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Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

> this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.

Time for you to make some money then? :D

https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...

Can one know how many people are in that market? When prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99 story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people participate in that markets. Where I could find the number of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten, fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit over a thousand, but even then less than a hundred or so where using real money, the majority was using play money. Did I miss the place where everyone is? Is this to expected because the are so many topics you can bet on? Are the resulting prices still meaningful even with a small number of predictors only?

Manifolds main market on LK99 has 4.6k predictors now.

This is a pretty strict version, at 33% now by 2025

https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...

That's a play money market

Hackernews is also play money

Website says $1 083 678 has been bet so far. You can scroll down to see all the shares and their prices.

I wanted to bet 10$ or so, but the two links above both seem to be some sort of cryptocurrency thing. I dunno, isn’t there a way to gamble on the future that isn’t so… shifty?

My understanding is no due to US regulations and their stranglehold on the financial system.

this lets me do what I want by it's bad because hacker news told me crypto can't be useful for anything

That seems to be made up as you would have discovered that there is no major money prediction market besides Polymarket, which was linked above.

What seems to be made up?

He implied there are many money prediction markets.

How did I imply that there are many real money prediction markets, that was exactly my question, did I miss the ones where everyone is or are prediction markets just not that popular and that is why even the big ones do not have a large number of predictors.

There is just one real working prediction market: Polymarket. However, it is currently illegal to use in the US, because of old laws. This can be circumvented with cryptocurrency, but most Americans still won't use such a hack. Which strongly limits the popularity of Polymarket, as US Americans happen to be the people who are most interested in prediction markets.

There are also the prediction ... platforms Metaculus and Manifold, which are legal in the US, since they only use made-up internet points instead of real money. I'm not sure whether this even hurts their accuracy compared to Polymarket though.

ugh, how come people can bet on stupid shit like baseball but they can't bet on important shit like superconductors?

If enough people cared, you could probably make the same argument that got sports betting into a place of legality and get at least some subset of prediction markets legalized.

The sportsbook argument was that sports betting involves more than random chance - knowledge of the game, the players, etc. effectively turn it into a matter of skill.

I doubt there are enough interested parties to bother for prediction markets, though.

The CFTC is overstepping its mandate: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-to-legalize-prediction-...

The sensible thing would be to bet against it - as shown by xkcd

Did that site predate https://xkcd.com/955/ or was it inspired by it?

The author of that comic did not invent prediction markets.

Who invented the euphemism "prediction market" when they just mean gambling?

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