[extropy-chat] Real money betting markets

[Hal Finney]

There are some jurisdictions where a real-money Idea Futures (IF)
market would seem to be possible.  There are a number of real-money
betting markets available today, but none of them seem particularly
oriented towards ideas or policy proposals.  Probably the most famous
is Tradesports.com, which as the name suggests mostly bets on sports
but does have some current-events and politics bets.  Intrade.com says
"Intrade is a trading exchange for Politics, Current Events, Financial
Indicators,  Weather & other Unique Contracts."  I think they may be
the same as tradesports under a different name, though.

Terrorxchange.com is another one focusing on current events, nominally
terrorism related but actually with a broader focus.  Newsfutures.com does
seem to have a few technology claims: human cloning, the Higgs boson,
on the race between Mars rovers Spirit vs Opportunity; and the fate of
the Huygens probe to Titan next month.

MIT Technology Review is running Innovationfutures.com , which uses
play money but offers real prizes to the big winners every month.
They're really good prizes, too, iPods and TiVos and such - I might sign
up and hope to get lucky.  However it has only a few claims and none are
very far out.  Plus I would be concerned about cheating in a play money
market - FX has had problems with players secretly running multiple
accounts and arranging for one to win at the expense of the others,
inflating its score.

A big problem with even the technology-supporting markets is that the
claim creation process seems to be extremely limited, so we see spotty
and random coverage.  But given that the basic betting operation is legal
(or at least legal "enough"), I don't see why a real money IF couldn't
happen too.

Now, from ten years of playing the play-money IF game, Foresight
Exchange, www.ideosphere.com , I will say that it is much harder than you
might think to create good, bettable and judgeable claims.  We have had a
number of extremely controversial outcomes over the years, and I am sure
that if real money were involved, people would have sued.  This may be
one reason why these commercial markets prefer to make their own claims.
They may feel that they can come up with ones where the judgement will
be clean and they will be less likely to be fighting it out in court.

Hal