OOOOOO On Oct 24, 2015 6:21 AM, "Steven Schear" wrote:

or how about Open-Transactions reborn as Stash http://stashcrypto.com/front https://t.co/XQMCPo4r1v ?

Warrant Canary creator On Oct 23, 2015 1:13 PM, "jim bell" wrote:

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If we are looking for interesting subjects to discuss, why not Ethereum https://www.ethereum.org/ and Auger? http://www.augur.net/

Jim Bell

From the Auger website: The Augur Alpha Preview After months of development, we are proud to release our alpha version of Augur. This version showcases the basic features of our prediction market implementation. It's by no means feature complete and certainly prone to bugs. Tell us what you think and report any issues you have using the "Feedback" link in the app.

From: Georgi Guninski On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 08:08:33PM +0000, jim bell wrote:

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If we are looking for interesting subjects to discuss, why not Ethereum    https://www.ethereum.org/  and Auger?  http://www.augur.net/            Jim Bell After months of development, we are proud to release our alpha version of Augur. This version showcases the basic features of our>>prediction>>market implementation. It's by no means feature complete and certainly prone to bugs.Tell us what you think and report any issues you have>>using the "Feedback" link in the app. DISCLAIMER: I quickly browsed both and well might be wrong. Here are some remarks about augur. Basically I don't think the crowd can make good predictions because of lack of skills and in addition sufficiently many "crowd actors" might turn the dice the other way. Apparently they work on the principle that if decisions are made using a lot of input (many members of the public).   The PAM (Policy Analysis Market  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market  ) proposal from 2003 was intended to work on the same principle.  (The media quickly labelled it, "terrorism futures".)   Presumably if 'enough' of the crowd change the prediction, that will be for good reason if they have to burn 'reputation' too.

There is a local saying that "one woman in general can give birth to a child in approximately 9 months" BUT "9 women can't give birth to a child in approximately one month".

If that was indeed what a crowdsourced prediction market was attempting to do, it would fail.  But that is not the case.   Since augur mentions "market", likely the lovely NSA can put a lot of bots on it, possibly just burning inflated virtual money. I'm not sure I understand what may be your objection, but my understanding is that the Ethereum system is intended to be supported by means of some micropayment system, called 'ether'.  .  A DOS (denial of service) attack won't work if those attacking have to pay a small fee to communicate with the system.  

I would recommend to them to try their skills on the lottery or on some>sport betting site ;) Presumably Augur will be doing that, too.  Naturally, I can think of better things for a prediction market to be doing!!!             Jim Bell

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Georgi Guninski wrote:

I mean: I don't trust any actor on any market. If more than half of the actors decide to cooperate, they trivially win in this case. If the NSA decides to fuck a prediction, they can buy ether and their bots will do the rest.

Does it matter whether the crowds can do accurate predictions if the main purpose is for special actors with the skills and interest to be encouraged to create outcomes that are being wagered upon. I've not looked closely at Augur but back in Cpunk days stumped for PMs that included forwards, similar to financial futures, but where the participants could create contracts which narrowed the prediction windows to months, weeks or even days within the greater expiry period (e.g., Dec. 31, 2015) but were not required to specify which month, week or day . By enabling such sub-contract narrowing the benefit for an accurate prediction scales with its temporal ratio with the general contract thus increasing leverage and benefit to special actors. Steve

There is a considerable body of academic work on prediction markets, and I recommend reading it. Inter alia, intentionally moving such a market in a stupid direction to further some sort of fraud or to act out of spite is entirely possible so long as you have an open-ended amount of money to lose. But for those still hoping to dismiss prediction markets, the Dodd-Frank Act, in provision 7 USC section 7a-2(c)(5)(c)(i), gave the CFTC the power to ban certain kinds of event contracts. This includes illegal activities, gaming, war, and terrorism. The CFTC has used that power to forbid NADEX, a regulated market, from offering event contracts for elections. The CFTC gave several reasons for banning the event contracts, including that multiple states had defined placing money on elections to be gambling and that the contracts would not serve any economic purpose such as allowing participants to hedge against an outcome. Libertarians who live in the real world vote Republican, --dan