Slashdot Mirror
Technology Review Launches Futures Market
prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review launched a futures market, allowing people to bet on ideas. A similar concept was at some point introduced by the Pentagon, but later the project was shut down. Currently you can bet on major stock indices, on answers to yes/no questions ('Will Oracle acquire PeopleSoft Inc before March 31st, 2004?') and technological achievements ('When will there be a commercially available electronic device using ultrawideband technology?')" Although the game doesn't use real money, the prizes are pretty swell. I like to think of it as the nerd's version of sportsbook.
Richard Stallman coming to make us an offer we can't refuse.
What's to stop this from becoming real? Why can't I bet on things like this in Vegas or Atlantic City?
moo.
"Will Duke Nukem Forever be released? Ever?"
[ ] yes
[ ] no
what's the over/under on the amount of time until emacs becomes self-aware?
In the classic Shockwave Rider, Brunner describes exactly these kind of contests. In the book they were called "Delphi Polls", and were used by the government to both predict the future and, more subtley, guide public opinion.
Shockwave Rider was, of course, a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock -- I don't know if that's where the Delphi Polls idea came from.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
No betting on when a time machine will be invented. Because the person who guesses when, is probably the bastard that did invent it.
If this post didn't make your head spin on your shoulders and implode, then you have a better temproral mind than I.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
2. Bet half one way, half the other. Discard the half that loses.
3. n--
4. If n>0, goto step 2.
5. Profit!!!
I signed up for the Technology Review newsletter and this was the first piece of actual email I've gotten. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Not only did it basically look like cheap spam to me, clicking on the unsubscribe link did *not* take me to an unsubscribe page, but instead to a main page with only a link to allow me to create an account. The whole thing read like a fantasy football league.
If this "great idea" is going to catch on, they're going to have to start by acting a little more professionally than your average penis enlargment spammer.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
you insensitive futures exchange clod
The Foresight Exchange online game has been doing this since 1994. It was invented by economist Robin Hanson, who was also the mastermind behind the ill fated Pentagon effort.
One of the big problems with these "funny money" based games is the possibility of cheating. Sine it doesn't cost anything to register, you can create as many accounts as you want, for free. What you do is create multiple accounts under different names, and arrange to funnel money from one account to another. You have one account make bad trades so it loses money, which then goes into the other accounts, building up their scores. Since this MIT game is offering valuable prizes, they can expect problems with this kind of cheating.
It looks a lot like Long Bets, which has been around for quite some time. It was launched as a spin-off of Danny Hillis's Long Now Foundation. Other interesting projects of theirs include the Rosetta Project and the 10,000 year clock.
siener's youtube channel
There used to be occasional promotions like this (and maybe still are) on the Howard Stern show. For example, one of their gambling advertisers was taking bets on whether or not Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck would get married by a certain date. You were betting with, and stood a chance to win or lose, real money.
I can't remember now whether it was GoldenPalace.com or BetOnSports.com doing that particular promotion... Both of them are Stern show sponsors, and both of them are based offshore. But wacky, offbeat bets show up at online casinos from time to time.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
No, no, no - many of them are lame hundred-liners by GNAA these days.
Someone else was doing this circa 1998/1999 IIRC... myhand.com? Invible Hand? They had exactly this kind of market, but with funny money. There were bets on the outcome of Madonna's upcoming release, whether who would win the GOP and DNC 2000 Presidential nominations, and bets on tech stuff too... anyone else recall this?
Tweet, tweet.
The jist of the theory is, a panel of experts would make a educated "bet" based soley on intuition, and the average of their guesses usually came up with "close" answers. That is what these two project are hoping to achieve, a cummulative, and perdictive, "best guess".
I read about it in Blind Man's Bluff book (Sherry Sintag, Christopher Drew, pub. 1999). A historical book about submarine espionage.
How about the same thing that stops it from being legal to gamble on professional wrestling. You can only gamble on what's technically a RISK. If the outcome is possibly known, there is no risk involved, and thus no reason for Vegas to make it something to gamble on. That would result in them losing money, which = bad.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Maybe they can use this as a testbed for their incredibly well-thought out "terrorism futures exchange", an idea which was unfortunately scuttled, probably by the communists.
They could shake things up by combining the two overarching themes: Will Microsoft hire mercenaries to keep Linux out of the Sudan? Will Lars Ulrich be assassinated by a rogue faction of the EFF? Who the devil is Wintermute?
windside
--
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
The Iowa Electronic Markets at the University of Iowa has had this for a long time. And it does use real money, and is fully legal.
All this is very similar to the 'Delphi' futures betting system described by SF writer John Brunner in his novel 'Shockwave Rider'. Yet another case of Science Fiction getting there first I think.
Note that Brunner described some bad consequences of such a system, as well as the advantages. Also note that 'Shockwave Rider' is the 'book of honor' this year for the literary SF convention Potlatch which will be in Seattle next Febuary...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Sorry our servers are temporarily unavailable. Please try again latter.
Not only did we cause their server to go off-line, we caused them to start spelling wrong, too! Now just wait until they re-launch the same service tomorrow, pretending they haven't noticed it's a dupe...
Money for nothing, pix for free
I agree that games like these, with no identity checks, are open to cheating. However, I don't understand your cheating method. I just signed up so I don't know the full rules yet, but I don't think you can "funnel money from one account to the next".
Related to your point, I'm wondering if it is possible to launder money via stock exchanges (sort of like what you described, although I think you need more sophisticated methods). Can a drug dealer in Colombia transfer money to some corrupt DEA agent in New York by using stock markets?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I am an anti-capitalist and don't think you can get the truth from the markets. Having said that...
The difference is... one is academic while the other is for government purposes. There is a big difference between the two. It's too bad you don't see the difference. In any case, I am not against USA doing it; I am against anyone doing it. It doesn't matter if it is another country or not, same opinion.
That ends the evil Marxist view...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Actually, a socialist view would want it run by the state, and NOT private industry.
Too bad, you lose.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Oh come on, you're misrepresenting and oversimplifying the issues and you know it.
/. first (yada yada, insert "you must be new here" and get +5 funny for it... I'm just too lazy to create an account, but if I did, you would get modded down hardcore-style)
The terrorist futures market (your "U.S.A" futures market) was to allow people to bet real money on when/where the next terrorist attack was going to occur. This creates an incentive for those trading in those futures to help make sure the attacks happen so as to cash in on their investment. People would literally be betting on other peoples' lives; a rather morbid idea, don't you think? Especially considering that the terrorists themselves could (if the program were expanded to allow more than just select govn't individuals) bet on their own plans.
MIT's futures market is not betting on human life, and for that matter, does not even involve real money. You might as well be playing Monopoly; the real value gained from participating is the same (except that with the MIT futures market, you might see cool new stuff developed as a result of the interest of people who think it likely that a given idea will come to fruition).
One market bets on life, using real money. The other bets on ideas/concepts, using fake money.
Look, I'm a seriously tax-hating, free-market loving, communist-hating "economics-drives-everything" libertarian, and still I oppose(d) the terrorist futures market on the grounds that it creates financial incentive to end human life.
I read a report in some business magazine (Fortune? Forbes?) about the creator of that market - a PhD economics professor. His intentions were excellent, but the problem is that he is so far out of the loop from the rest of society that he didn't realize that people would find such a market morally-repugnant.
"Get it straight"? Speak for yourself. Get your issues straight before committing them to
Possible, but unlikely. Money laundering schemes normally work by routing "dirty" money through a "clean" operation with a small cut being taken by whoever's doing the washing. You'd want to make sure that you're money isn't at any more risk than normal, and the stock market would inject too much risk into the transaction. Not to mention that huge bidirectional trades of stock in a short time can cause the SEC to blink.
Far better to have a legitimate shell corporation hire the DEA agent for "security consultations" for some exorbanant hourly fee and move the money that way.
At least, that's how the whole laundering thing was explained to me. I'm not an accountant, I just write their software...
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
There's no penalty for failure! People will exhibit risk-seeking behavior, "investing" in longshots like cold fusion, because the rewards are only given to the very highest earners. Also, there's no political categories, which is no fun. I'll stick with Tradesports.com (I find it highly amusing that for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton was beating out everyone except Dean and Clark, and Clinton's not even running! She's started slipping, I guess people are finally getting the message that she's not changing her mind)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If I lay a cable between my neighbours' house and mine, and connect my switch to their switch, and neither of us are connected to any other computer, how do you think anybody is going to tap into that? Only by physically compromising the cable is how. They would have to cut it, crimp on some new connectors and plug each one into their own switch. They would have 10 nanoseconds to perform this whole operation between successive data bits. Good luck to 'em trying, I say.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The way this works on FX is this: You want to move money from player A to player B. You find a thinly traded claim, say currently trading at a price of 50. Player A offers to sell a bunch at 20. Immediately, most of the other orders on the board will execute, but you picked a thinly traded claim, so they should represent a relatively small fraction of the ammount you wished to move. Now there is a big offer to sell on the board for 20, which player B scoops up. Then the process is reversed, with player A offering to buy at 70. Player B then unloads the claims he bought at 20 for 70 to player A. There are a lot of variations on this theme with multiple accounts and such, that you could think up.
In the stock market, it's a lot harder to do this type of thing, because of several factors. First, there aren't any stocks that are as thinly traded as the thinnest claims on FX. Second, even if you pick the smallest stock off the pink sheets, you will be dealing with a broker. If you offer to buy at a very high price or sell at a very low one, the broker may just execute the transaction for himself, or with another market maker. If you execute on an ECN, someone else may snag the trade before you have a chance to yourself. Furthermore, in its pure form, you need to be able to sell short. You usually can't do this on a penny stock. Furthermore, these transactions are logged, and this type of transaction would be likely to arouse suspicion if you were way out of line with the market. Therefore, it would be tough to do this with good efficiency, because the other traders and commissions would eat into the money you were trying to transfer.
Becomes a whole lot easier. Imagine the corruption! This stuff is a lot LESS random than sports events, which can be 'thrown' are a lot easier to spot as frauds.
I'm just waiting for the disgruntled engineer to whisper to his cousin to place his money on the new Intel Hypertanic chip to be released in Q4. Then flee with the millions reaped. Puh-leez, this ==lame idea;
There's also the assumption that there are a core group of "experts" who really are good at predicting things. Studies of sucessful entrepreneurs show they are no better at subsequent ventures than anyone else. What you are really looking at is luck and mistaking it for something else. And don't think that making money once you have a lot of money means anything. Remember, the system is gamed in their favour.
I just made about 34% in about 4 hours betting on Viagra futures. I can see how day-traders can get hooked.
Yep, myhand.com was the domain. Invisible Hand was the site name. It was a site that I started. I am happy that you remembered. We later raised some VC money, changed the name, and lost the VC money. I still own all the code for it and been wondering whether I should GPL it.
One core assumption of these types of trading markets is that the price of the item is tied to some objective value. In an ideas market, the price should reflect the probability that the stated idea or proposition will be true. Under this assumption, people could use the price of the idea as a proxy for the probability that the idea is true (and make product development or VC decisions with the information).
But some traders act not on the intrinsic value of the item underlying the tradable instrument, they act on the movement of the price. Thus they might buy in on a idea, not because it is undervalued, but because they think the price will go up. Such speculators profit from short-term trades. Called momentum trading, it is a good way to create a bubble in the price that has nothing to do with the true value of the idea or probability that the idea will come to pass.
Markets like this ideas market and the stock market tend to reflect both rational economic facts and human subjective thought patterns. The problem is that one can never tell when the price represents reality or a mass dillusion.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I wonder when some site owner is going to get irate over a slashdotting? The slashdot effect demonstrates one of the core flaws of the internet -- the connectivity to each node vastly exceeds the scalability of each node. It is too easy for a single node to become the focus of an unsustainable level of traffic.
I wonder if there will ever be a ubiquitous opensource equivalent to Akamai's distributed caching system? Although it would be hard to do with dynamic content, static content could be automatically cached in transit. Requests for static web pages that are heading to a destination would be quickly compared to the reverse flow of pages that are in-cache. If the desired page is already there, the protocol would snarf a copy of the in-cache page instead of routing the request all the way to the destination server (actually, it might route the request, but flag it as "fulfilled").
Do any of the multicasting protocols handle this type of on-the-fly, mid-network rebroadcast from cache?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I really think there will be some kind of securities market based solution for paying free content producers in 25 years, and this is a step in that direction. It's not a pyramid scheme, because when you put money into the hands of *highly productive* free content producers, they will make enough free content to ensure increasing overall wealth/intrinsic value in the economy to keep the market prices rising so that all good investors can expect a return on their investment in the long term. The bigger the market gets, the more efficiently in will distribute money because knowing people will be able to profit from incorrectly priced shares. This is the model we want, because outright donations will be used less efficiently as they get bigger.
In the same way that Fox will turn into a hardcore sex network in the next 30 years gradually enough to avoid the sensors, this betting could turn into exactly what the pentagon tried to do.
2004: When will helicopter prototype X be released.
2007: How long until the first helicopter X will be shot down?
2008: When and where will the next helicopter X be shot down?
2009: What is the current mailing address and phone numer of the next person who will shoot down a helicopter X?
People would literally be betting on other peoples' lives; a rather morbid idea, don't you think?
It may seem morbid and morally repugnant, but its a trillion dollar industry that has been going on for hundreds of years. The entire life insurance industry (including annuities and death benefits) is all about betting on peoples lives. And liability insurance on big construction projects includes bets on the number of lives lost on the project -- the contractors often get a bonus if not too many lives are lost.
There is nothing wrong with buying and selling risk - many people are willing to buy certainty in an uncertain world. And what bigger uncertainty is there than the uncertainty of when someone will die?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sounds like the Delphic Lottery from Larry Niven's Ringworld and related stories.
Larry should have taken out a patent on it.
still I oppose(d) the terrorist futures market on the grounds that it creates financial incentive to end human life.
That was really stupid. You can't be a libertarian if you allow your emotions to overcome your intelligence so quickly. I mean, I understand perfectly, why some people would be up in arms about the "terrorism market" (because they are idiots), but the arguments simply do not hold water. Whatever financial incentive there might be to commit the act, do you honestly believe that it can be in any way comparable to the risks and the expected value of losses? I mean, what sane person would do a terrorist act for a few thousand dollars? And you can't win more, because what would FBI think when you bet 1 million $ on a terrorist act and it happens? You call that incentive to commit the act, I call it incentive to disclose the information about it.
Nobody said (except for conservative wackos like yourself) that participants will be rewarded for successful terrorist acts and not for those that are prevented. What makes you think that the exchange would not reward people for successful predictions that would have resulted in a prevented terrorist act.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
tried submitting this when I learned about it:
http://www.longbets.org/
It's a similar concept, and there are some very familiar names making wagers (Dave Winer, Eric Schmidt, Vint Cerf, even Ted Danson)
In a regular futures market, you're not gambling in a pure sense. Your commiting to buy something (a real tangible something) at some future date for a price you specify today. If that thing becomes more or less valuable by the time you are obligated to buy it then you win or lose money. Generally you sell your contract before the due date, and there is always someone who needs/uses the product that picks it up at the end. This is a bit different than betting on events. What is the market value of an event happening or not? I think this is a fancy way to disguise pure gambling as a legitimate financial instrument.
Okay, so here's a game whereupon the players gamble with fake money for fun and entertainment. They never see a dime of real money, ever. (Unless they happen to fall into the top 8 when the game is over.)
Note, however, that in order to gain full access to the game, you do indeed have to PAY THEM real money.
What a bargain.
Ok, I started on this page, which was linked in the story. I found this link, which is presented as a link to registration in the section labeled "How can I get x$ to start playing?". Interestingly, this link is to an outside domain, nf4.newsfutures.com. More interestingly, nf4.newsfutures.com presents a self-issued SSL certificate with a common name of www.snakeoil.dom and issuing CA of Snake Oil CA.
Ok, so I start to think this is all an elaborate hoax. However, when I click through the link at the top of the left-side navigation bar labeled Trading Account(s), I get sent to a Technology Review registration page, after which I am asked for a trading name in order to setup a trading account. It appears that it is not a hox after all.
So WTF is this link to nf4.newsfutures.com? It's obviously not a placeholder, as it points to an existing domain with a joke certificate. I don't get it.
Whoops, I retract the above post. Turns out that you can pay for premium access to the *magazine*, not the game. I was misled by some text on the account creation page. Moderators, do your thing.
People were predict like 2015, based on M$ "Moore's Law" growth in stock price in the 1990s. Now the stock price has been stuck at the same place for over three years, and not as likely.
Seemed like the whole system was developed by MIT students and/or faculty, but it was not.
You can't be a libertarian...what sane person would do a terrorist act for a few thousand dollars?
:)
No one ever claimed all Libertarians are sane
(Before you mod me as flamebait, I'm card-carrying. Libertarian, that is, not mental patient)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
The whole idea of using a market based system to get a poll sample is based on the idea that people will have more realistic responses if they have their money on the line, even if they don't necessarily agree with that particular outcome. The old "put your money where your mouth is" idea. Without actually putting down some green, it's all just hot air. There is a reason that the IEM was constructed by professors in Economics as well as Poli Sci and others. Because without the Economics part, it's just wanking.
Also, The concept of an Idea market is also a bit of a miss. When you take something like an election, and simply ask "Who do you think will win" and "By what margin", your questions are without bias towards a particular outcome. With an idea, there is no clear, predictable, final event. Will stock X go up? Yes. How much? In what time period? What if No one is right? What if the market takes a powerdive no one expected? Or a terrorist event causes the market to be closed for a day? How do I buy THAT stock? And that's even an idea that's easy to track, and has a two dimensional plane of movement. In the end it's silly because we don't NEED a meta-market for the actual stock market. We already HAVE the stock market, which does that job nicely. How would you track more nebulous ideas, that have no prediction market, but more unpredictable outcomes? Not with a market of this type.
The current stock market works because it takes all the factors of the world, and asks a simple question. Will all these things help or hinder this company from making money, and therefore, make this stock valuable or worthless. In this case, our old friend Gordon Gecko was right. Greed is good. It causes this system to work, and without it, there simply IS no stock market, for ideas, companies, politicians or anything else under the sun.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
That depends entirely on how much is at stake. What is worth more to a terrorist who does not value life -- a few thousand dollars or a few hundred lives?
The original point is still valid - normal people will not become terrorists because of the ability to profit in this perverted way and terrorists usually have other reasons to commit their acts.
What sane person hijacks a plane and slams it into a symbol of American power? Don't they realize the backlash they will receive? Well - no, they don't, because they're blinded by religious fanaticism.
Backlash? I think that was the whole point to make America pissed off. I am not arguing that terrorists are sane. I am arguing that sane people will not become terrorists because of this market.
Let's say the 19 hijackers on 9/11 each bet $10,000 that planes would slam into the WTC and Pentagon. Result? $190,000 profit for their surviving families.
Well, the whole point of the market is to try to prevent terrorism, not for people to profit (that's a side effect). I suspect that someone from FBI or CIA might (just might) become interested in these bets. I mean, you see 19 Arabs betting money that planes will slam into the WTC. What exactly is the reason they do it? Can they know something? Even given the helplessness of the FBI and CIA, I believe there is at least a 0.01% chance that they will be able to prevent the attack, given such an obvious hint. Since the US lost several tens of billions because of the 9/11, paying 200000$ even for a 0.01% chance to prevent the loss is a bargain.
might as well take advantage of our supposedly-capitalist (actually crony-capitalist) system
And we might as well take advantage of their greed.
Do you realize, for example, that foreign exchange markets perform about $1.5 trillion in transactions every day?
Of course, the proposed market was not experimental in any way, right? Surely people would immediately start trading trillions of dollars there. Yeah. This was an experiment, which would be done in a highly controlled environment first. If it proved successful in the trial, then it might have been changed into a full fledged idea futures market.
Who is going to stop a dedicated attacker?
It's all about chances. If you can very cheaply do something that has a decent chance of helping prevent a terrorist act, it is a good idea to try.
I never said the exchange *wouldn't* allow for it. However, I highly doubt that the Islamic religious-zealots who seem to be responsible for the majority of the terrorist acts in the last 30 years or so are going to be overcome by their wives or friends (who are also likely religious extremists) trying to stop them from pursuing their crusade "in the name of Allah!"
You really are very stupid. But I will patiently try to explain.
With the information about the bets currently made on the market, FBI/CIA will be able to prevent terrorism, not wives or friends (WTF?). When I call police and warn them about a bomb in the mall, they go, check and disarm it. When several people will bet money on the market that there will be a bomb in the mall on such and such date, police will do the same. The end result? A terrorist act did not happen, people are safe. What about the better? Since the terrorist act was obviously planned, a person gets the money for the correct prediction.
You may ask, what if people will start planting the bombs just to collect the money? Well, this is not currently a problem. If it ever becomes one, the market can be closed and we will be back to the starting point. But if it doesn't, we will have a useful tool to save some lives.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
500 quatloos on the newcomers!! (STOS)
This might be one of the 5 coolest things I've ever seen.
I was kind of disappointed when the Pentagon cancelled their futures market plans because (even though the program was presented as the macabre plans of an evil genius) it really looked like an interesting experiment for sifting through data and evaluating information. But this... this.... THIS LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF FUN. It's like fantasy football on crack, but with monopoly money and no social diseases.
Kudos to NewsFutures for putting this together. It's going to be tough to tear myself away from this when HL2 comes out, I just hope rehab isn't going to be too expensive.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I still own all the code for it and been wondering whether I should GPL it.
... or perhaps at least find someone willing to donate bandwidth. Unless of course you've got a smart business plan hidden up your sleeve, to jump to step three (Profit!) :)
I'd be interested to see something like what you had -- which was apparently quite well developed, by the way -- released/active again, despite the fact the wheel is obviously being reinvented. Probably more to your lasting fame and credit to release it rather than keep it
Feel free to email me about it!
Tweet, tweet.
--You utter bastard - that's 19+MB worth of pics on 1 page - it takes over 2 minutes to load on 1500 DSL!!
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Interesting site
http://www.opinion-exchange.com
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
Looking through the rules, I found this little gem (emphasis mine):
"TR reserves the right to penalize, suspend, disable, and/or destroy the account of any user that it merely suspects has engaged in any negative or cheating behavior, including:
Using the message boards to spread unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane or indecent information of any kind, or any message negatively inclined in any way towards TR, its sponsors partners, their staff, NewsFutures or the Promotion itself."
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
...it's a market where you trade bets on future events. Not the same.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Last (semi-)serious paper I read on travelling along spacelike curves implied that doing so was only possible if consistency was maintained - you can't go back and change something that would affect "when" you were from.
/., there is no lameness filter, but on "spacelike" will turn it up I think.
Sorry but I dont have the Arxiv ref for you - or whether it was gr-qc, astro, ????. As always use Arxiv with care unlike
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant