Satoshi's Abandoned Poker Experiment Returns With a Bitcoin Twist

Satoshi’s Forgotten Poker Room Gets a Second Life

The original Bitcoin source code contained a file called uibase.cpp, which included graphical components for a poker lobby and table. The interface carried an April 16, 2008, generator date, roughly six months before Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper. Buttons labeled Deal Hand, Fold, Call and Raise suggested something more ambitious than a simple payment application, although Satoshi never publicly explained what he intended to do with them.

Those early fragments weren’t a functioning poker client, much less a blockchain-enforced gambling system. There was no mechanism for dealing private cards, tracking wagers or determining who should collect the winnings. Linus makes that distinction clear in his Bitcoin Poker white paper, writing, “These interface fragments were not a complete poker protocol.” Rather than resurrecting Satoshi’s abandoned software, Linus set out to build the missing machinery from scratch.

The historical backdrop makes the discovery even more interesting. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in October 2006, targeting financial transactions associated with unlawful internet gambling. Years later, federal authorities famously seized domains belonging to major online poker operators during the April 2011 crackdown known as “Black Friday.” Whether online gambling restrictions influenced Satoshi’s thinking remains unknown, but the idea of playing poker without relying on a centralized payment processor certainly fits Bitcoin’s original purpose.