Thanks very much for the replies!
In some of your notes you suggested timelines of a couple of weeks for voting. Would it be fair to say this wouldn't be suitable to horse racing etc. where the events happen very fast, there are many of them and payouts need to be made fairly quickly.
The price will not fix at 1 or 0 until voting occurs, but it will converge toward one of those values as the event info is revealed (ie just as the horse wins). If voting is in two weeks, there may be some time-value-of-money/time-preference/liquidity effect, but shares of the winning horse could still sell for 99.0 or 99.9. Those buying at 99 would be Wall Street / banker types who pick up the shares purely to earn 2 week's worth of above-market interest on their capital.
So fast cashouts shouldn't be a problem.
Yes that makes a lot of sense. I can even see third parties advertising they use TCPM on the back-end but bettors might interact with an interface that is market specific and very user friendly with fast cashouts, all for a small fee but which still makes the process a lot cheaper than traditional betting plus with some new interesting options.
Another question, (I'm not 100% sure I understand the coin system exactly so apologies if this is wrong) but you say in your whitepaper, that
a) Any Bitcoin-user can trade on any prediction market without directly interfacing with Truthcoin at all.
Ie. The trading part is done in Bitcoin.
Trading uses the Truthcoin blockchain, but not the 'Truthcoins' themselves. This is probably my fault for relying on the word "directly", I'll put it on my edit list for v1.2.
It seems that if TCPM became a trillion dollar market, the real benificiary would be Bitcoin holders.
Hard to say. Truthcoin owners would be getting 1% of the trading volume. You are probably right, thus is the power of money's network effect.
Yeah 1% of a $Trillion trading volume would be $10 Billion, which is very lucrative.
However, yeah, the coin that sucks up that $1 trillion volume, (The one the trading is denominated in) will benefit a lot I think.
I still can't clearly see the reason for not making a new TRU trading coin, (especially because the return on that new coin which would start from a very low market cap would be incredible & I don't think Bitcoin separates the ownership/control problem that much better.) but might just be me. I can be a bit slow on some things.
(Because even though the return on a specific TCPM blockchain would be higher by being a voter and owning truthcoin, a voter only has the capacity to vote on X amount of blockchains, so as the TCPM expands they will be selling or losing their stake (via demurrage) in various sub-chains whereas the Bitcoin holder would have a stake in all of them, because all of the trading volume would be denominated in Bitcoin. So IMO the current system does to a certain extent 'separate ownership from control' anyway? )
Actually, the vision for Branching is that all current owners will own all future branches (they will just sell or fail to use the TRU on branches they are disinterested in). It is actually quite a bit like ProtoShares, where PTS is the first branch. Of course, someone can "plant a new tree" by forking the project completely, which might be ideal for private firms, but for public PMs skeptics would wonder why they should trust you vs. something with an existing reputation. So there is an incentive to buy the earliest tree.
TRU seems a bit different to PTS in that regard as I understand in the moment. In TRU I don't see a lot of new trees but I see a lot of new branches that don't honour the original trunk.
Like say I owned 1% of the first TRU blockchain, then someone created a basketball sub-chain which honoured the base chain,
I would then own 1% of the Basketball sub-chain. But as I'm not particularly interested in voting on Basketball, I would sell my Basketball stake or it would slowly erode away (Through demurrage.)
After a year, the Basketball chain is working well and has gained a great reputation, however the voting demand is too much so they decide to make some new sub-chains/forks and divide basketball up by the various divisions.
It seems if you wanted to make a sub-chain/fork that works the best and that basketball bettors would trust the most, the basketball division sub-chain would be better off honouring holders of the current Basketball Chain not holders of the original TRU blockchain from which it was originally forked?