LWers may find this interesting: someone may've finally figured out how to build a fully distributed prediction market (including distributed judging) on top of blockchains, dubbing it 'Truthcoin'.
The key idea is how judgment of a prediction market is carried out: holders of truthcoins submit encrypted votes 1/0 on every outstanding market, and rather than a simple majority vote, they're weighted by how well they mirror the overall consensus (across all markets they voted on) and paid out a share of trading fees based on that weight. This punishes deviation from the majority and reminds me of Bayesian truth serum.
Clever. I haven't been too impressed with the Bitcoin betting sites I've seen too far (some of them like Bets of Bitcoin are just atrocious), but this seems like a fully decentralized design. The problem is it's so complex that I don't see anyone implementing it anytime soon.
The problem is it's so complex that I don't see anyone implementing it anytime soon.
It seems to be a straightforward way to implement a new altcoin.
If someone pays 200,000$ for two man years of programmer time to implement this and then makes 10 million$ with the altcoin that seems to me like a valid business model.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.