Paging Jim Bell

jim bell jdb10987 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 25 10:34:43 PDT 2018


 Ah yes, excellent point, and quite true.   I'd forgotten...   Which is one reason this new system (I haven't looked at it yet) might not "work", at least it won't bring us an AP-type system.   If the question is, "Will [fill in the blank with a name] be alive at the end of the year 2018?", then everybody who bets "No" is essentially on the same footing.  They'd all share, proportionately, in the reward.   A person who predicted death before 2019 is on the same footing as everyone else who made the same prediction.  Thus, there is little incentive to "adjust the odds"acting outside of the game.  

If, instead, the system is designed to allow bettors to 'predict' the date and perhaps even the time of the death, that system carefully excludes most other 'competing' bettors:  If one bettor predicted December 1, and another predicted December 3, if the actual death occurred on December 1 all other bettors would lose the 'pot', and only those who predicted December 1 would share the 'pot'.   This greatly leverages the betting.  Which is why death-on-a-certain-date was my intended model when I wrote AP.

               Jim Bell

    On Wednesday, July 25, 2018, 9:54:13 AM PDT, Steven Schear <schear.steve at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Another practical requirement is leveraged betting. This enables those intending to act outside of these online venues but with limited financial means to wager in such ways as their payouts are greatly disproportionate to their wagers.
On Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 9:46 AM jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

 

    On Wednesday, July 25, 2018, 1:22:09 AM PDT, Mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:  
 
 On 07/24/2018 10:55 PM, jim bell wrote:
>  
> 
>>     On Tuesday, July 24, 2018, 10:21:40 PM PDT, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote: https://www.ccn.com/first-assassination-markets-appear-on-gambling-platform-augur/
> 

> 
>> Well, you've got my attention!    What can I say?  Never expected that Betty White would be "on the list", so to speak.  
>                 Jim Bell

>Hey! Props to you, Jim! Very cool!

>But still, in a gambling context, this is more like typical dead pool
betting, which has been a thing like forever.

Quite true.    But as Nick Szabo said,  http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/05/small-game-fallacies.html

 "A sufficiently large market predicting an individual's death is also, necessarily, an assassination market, and similarly other "prediction" markets are also act markets, changing incentives to act outside that market to bring about the predicted events."


And he was right.   It is the size, or lack of it, which is the primary thing which has prevented 'dead pool' betting from turning into AP.

The other thing necessary to turn such a prediction market into a classic AP system   https://cryptome.org/ap.htm    is good, i.e. perfect, anonymity of bets and payouts:  So nobody else, other than than the bettor himself, knows who he is, and he knows he can collect the payout anonymously without risk.  I don't know if this Ethereum/Augur system has such anonymity, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough.   It wouldn't be particularly useful if it didn't.×

The main advantage added by Ethereum/Augur, I assume, is that it acts as a distributed computer system that, being "everywhere", ends up being "nowhere":  It cannot be shut down by government authority.

                  Jim Bell×

  
  
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