Above the Fold: Did SBF commit fraud?
Self-resolving mechanisms, Aella markets, SBF, and a ton of updates
Greetings! Today we will be continuing our search for a self-resolving market mechanism, sharing topical markets, and announcing our new mobile app!
Was Joe Biden president in October?
Well duh! We don’t need a prediction market to tell us that.
Recent experimental self-resolving prediction markets politely decline to acknowledge your memory as being factual :) Unfortunately, we will never know for sure if Joe Biden was president in October.
In a previous newsletter, we discussed the journey of our users in search of a robust self-resolving mechanism.
One of the markets was still ongoing which users were hopeful would provide fruitful results. Well… that market has finally resolved, but not how one may have hoped.
To summarise, for the market to resolve, the market probability must stay within two consecutive integer percentages for 48 hours. It would then be resolved to prob (if the market is at 78% then each yes share would be paid out at 0.78 mana and each no share at 0.22 mana). After an entire month after when there should have been a known resolution (end of November), the market resolves N/A if the criteria are not met.
Although the probability seemed fairly stable, even for a sure result it was still too volatile to meet the strict quiescence criteria. Towards the end of the month, the market almost resolved to 40% after valiant attempts from Jack and Micheal to manipulate the market. See just a small portion of their huge limit orders:
We’ll have to wait and see if someone runs another experiment. Maybe you could! Here are some thoughts from Jack on some factors that could facilitate a robust self-resolving mechanism.
Aella is back!
For those not familiar, Aella was the first individual with a large community that we paid to use and promote Manifold on Twitter. Several months later, and no longer paid, she is back to bring the sauce to Manifold.
If you need a break from forecasting the demise of our world, perhaps you could indulge in some slightly outrageous content.
Ongoing market:
Resolved market and poll:
Although the market ultimately chose the correct result, it was quite surprising how close the poll on Twitter with swear winning at 58%.
Is SBF going to be convicted of a felony?
SBF’s personal schedule continues to be a trending topic on Manifold, with users trading on which talks he will attend next to leak more information without lawyers present.
Although questionable from a legal perspective, we have respect for SBF’s interest in being as open as possible, even if some suggest its intent is manipulative in nature.
That being said, SBF’s continued transparency is not looking to be particularly helpful to his freedom.
Other interesting tidbits
User @A created a bot that you can tag to receive a comment with a randomly generated number. Test market.
AI Impacts had a work retreat where they tried using Manifold to help plan social activities. They wrote about the experience here: https://aiimpacts.org/notes-on-an-experiment-with-markets/
Shoutout to Frankfurt School who have been using our site as an activity for their resource allocation class. See the group here.
Site Updates
You can now download Manifold Markets as a mobile app! It should function essentially the same as the mobile website. The app will hopefully be more convenient and also has more customisable notification settings! Please consider leaving a review in the store!
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.markets.manifold&pli=1
The iOS AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/manifold-markets/id6444136749
Thanks for reading!
David Chee
 | A guest post by
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Friends don't let friends use "resolve-to-market".