanying prompt that will be used to settle the response will transparently be displayed within the metadata of the betting event and will be available to any user prior to the placement of any bet so that any user placing a bet on said sport event is acknowledging that they have agreed to that url as being the source of truth and consider the bet to be fair.

The main issue with the Hodl Contracts technology simply on its own is the need for a individual third party to acts as an Oracle and to decide on the betting event outcome.

Although this Lightning Routing Node cannot steal the funds that are being routed through it thanks to the Lightning Network's technology, they could hold the funds hostage for up to the invoice's expiration either by malfeasance or lack of connectivity or, in the wort outcome, they could settle the payment incorrectly either due to error or by being bribed by one of the participants somehow.

In order to mitigate the flaw of this trust model, Vigless will utilize the Fedimint protocol in order to band together several Lightning Network Nodes under a MultiSig technology.

Unlike a normal Fedimint “Federation", this federation will not actually issue any Ecash tokens but will only be used band together routing lightning nodes that watch over each in a programatic manner using open source code. Most importantly the ability to access and change a Arbitrator's Lightning Node operating code curtailed by the fact that all the nodes belonging to the same federation are able to validate each other's operation and keep each other in check. Therefore, the Arbitrator belonging to the same federation are assured to run act as honest nodes as well as a majority of guardians remain honest.

Any user of Vigless can become a participant of the Federation quorum simply by running a node and stating their interest in doing so, given more credibility to it’s trust model.

The federation will be periodically disbanded and reformed to integrate additional guardians over time. By virtue of having the Escrow Node functionality distributed amongst a large number of anonymous users and by the fact that the mint itself actually does not custody any funds but rather only temporarily holds and routes lightning payments, the possibility of collusion becomes very difficult and unpractical and most importantly, there is very little incentive for the guardians to do so.

The money settlement aspect of Vigless will leverage Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

It will make use of the technology called Hodl Contracts developed by nostr:npub1yxp7j36cfqws7yj0hkfu2mx25308u4zua6ud22zglxp98ayhh96s8c399s (https://github.com/supertestnet/hodlcontracts).

As you can see in the repo's video, this open source technology allows for users to exchange lightning invoices and to pay them by routing via an intermediary Lightning Node that will act as an arbitrator.

This Lightning Node acting as arbitrator, will not route the payments of either participants until the outcome of the sport event they are betting on has been settled. Once the outcome of the betting event has been determined, the Lightning routing node will route the Lightning Payment of the loser to the winner and cancel the invoice payment of the winner so that their funds are returned to their Lightning Wallet.

In this settlement model, users custody and send funds directly from their lightning model and can use any functioning Lightning Network client they wish in order to make bets and receive their winnings. There is no need to custody funds prior to the placement of a bet with any sort intermediary. The Arbitrator Lightning Node has no custody or access to the funds that are holding, they can only control in which direction they are routed.

Frontend UI will be community developed, meanwhile the backend of Vigless will be built by leveraging the Nostr communication protocol.

Bettors will use the private/public key communication to coordinate on betting markets so that they can open bets, take existing bets and even create new betting events. All users are pseudonymous and will only need their private key to prove the authenticity of their messages.

Each running instantiation of the Vigless desktop or mobile client will be a Nostr relay under the hood, that stores and transmit communication to other Vigless relays in a peer-to-peer network fashion.

This ensures there is no centralized source of information and makes the information that the protocol depends on robustly redundant. Only  communication with a specific predefined format pertaining to opening and placing bets will be accepted and passed on by the relays. There are many spam prevention and efficient data compression techniques that can be employed to ensure that the amount of text data stored remains lightweight and unburdesome for the operating hardware.

Vigless will be a non-profit seeking venture, it will be an open source code protocol. It will enable sport bettors around to world to bet directly against one another without the need of an centralized intermediary. Although Vigless will not attempt to generate any sort of income, it will hopefully save those that use it millions in the aggregate by eliminating middlemen commissions and “vigs”. In sports betting terminology, the term vig references the commission embedded within the odds presented by the bookmakers, so that they are always ensured to make a profit no matter the outcome. Vigless will eliminate this practice by allowing true free markets in sport betting. Online bookmakers are known for providing terrible user experience, invasive KYC practices, painfully slow money withdrawals and have the undue ability to freeze and seize user winnings arbitrarily, a right that they often abuse to the favor to limit their downside loss. A slightly better trust model are Betting Exchange Markets such a Betfair Exchange, in which users bet or lay directly against one another and the odds are set by an (almost) free market. However, Betfair, a centralized entity plagued with the same aforementioned custodial issues, takes a commission of 5% on all winnings. Vigless will function similarly in terms of offerering fair odds but will take a 0% commission and will be non-custodial and trustless, will not demand any sort of identity verification and will not have to depend on the outcome of the bet to be determined by a centralized authority. In time, Vigless will make bookmakers obsolete and bankrupt.

I am Vigtor.

I want to start Vigless.

Vigless will be a completely decentralized, peer to peer sports betting network, built on Nostr and Bitcoin technology, to ensure a fully non-custodian and trustless experience.