I've made this comparison before, but consider how a company like Valve (creators of Dota2) just let everyone play a game -- which is way more challenging from a graphics/processing perspective -- online, for free, indefinitely. Or even if that doesn't count because people spend money on cosmetics, companies which require a lump sum to purchase the game still only require maybe 50 bucks to purchase indefinite online play.
And now compare that to the money you pay to play online poker via rake. It's an insane disparity.
What it shows is that it has to be about security/managing
real money accounts/taxation/regulatory-stuff-in-general, rather than about the difficulty of hosting the game itself. Which means that theoretically, crypto should be an amazing solution because iiuc most of the regulatory stuff can just be automated.
It's not happening yet; phenom poker is not exactly booming with popularity. But I think theoretically it should. In a perfect world where everyone knows how to use it and there is huge demand, it should be possible to have a profitable crypto
poker site with extremely low rake, like 1% maybe. Maybe even lower at high stakes. I don't see any technical obstacle; the cost of running the games should be low enough to make a profit even with very low rake. I think.
Or maybe there is a technical hurdle here that I don't know about. I'm not a crypto expert, so don't take me too seriously. But based on my naive understanding, online poker should be a perfect use case for cypto. Well, specifically for ETH; it's not like you can do any of this with bitcoin. So yeah if there is a future for online poker, I have my hopes on an ETH-based client.
Or, maybe there won't be and online poker may just continue to fade into obscurity. Also possible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
