Large stock market gains are trackable. See the investigation of people who bought puts on airline stocks before 9/11, for example. (It didn't end up finding them guilty, but my point is that it could have, the information was there.)
If prediction markets were required to ban anonymous users, then it might be comparable to the stock market.
Do the proponents of futarchy think predicting should be anonymous?
Do the proponents of futarchy think predicting should be anonymous?
I infer from the timing of Szabo's post (maybe he says more explicitly, I didn't read it carefully since this is an old criticism of PMs) that this post was prompted by the recent progress of Truthcoin/Augur, a prediction market which is now running prototypes on the Ethereum blockchain.
Truthcoin is fully-distributed (judgments are distributed among all traders and honesty incentivized by a clever majority algorithm), and so whether or not one thinks predicting should be anonymous, it will be pseudonymous.
Nick Szabo writes about the dangers of taking assumptions that are valid in small, self-contained games and applying them to larger, real-world "games," a practice he calls a small-game fallacy.
This last point, which he expands on later in the post, will be of particular interest to some readers of LW. The idea is that while a prediction market does incentivize feeding accurate information into the system, the existence of the market also gives rise to parallel external incentives. As Szabo glibly puts it,
Futarchy, it seems, will have some kinks to work out.