Fair enough. I guess points just won’t track ‘reputation’ for people like you with a more fluid online presence. But I still think that’s not a serious problem—enough people have a clear online identity that I think the trading will mostly be sensible.
kickboxer
Karma: 15
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this! I’m a bit more optimistic that these problems will be solvable, though.
There’s a zero bound to losing bets, so the game incents taking on too much risk. If you go broke, just start again.
You could start again with a different Facebook account, but that wouldn’t be attached to your real identity. In order to earn reputation points attached to your regular Facebook account, you’d have to bet carefully. If people create lots of accounts anyway, it’s not too big a deal—as long as the total flow of points from new fake accounts isn’t too big, it’ll just fund more sensible traders.
Points are created by new users, who have no information value on their own. It’s annoying but not difficult to create hundreds of “feeder” accounts, which only exist to funnel money to your real account, by making bad bets against your main account.
This seems like a much more serious problem to me, and I aim to make it very hard to transfer money. For example, users don’t have much freedom to decide who they bet against—compatible bets are matched automatically. So if you make a bad bet, it will be automatically matched with the best existing bets from other users. The receiving account would have to offer better odds than anyone else in the market to ensure they match the bet. In heavily traded markets I can’t see this happening, but I might have to put more restrictions on thinly-traded ones.
Ok, I’ll add that question soon. And thanks for the mention!