Paging Jim Bell

[jim bell]

    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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