Author Topic: Feasibility of prediction market business  (Read 2222 times)

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Offline wallace

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Like Empirical suggested, I'm also in favour of Prediction Markets mostly about sports. There's tons of sports betting platforms and it seems it's what the average joe is more interested in.

Prediction markets about sports has huge potential especially in china and some other asia country. this is a horrible maket you can't imagine in the real world.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2016, 04:38:31 pm by wallace »
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Offline Akado

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Like Empirical suggested, I'm also in favour of Prediction Markets mostly about sports. There's tons of sports betting platforms and it seems it's what the average joe is more interested in.
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Offline Samupaha

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One of our portfolio projects (gamebet.gg) is a pioneer in the e-sports gambling front considering it will be the world's first to utilize the blockchain for real time betting on e-sports tournaments. I am open to working with individuals on integration of PM into it. I've been hunting for documentation on the same for a while but I've been busy with other things. If you are interested, I'd be glad to spend time and look into it.

Great! Good to hear that at least somebody is considering this. But unfortunately I'm not a PM expert by any means, so I don't think I can help much. If you are really serious about this, I suggest you contact people like Robin Hanson who are real experts. Paul Sztorc has been planning blockchain based prediction markets for a while, but I dont' think he is interested in implementing it in Bitshares (BTW, he is also very much against Augur).

Offline Stan

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It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.

First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.

Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?

We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.

I think you hit the nail on the head.  The technology is just half the problem.  Understanding the target market is the other half.  Every great idea for a potential application requires an industry savvy entrepreneur to lead it.

Want to do gambling?  You need a gambling industry expert.
Want to do music?  You need a voting member of the Music Academy like Eddie.
Want to run an exchange?  You need someone with that experience like Ronny.
Want to make inroads with the banks?  You need a Wall Street mogul like Underwood.
Want to do multiplayer games?  You need someone with that background, Like Freebieservers.

So we have quite a few business developers incentivized to go recruit more champions from various industries.
Once you have them, they can raise funds and THEN you can build any specialized support they may need.

Its a long mating dance to recruit such partners and then they need time to rally support, build and market.
And you can't go public about the leads until the dance is done.  Even when you have an agreement to announce something, there are no guarantees that any particular partner won't run into roadblocks and delays.  It comes with the job of being an entrepreneur.

In the mean time, the folks we've already got will be most successful working in the markets they understand. 

This, more than anything, affects the order in which things get developed. 

Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline Empirical1.2

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It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.

First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.

Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?

We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.

I agree, I think the potential for a Sports Betting PM in particular is huge but because of the lead, funding & single minded focus Augur has, I've placed it below DEX features on my fantasy development list for similar reasons.

In terms of easiest way for BTS to increase market value, profit & adoption right now...

1. Crypto-currency               (Remove dilution & commit to being sound money - highly unlikely.)
2. Gambling                          (Blockchain based Dice)
3. Liquid Smartcoins           (Liquidity incentives & lower fees)
4. DEX features                    (Bond Market)
5. Sports Betting                 (Prediction Market)
6. Blue Chip Stocks            (Derivatives of world's most popular stocks.)
7. STEALTH                          (More valuable when you have a popular product any of 1-5 above to apply STEALTH too.)
8. Referral Programme      (Need sellable product for referral programme to work.)
9. UIA's                                 (Counterparty and NXT currently dominate UIA's and demonstrate they don't add significantly to market value)

...

4. DEX features                   

I think Augur Sports betting will be immensely successful but it requires a lot of work and exclusive focus so I'm unsure BTS would benefit from diverting focus from DEX features to deliver competitive sports betting.

5.  Sports Betting via prediction markets

Large market of consenting adults excluded from recreational sports wagering and/or paying extortionate rates. The blockchains ability to penetrate global markets at a fraction of the cost make this a sure fire winner. Creating and running a fully fledged competitive decentralized prediction market will be extremely challenging and require exclusive focus from a talented group.

Also I know my number 1 is controversial here, but with FBA's it's almost possible and you can see how successful BTSX was and also that excl. 2014, every year since inception limited POW currencies have made strong gains despite limited marketing and development as well as dealing with a host of very serious problems. In fact in 2015, BTC, despite its problems, was the best performing reasonable size currency of the year. 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-07/its-official-bitcoin-was-top-performing-currency-2015

« Last Edit: January 08, 2016, 12:05:52 pm by Empirical1.2 »
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Offline Xypher

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It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.

First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.

Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?

We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.


One of our portfolio projects (gamebet.gg) is a pioneer in the e-sports gambling front considering it will be the world's first to utilize the blockchain for real time betting on e-sports tournaments. I am open to working with individuals on integration of PM into it. I've been hunting for documentation on the same for a while but I've been busy with other things. If you are interested, I'd be glad to spend time and look into it.

Offline Samupaha

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It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.

First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.

Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?

We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.