Quote from: halcyon on February 22, 2014, 01:33:56 PM

Quote from: RodeoX on February 21, 2014, 05:20:56 PM

Thanks for doing this. Prediction markets are fun. I used to clean up on contracts at http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/
If you are a news junkie and regularly can see what is happening early on, you might like this a lot.

sorry for offtopic, but why is intrade currently deactivated?
You must have information about this when you were cleaning up on contracts there.

(shoot me a pm if you don´t want to derail the thread further)

This was years ago (2004?). It became hard to get money in and out of my account in Ireland and the contracts became less interesting. Originally, if you followed the news and did some homework you could outguess the market as a whole and reap some profit. It seemed to me that over time the contracts became more difficult to predict and celebrity based. I didn't know about their recent troubles. Pitty. I'll offer my defense of prediction markets as penance for my derailment.

I would love to see a good implementation of a prediction market in bitcoin. I think it could serve a use beyond speculation. It could be a new important media source, even an everyday app for making decisions. In the famous story about the discovery of the "wisdom of the crowd", Francis Galton finds the best guess as to the weight of an ox is a large sampling of guesses. What is less emphasized is that the guesses were actually bets. By adding a scalable risk and reward people are encouraged to act in their own best interest thus doing better research and mitigating personal bias. In aggregate the results reflect more than say a poll. A poll is a better gauge of what people are willing to say than what their internal best guess is.
In the future I could easily see monetized crowd sourcing for all sorts of decisions. Some people would pay a lot of money for best guesses now. Intrade was a goto for many in the press during elections. Anyway, I'd be interested in it.