hi Shaun, thanks for the Qs, they are certainly worth asking and deserve an answer.
>>Who's going to abritrate disputes or provide other legal protections?
If you mean disputes over whether a bet was placed or not, or at what time the bet was placed, or how it got matched, etc - every transaction on Bookie is publicly broadcast in real time. That's not a generous decision that anyone makes, that's simply the nature of blockchain. With this 100% real-time transparency of transaction history, there is a single (distributed) record of every bet, that no single party has privileged access to. Disputes of this nature are settled by reference to the public ledger. That has never been the case before in the history of online betting.
Legal protections: the Peerplays blockchain (as with most public blockchains right now) does not belong to a particular jurisdiction. With blockchain being so new a technology, there is a huge amount of uncertainty in how blockchain and existing legal systems interact. The issues underlying legal protections with Bookie/Peerplays are in principle the same as those underlying Bitcoin. This might provide some useful insight:
https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#is-bitcoin-legal
>>And by decentralized, do you mean that...
By decentralized, we mean that no single person (or company) will have control over the way that the Bookie betting exchange operates.
The Bookie betting exchange will run on top of the Peerplays blockchain, a purpose-built gaming and gambling blockchain that uses the same underlying codebase ('Graphene') used by BitShares, a decentralized financial exchange that has handled 100s of millions of dollars of trading in the past 2 years or so.
Our organisation (PBSA) is a non-profit organization that writes the Bookie software (front-end and back-end). But we have nothing to do with the operation of the Bookie betting exchange - we won't be running servers, or holding end users' money, or settling bets, etc. We just release the code, which is then run on the Peerplays blockchain by its 'block-producers', the nodes that verify new entries on the distributed ledger (in Bitcoin they are known as 'miners'). On the Peerplays blockchain, block-producers are known as "Witnesses". But no single one of these Witnesses has exclusive control over how the blockchain (or products like Bookie that run on the blockchain) is run. That is what is meant by decentralized.
>>And by decentralized, do you mean that you won't be holding people's money to cover their liability?
As per above, "we" (PBSA) are not involved in the operation of any part of Bookie or the Peerplays blockchain, including holding user funds.
But, of course, users need to deposit funds with Bookie before they can bet, the same way as for any betting exchange. With bitcoin (BTC) deposits, funds are deposited to a BTC wallet that is managed by the Peerplays blockchain i.e. by a decentralized entity. So, again, this means that no single person or entity has control over those funds. PBSA believes this will offer the most transparent and secure way to hold users' BTC funds.