I agree that there’s a mostly safe and clean (but too often smoke-filled :( )space for gambling in the US now. There’s still a lot of shadiness in sports gambling, even though there are places to bet legally on games.
This has been a great exchange for me, and I appreciate it, so thank you! It’s helped me clarify my thinking on prediction markets.
I think niche prediction markets interested mostly in existential risk and AI are likely to be too small and eccentric to be good predictors, and that truly massive global predictions markets will involve shadiness. But I can see something in between, with real capital and a broad set of well-informed bettors, and some sort of mechanism to identify and track bettors, providing good information on near term events with little downside.
What do you think are the best and worse case scenarios for prediction markets?
What do you think are the best and worse case scenarios for prediction markets?
I don’t think that long-term prediction markets will have earthshattering consequences given that they will complement the existing financial markets.
Worst case: the US government (and others) continues to insist they’re illegal gambling, they don’t take off, nothing happens. I’m not considering movie-type scenarios in which an evil mastermind manipulates the prediction markets to fool the good guys and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!
Best case: the prediction markets do take off, become popular, continue to be independent and reasonably resistant to manipulation, and provide valuable data about the revealed predictions of the public.
I agree that there’s a mostly safe and clean (but too often smoke-filled :( )space for gambling in the US now. There’s still a lot of shadiness in sports gambling, even though there are places to bet legally on games.
This has been a great exchange for me, and I appreciate it, so thank you! It’s helped me clarify my thinking on prediction markets.
I think niche prediction markets interested mostly in existential risk and AI are likely to be too small and eccentric to be good predictors, and that truly massive global predictions markets will involve shadiness. But I can see something in between, with real capital and a broad set of well-informed bettors, and some sort of mechanism to identify and track bettors, providing good information on near term events with little downside.
What do you think are the best and worse case scenarios for prediction markets?
I don’t think that long-term prediction markets will have earthshattering consequences given that they will complement the existing financial markets.
Worst case: the US government (and others) continues to insist they’re illegal gambling, they don’t take off, nothing happens. I’m not considering movie-type scenarios in which an evil mastermind manipulates the prediction markets to fool the good guys and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!
Best case: the prediction markets do take off, become popular, continue to be independent and reasonably resistant to manipulation, and provide valuable data about the revealed predictions of the public.
Nothing horribly exciting here :-)