Gurkenglas comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: eggman 19 February 2014 12:57PM

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Comment author: gwern 20 February 2014 10:20:38PM *  19 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Gurkenglas 21 February 2014 04:13:04AM 1 point [-]

Wouldn't evil people farm consensus karma via specifically constructed bets?

Comment author: gwern 21 February 2014 04:04:43PM *  2 points [-]

Hm, how would that work? If you make 1000 nonsense markets and the majority of people refuse to vote on your nonsense bets, then their votes are recorded as 0.5s/neutrals, and you can't diverge from them without being punished, which eliminates any gain from 'good karma' (and if you likewise are neutral, you've spent a lot of money for no particular point).

Comment author: Gurkenglas 22 February 2014 06:55:28PM 0 points [-]

After actually reading some of the pdf, I feel that any possible objections as simple as the one I used there have already been accounted for. Disregard me.