@monteluna

I remember writing a lot about Augur and prediction markets when it was around. Back then you wouldn't have the chance to see defi products in Bloomberg articles. Now it's a regular Wednesday discussion. What's interesting is people new to the space keep referring to prediction markets as "truth engines". This is false, and why this particular article is realizing event contracts can financialize executing the outcome. When we discussed this in Augur, we called this "bounty markets" where we expected agents would seed markets purposefully to drive events happening. Instead of truth engines, I would call these systems "information markets". Truth implies binary outcomes and are relative to oracle information, which isn't necessarily true for most questions. It also encapsulates the idea that these are financial products which causes incentives, depending on the markets. I also would say the unlock of blockchains enabled this technology, and there's no way it's going back. People are wildly discounting the implications of a world where a private entity can use crypto to globally affect outcomes. Usually this is done in private backrooms with politicians, and mostly localized. Today it's democratized to anyone in the world with enough capital.

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