Consulting Augur: An Introduction to Decentralized Probability Markets

With all the speculation in the cryptosphere, it is liberating to come across a platform that you can use right here, right now. According to Ben Davidow, Augur is the world's first decentralized prediction market (DPN). It aims to unlock the wisdom of the masses by offering incentives for insider knowledge.  Will Donald Trump win a second term as President?... that is a current question on Augur (probability: 40%). Will there be a big earthquake in Tokyo by April 2019? (probability: 2%.) The theory is, people with secret knowledge, for example Japanese seismologists, will try to exploit their private expertise, and tip off the market. Over time, Augur might answer some of our most profound questions, such as When will AI become self-aware? I would wager never.. but with such an open timeframe, there won't ever be a payday. This is the kind of market I would be ought to stay away from, for reasons that I will shortly explain.

Augur has huge potential, not just in the speculated future, but right now, and that is what attracts me to the platform. That said, the system is still a bit buggy, very much Beta, and counterintuitive for newbies. To begin with, bets are called markets (buying and selling the probability of a certain event). If you want to bet against an event, you sell shares in it (even though you don't own any shares to begin with). Once you wrap your mind around this, it gets a little easier, but there are other problems. The UI can shut down, for days at a time. With some markets it can take a lot of time getting trades through. Cancelling such orders costs more gas (though not as much as it costs to enter or exit a market). Congestion on the Ethereum blockchain can freeze you just when you are about to pounce.

In spite of these obstacles, I persist, because I can see real rewards here. Based on my exchanges so far, I am 93.75% certain that I have found the Holy Grail for bear markets such as these. And since my research has revealed that cryptocurrencies languish in bear markets 75% of their lives, Augur offers me the way to monetize this downtime. Who knows, it could help kickstart the Escape from Oz, a project which has been languishing way too long in my personal bear market... (For the full review of the Augur prediction market, click here.)