That's what I'm waiting for

I figure maybe I could learn to use it as is, but there won't be enough trading partners until it is easy, so might as well wait.

Darn, I must work on this!

Yes, I see the risk of letting one single miner decide the outcome of a bet, so perhaps some bets could be setup so that it requires 1000 winners that vote on the outcome of the programs they have executed, then divide the booty described in the bet?

In less than eight hours, it will be up. Personal commitment to you and me. It's just down to extremely minor tweaks.

Re: Option type: American.

Re: Covered; right now, you must be able to cover with the underlying. v2(3?) you will be able to buy to cover. Later, it's possible we'll allow more speculative buy/sell, and just close you out when you get close to your limit.

As we all know, BTC make the lending / margining situation much more difficult than in most western countries, so I don't really expect we'll do much margining. It's possible I would eventually pre-auth credit cards against losses, but right now, I just want this thing out the door.

Yeah, I think there will be lots of cool bitcoin clients in the future. Bitcoin is only a protocol after all. But I see prediction markets as a generalization of stock markets, currency exchanges, sports betting, futures markets, and possibly even insurance policies and bounty schemes. So all you really need is well designed prediction market support in the core bitcoin protocol. The market will then come up with the actual prediction contracts.

I paid my friend some bitcoins to work on it, so it WILL have development go on! (not just be another give-up project)

Link: https://github.com/pjwaffle/BitFutures

We're ONLY looking for developers right now because it isn't finished... I might offer 0.5 bitcoins for every major contribution to the project, but maybe not.

Wiki might be helpful, as well as just browsing around!

Ask if you would like commit rights!

Hi dacoinminster, thanks for weighing in. Some notes, below:

1) Bets can be machine readable, but this is a problematic single point of failure, especially if a miner is closing out a huge bet. The website in question could easily be down, or it could be hacked, possibly in anticipation of the bet closing. Still, that's a cool idea.

2) Yep, I read up on that thread, but it requires trusted mediators.

3) I'd like to focus on this. The major idea I wanted to test here is that for prediction markets, mediators or referees are never needed. The problem with (1) and (2) is they introduce weaknesses that Bitcoin doesn't have, and it's precisely Bitcoin's resistance to those weaknesses that make it so great. What I'd like to see is a prediction market that is as strong as Bitcoin itself, thereby expanding the Bitcoin economy from just currency and payment to pretty much of all of finance.

4) As an example of how powerful this is, if we can do a prediction market for BTC/USD with just a next generation bitcoin client, it will be as hard to shut down that market as it is to shut down bitcoin itself. Of course if you're betting on USD going up in value, you won't gain possession of any actual dollars. But that's ok, because determining the exchange rate is the hard part, the part that requires mass coordination of the market. Once we've done that, I can just meet up with some guys at a hackerspace and swap USD cash for bitbills or bitcoins. Or I could do a small bank transfer with someone on #bitcoin-otc. The exchange rate will already be set by the prediction market, and both sides can use it to hedge the exchange if they want to. It will never really be possible to shut down this kind of micro exchange between individuals, there's nobody important to go after, and no great risk if you're caught. The safest, most robust interface between meatspace and the Bitcoin economy is masses of individual people, doing small deals across the boundaries. The heavy lifting gets done either entirely in the Bitcoin economy (btc transfers, prediction markets) or entirely in meatspace (car manufacturing).

5) If this does take off, Government will be so severely crippled by the loss of finance, and finance itself will be so utterly transformed, that the meatspace side will start changing fast, too.

strange i see the incoming 0.1 from you but my client still give me that my key is : 18wk1xCrjqCvbkfSXZVCWJu9Nn4Q74dSyc

What if nobody wins?

I just sent in my guess. It will make some of you choke on your drink.

i bet 0.17 BTC that value will be 17$.

coming from :
18wk1xCrjqCvbkfSXZVCWJu9Nn4Q74dSyc