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Comment by jurandom | Hacker News Reader

Any thoughts on Augur/Gnosis? Those have a real use case in my opinion.

Prediction market tokens seem to be really popular. I am sure they will rise in value with the rising tide, but I am not extremely interested in them personally. I am not sure they can deliver on the utopia-like vision they claim to be able to deliver. If I were to buy something right now, I would purchase tezos, ether, and 1-2 of my favorite ether contract tokens. I am very weary though that this is a big bubble.

Are those just prediction markets or is there something else to them? I remember there was a site called TradeSports everyone was excited about in the early 2000s. It's problem was that there was very little liquidity for any bet other than presidential elections and the Super Bowl.

Why is low liquidity a problem? As long as there is someone betting for and someone against an outcome, a prediction market is successful, right?

I bet 50 cents to your dollar that the S&P 500 will be above 2,500 on Jan. 1, 2018. Would I have bet 51 cents if offered? 55 cents? 75 cents? Without a bunch of participants, we'll never know.

Markets with low liquidity are terrible at price discovery. Price in a prediction market is (if we believe in the concept) directly tied to how likely a prediction is to be true.

Augur had been in development for quite a while and it seems to be going pretty slowly. I bought some REP in the crowd sale (which has gone up in value, with the rising tide), have been following along on the subreddit, and I'm not sure it'll ever have any use.

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