There should be a way to bet (short) against “projects” or products, not the whole company. When they hyped about Watson Health, I “knew” it will fail.
Basically, I don't see that Google has any incentive to break out its profits by line of business unless someone forces them to. They're better off if you just look at a black box of ad revenue and say "yeah it's all profitable, so ads are as strong as ever."
Probably could be accomplished without crypto, but it can also be accomplished on some blockchains with minimal additional investment.
However, many jurisdictions ban them outright claiming that they a form of gambling and challenging the unregulated nature of questions leading to misaligned incentives (“When will that building burn down?”).
Yet despite these issues, the scheme can offer a neutral ground for betting against overhyped technologies or registering dissent against the policies of authoritarian regimes.
Cryptocurrency based prediction markets further protect the participants by masking or hiding their identities.
The combination of these features makes prediction markets an effective way to deliver global-scale censorship-resistant voting to the masses.
Your argument isn't with me, it's with whoever decided a prediction market should be illegal. Go change that person's mind.
The blockchain only knows about things on the blockchain itself. So someone has to do the actual data entry into the blockchain, and that person is the weakest link in any 'prediction' scheme.