Hi Tao! Austin from Manifold here. Thanks for writing this up -- I think you did a great job explaining the benefits of a decentralized oracle system! I'm personally very interested in ways to adjudicate resolutions beyond "creator decides", though I don't speak for all of Manifold; James and Stephen lean more towards caveat emptor as where the buck stops. There may be some middle ground here, eg where the default is "creator decides" but creators can delegate to the community oracle.
We'd definitely like to get Manifold to a place where our money feels "real" as well. Crypto is the most obvious solution, but every crypto implementation so far fails the "easy to use" test of the Alexander cube. Polymarket blocks US users; every crypto prediction market requires you to figure out how to onboard money into a personal wallet (FTX is the exception, but they have very few markets atm). I think a managed wallet might be the answer (https://future.a16z.com/missing-link-web2-web3-custody-wallets/) but we have a few other ideas in this space such as cash-prize tournaments and charity prediction markets.
Finally: it seems like Polymarket's markets are no longer resolved by the platform, but rather use the decentralized UMA oracle? Nuno goes more in-depth here: https://forecasting.substack.com/p/2022-02?s=r . It's quite exciting, and I'm tempted to see if a similar mechanism could work for us as well!
I was unaware Augur had died. But just checking their site, I see that 2 hours ago they made what might be their final blog post:
https://www.augur.net/blog/augurdao/
Hi Tao! Austin from Manifold here. Thanks for writing this up -- I think you did a great job explaining the benefits of a decentralized oracle system! I'm personally very interested in ways to adjudicate resolutions beyond "creator decides", though I don't speak for all of Manifold; James and Stephen lean more towards caveat emptor as where the buck stops. There may be some middle ground here, eg where the default is "creator decides" but creators can delegate to the community oracle.
We'd definitely like to get Manifold to a place where our money feels "real" as well. Crypto is the most obvious solution, but every crypto implementation so far fails the "easy to use" test of the Alexander cube. Polymarket blocks US users; every crypto prediction market requires you to figure out how to onboard money into a personal wallet (FTX is the exception, but they have very few markets atm). I think a managed wallet might be the answer (https://future.a16z.com/missing-link-web2-web3-custody-wallets/) but we have a few other ideas in this space such as cash-prize tournaments and charity prediction markets.
Finally: it seems like Polymarket's markets are no longer resolved by the platform, but rather use the decentralized UMA oracle? Nuno goes more in-depth here: https://forecasting.substack.com/p/2022-02?s=r . It's quite exciting, and I'm tempted to see if a similar mechanism could work for us as well!