What is the currency used for the bets? Can I cash out back to USD? Why not just use actual money or even stable coins?
The idea is cool, but I’m never gonna put money into something where there’s ZERO documentation for what happens to my money once it’s in your pocket.
One thing this makes me think of is "Oracles" that could potentially decide a market. Someone could write an oracle, and open source the code, and MM could then run the oracle for the lifetime of the market.
The oracle would be responsible for resolving the bet and would turn an ambiguous statement into a well defined one. i.e. What you are betting on, ultimately, is how the linked oracle will resolve the bet, and everyone can see the code.
The first bet I see is about Russia invading Ukraine. We could have an oracle that checks Wikipedia's list of Russian military engagements every day and if there is a new one in Ukraine and it stays for five days that might be a sign. Another sign might be scraping New York Times headlines for a list of terms you might expect to see in an invasion. Maybe there's a website tracking Russian troop deployments, or Russian flagged planes and ships and those could become signals. Then, the oracle collects and judges based on its signals.
fun, but "Our goal is to make prediction markets an order of magnitude easier for you to create and share" is a lie. your goal is to take a % lol
One complaint is that it requires a Google account to sign up. It does make sense why this is a feature, but it's still kind of annoying.
> you could create a market on “Will my date with [X] go well?”
Why do I get the feeling one of the underlying key variables here would be how likely [X] is to like prediction markets?
The twin facts that the market maker gets to decide the outcome, and there being no binding requirements for how something closes, makes it an exercise in absurdity. By leaving the decision up to them, you've made it impossible to measure the variables independently, so you'll never even be able to draw any useful opinion data out of it. It's not that hard to write a trading platform. I thought of an open prediction platform like this in 2011. The really hard part would be to write a framework in business logic and code that lets people design and resolve prediction contracts in a clear, enforceable, stable way. I'd personally be embarrassed if I wasted time building something like this just to say bluntly that there are a hundred ways it could be taken advantage of. If that's the case, you've thought just enough about the real problem to know that you can't solve it, and you want points for coding the easy part? Garbage.
I’ve wondered, instead of betting on “truth” why not bet on the outcome of a webscraping query, where the code is open source?
Example, I publish some code that scrapes the outcome of an upcoming sports game. It returns a True/False payload.
Bettors can examine my source code and see the exact time when it will be run. They can then place their bet on the code itself.
Sure the code could point to a bad actor and someone could pull the rug, but you could also take the consensus result from a few trusted sources, e.g. Google sports, ESPN, etc.
This sounds like (hopefully a better executed) PredictionBook. [1] Definitely worth doing, as PredictionBook's UI leaves a lot to be desired, but I was confused at first seeing it described as a totally new concept.
Where can I follow updates on it so that I can join when there's Email signup? Will you be posting to the Substack for future updates too?
In trading, there are penalties for insider trading. In sports betting, teams get disqualified for match fixing. So there is protection against adverse selection. What about here? If the bet is "Will Apple air an ad at the Super Bowl," am I violating the rules by working at Apple? You really need users to trust that everyone's on an even playing field.
At first glance I thought this was a self-hosted thing, which would be really great. Still a fun idea though, best of luck. Someone should do an open source version of this, if it's not already,
Hmmm, looks like a less feature-full take on Metaculus https://www.metaculus.com/
This is great! Placed a couple of wagers and created a market.
Have you read Shockwave Rider? John Brunner envisioned a network that placed odds on everything, just like this.
Cool, I might use this, thanks!
Could be interesting for the real estate sector
How similar is this to Kalshi?
What about no.
I absolutely cannot hate this project more.
Today's the launch day for Manifold Markets, you can read our announcement here: https://manifoldmarkets.substack.com/p/above-the-fold-manifo...
We've been working for the past two months to make the easiest-to-use prediction markets! We want to make creating and trading in prediction markets as frictionless as using Twitter polls.
It's been a very exciting and fulfilling project to work on given the dedicated fans of prediction markets that have already joined our community.
Happy to hear any feedback you have on our site!