Show HN: Create your own prediction market in two minutes (manifold.markets)
For example, you could create a market on “Will my date with [X] go well?” Anyone can bet on it, and the bets create a forecast on the chance your date goes well. After the date is over, you get to judge the result and reward the traders who picked the correct side.
There are so many ways for this mechanism to go wrong: the creator of the market can be dishonest in deciding the outcome, or you may just disagree with their resolution, with no recourse. Nevertheless, we pitched user-created prediction markets in a grant proposal to the blog Astral Codex Ten, and somehow we won!
Since then, it’s been an exciting two months of us hacking away to realize this idea, and now we’re happy to announce the official launch of Manifold Markets! We’ve gotten so much support from early users who are just as passionate about prediction markets as we are.
You might ask: Is there a reason to create a prediction market, and not a Twitter poll? Are outcomes really that different from a simple person-by-person vote?
We believe so. The magic driving prediction markets is accountability. When wagering a scarce currency, those proven right live on to make future bets, whereas those with less-savvy bets have their influence diminished. Prediction markets succeed because they reward accuracy, and that makes all the difference!
Our goal is to make prediction markets an order of magnitude easier for you to create and share. It should be as frictionless as a Twitter poll. As part of that philosophy, we’re launching with a play money currency, which we believe is just as fun and predictive.
We’ve already built up a passionate community of predictors and market creators, including writers like Richard Hanania and James Medlock, who have predicted everything from CDC recommendations to newsletter subscriptions to fatal shark attacks.
There’s so much unexplored space to ask questions and get valuable forecasts. For example, with conditional markets, you can create several related markets that help you make a choice based on which has the highest likelihood of success!
Let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions; otherwise, looking forward to what markets you create!
75 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadWe've been working for the past two months to make the easiest-to-use prediction markets! We want to make creating and trading in prediction markets as frictionless as using Twitter polls.
It's been a very exciting and fulfilling project to work on given the dedicated fans of prediction markets that have already joined our community.
Happy to hear any feedback you have on our site!
You can make a Google account for free here: https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?hl=en
I mean, it is basically the same dynamic. Right?
People vote based on a prediction of what they think will be a "good" outcome for themselves, the ones they care about, and probably society as whole (for some folks anyway), and they [spend money] to do so. Erm..or that's the theory...let's ignore all the misinfo, short-term emotive-not-substantial-issue optimization, special interests...etc
Basically, your "single example" is the governing system of most of the 'Western liberal' world.
What do you think about that?
[spend money]: People are spending real money to vote (not just in supporting donating to a candidate) but by how they expect their choices will cost them or reward them financially (and of course there are other 'non fiscal' costs and benefits associated to different choices). I guess you could argue that's different but to me it seems it's pretty much the same.
Isn't that sort of like saying, "You say you love that man but you don't really, you just want to marry him so he gives you money."? Which can be true...yet you say you know it's a lie, but you don't know that.
The idea is cool, but I’m never gonna put money into something where there’s ZERO documentation for what happens to my money once it’s in your pocket.
Edit: you can downvote, but it's true...
My idea of trustworthy documentation on this sense would be an escrow or something like it.
- Much faster for testing out new market systems
- Lower barrier to entry for new users signing up
- Less regulatory risk for everyone involved
But we're actively looking at both the crypto space (for stablecoins), actual fiat like USD, and alternative withdrawal mechanisms (e.g. sending your Manifold balance to 501c3 charities). Attaching real value to these bets is very much something we're interested in!
Just to be clear I'm not trying to shit on your product. In fact, if your platform allowed me to participate with real money I would 100% use it.
What do I get for buying access to the service?
Have you read Shockwave Rider? John Brunner envisioned a network that placed odds on everything, just like this.
Why do I get the feeling one of the underlying key variables here would be how likely [X] is to like prediction markets?
I absolutely cannot hate this project more.
Facebook has an effect on the society you live in and on YOU despite you not using it.
The oracle would be responsible for resolving the bet and would turn an ambiguous statement into a well defined one. i.e. What you are betting on, ultimately, is how the linked oracle will resolve the bet, and everyone can see the code.
The first bet I see is about Russia invading Ukraine. We could have an oracle that checks Wikipedia's list of Russian military engagements every day and if there is a new one in Ukraine and it stays for five days that might be a sign. Another sign might be scraping New York Times headlines for a list of terms you might expect to see in an invasion. Maybe there's a website tracking Russian troop deployments, or Russian flagged planes and ships and those could become signals. Then, the oracle collects and judges based on its signals.
That said, we'd be very happy if anyone was interested in setting up an oracle on our Manifold! "User-resolved" includes the possibility of "user publicly commits to resolving all markets via an automated, predefined oracle".
As akrolsmir says, someone could commit to resolving according to an Oracle.
But mainly, it allows for a diversity of approaches to serve different user and subject-matter needs. Some markets can be resolved subjectively, others need to rigorously specify each case. Plus, the real world is often ambiguous. You need someone you trust to make the right judgment call.
Imagine - I create a market "Donald Trump will be speaker of the House in 2022" and people bet on that. I, through sock puppet accounts if necessary, bet that he will as much as possible. Then, I just resolve the bet so that I win.
Cheaters will have all the currency and cheating will make the predictions useless or worse than useless.
But the argument is not simply that people won't cheat often. The argument is that people will choose to bet in markets where the creator is trusted. Even if the majority of creators cheated, users would react appropriately and flock to the ones who don't.
It's just like how you purchase goods and services. They often have a chance to keep your money without providing what they promised. But in practice, they can't run a long term business that way.
By the way, even in our play-money currency, the market creators earn a fee on the traders' profits.
A well-designed series of forms would take away the friction of having some dude come in later and tell a moron what they meant to say.
Unfortunately, a form would also deter morons from creating contracts.
Ah. But what we have here is a would-be casino operator with a short-term view, who would love to have their site full of contracts, even if they're free-written by morons.
God-for-fucking-bid we deter some idiots from starting contracts by making them write down logical rules. Let's get as many idiots as we can!
It ain't well thought out. It's not designed to be able to deal with the public. If it makes any impression at all in the media, it will just cast more negative shade on prediction markets, because the people behind it didn't think for a second about how humans fucking work.
Actually, they're a prime example of dumbass greed themselves, since they did it as a result of a stupid idea winning a grant to build...a stupid site. Wonderful.
GO MAKE SOME BETTER GENETICALLY MODIFIED RICE, YOU OVERPAID LAZY FUCKS.
See, that's the issue. Wikipedia already has the Russian-Ukrainian war, because Russia has been occupying Crimea for years.
Wikipedia as a source of truth when money or power is on the line is also difficult. That's why topics frequently get locked.
The NYT would work as a source, but keyword matching could be iffy.
A nominally third party site (again, if real money is on the table) could easily be a fake set up by someone heavily invested in one of the two answers.
That shouldn't be used to say "ground truth isn't available", I'm just not sure it's machine readable and scalable yet. It's possibly I'm missing something obvious.
One key realization is that individual market creators on Manifold are given the same powers that existing prediction market platform or casino bookies are trusted with today. A trader is always placing some amount of trust in the bookie to not manipulate the own market, or pricing that risk into the transaction. We hope to make this risk clear and up-front, and to reward market creators who repeatedly adjudicate markets in a fair way.
User-resolved markets is the brilliant part of our platform, but most people are not able to figure that out.
Where can I follow updates on it so that I can join when there's Email signup? Will you be posting to the Substack for future updates too?
[1] https://predictionbook.com/
PredictionBook was definitely one of our inspirations! They are somewhat out of date with respect to UX; and we've also spent some time innovating on a new Automated Market Maker so that our markets work well for differing levels of trader volume. We hope to bring PredictionBook's core ideas to a much wider audience~
Example, I publish some code that scrapes the outcome of an upcoming sports game. It returns a True/False payload.
Bettors can examine my source code and see the exact time when it will be run. They can then place their bet on the code itself.
Sure the code could point to a bad actor and someone could pull the rug, but you could also take the consensus result from a few trusted sources, e.g. Google sports, ESPN, etc.
I remember this idea was floated after the 9/11 attacks. A spike in a terror attack odds would be an early warning system as someone with inside information on a terror attack tried to profit from it. This idea was shot down somewhat quickly though.
It is really a different animal than the stock market in a sense although the stock market still operates on information vs noise trades.
Kalshi accepts real USD, and all questions are listed and resolved by the Kalshi team; Manifold works with play money (for now), and allows anyone to list and resolve markets.