Let’s do an experiment in "reverse crowdfunding”. I will pay 50 USD to anyone who can suggest a new way of X-risk prevention that is not already mentioned in this roadmap. Post your ideas as a comment to this post.
Should more than one person have the same idea, the award will be made to the person who posted it first.
The idea must be endorsed by me and included in the roadmap in order to qualify, and it must be new, rational and consistent with modern scientific data.
I may include you as a co-author in the roadmap (if you agree).
The roadmap is distributed under an open license GNU.
Payment will be made by PayPal. The total amount of the prize fund is 500 USD (total 10 prizes).
The competition is open until the end of 2015.
The roadmap can be downloaded as a pdf from:
UPDATE: I uploaded new version of the map with changes marked in blue.
http://immortality-roadmap.com/globriskeng.pdf
Email: alexei.turchin@gmail.com
Each contract would have a maturity date - that is standard.
Your primary concern is that the market would not be functional after a 50%-population pandemic or a nuclear war? That is a possibility. The likelihood depends on the severity of the catastrophe, popularity of the market, its technology and infrastructure, geographic distribution, disaster recovery plan, etc.
With the proper funding and interest, I think a very robust market could be created. And if it works, the information it provides will be very valuable (in my opinion).
So, a bet would look like "There will or will not be a nuclear war during the year 2016"? I am not sure you will find enough serious bidders on the "will be" side to actually provide good predictions. You are likely to get some jokers and crackpots, but for prediction purposes you actually don't want them.
Is there any empirical data that prediction markets can correctly estimate the chances of very-low-probability events?