That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.
Problem intrinsic to gambling is that people appropriate expected winnings instead of what they really put in, thus making the feeling of loss even greater than what it objectively is.
The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.
Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true:
Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems.
or
Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it!
HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
> At no point do I say the oracle target should be private
Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.
Instead, your original said stuff like:
> they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity
> no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side
> where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation.
In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance:
"The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor."
> because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.
Remotely relevant? It's not like I'm talking about cats, I'm talking about prediction markets, which is the topic of the article. You would have to be extremely uncharitable to not see a holistic discussion about other problems prediction markets face and possible solutions to those problems as relevant. These topics very seldom come up on HN so a mere mention of prediction markets can and should be a very good excuse to have many side threads on the topic that have been waiting to happen.
Hmm, okay, I can see that. I guess I wasn't paying much attention to the frequency of prediction markets articles on here. From that perspective, I see where you're coming from. I was miffed by the "here" in your "I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here", because I assumed it meant the story under discussion, but I suppose it's a fine comment if we think of this page as a general discussion of the industry.
As to your exact proposal, I do have some criticism (less hostile this time). I don't think it would be easy to get people to do trades when they can't see the price. It's not enough to just ask everybody for limit orders, and then only pair off the ones that cross, because you're asking people to tie up capital on a trade they don't even know the price of.
Basically, somebody does a trade on a prediction market not because he believes he knows the probability, but because he believe he knows it better than the market.
Is there a way in your proposal to get around this limitation?
