Manifold Dollars for Charity & more
Manifold Dollars for Charity & more
News from Manifold Markets: Manifold dollars for charity, ACX on market use cases, better site navigation, and selling.
This week we’ve launched a few improvements to our core product, plus we’re working on a new way to give value to your Manifold dollars—by donating them to charity!
A new way to spend M$: On Charity
Manifold is experimenting with a new way to reward predictions: forecasters will be able to convert M$ to real dollars donated to their preferred charity.
We believe that accurate prediction markets can have a big positive impact on the world, so we want to encourage more people to participate and improve our forecasts.
Launching in the next couple weeks, users will be able to spend Manifold dollars from their account to send money to the charity of their choice from a pre-selected list. Manifold dollars will be converted into donations at their normal 100:1 rate. Read more about the advantages of charity prediction markets on this post by Sam Harsimony.
If you are interested in working with us to scale up charity prediction markets, or are a charitable organization interested in partnering with us, please reach out to austin@manifold.markets.
ACX on Information, Decision, Attention, and Action Markets
Scott Alexander wrote another Mantic Monday about alternative uses for prediction markets. For each, he highlighted a market from our site.
Information markets — Learn more about the past or present.
Decision markets — Learn what your decision will be in the future.
Attention markets — Learn what your decision would be if you devoted your attention.
Action markets — Incentivize someone to take an action.
We love hearing about and exploring all such uses for prediction markets, and are frequently surprised by the sheer creativity of our community.
One thesis of Manifold is that there’s a huge unexplored design space for putting the market mechanism to use. We want to improve the world by making an accessible self-service platform for using this mechanism.
Better site navigation
Ever found yourself trying to return to the home feed, but not realizing you need to click our logo to do so? Were you frustrated by how many clicks it takes to check in on a community you follow? Well, no more!
Austin has brought our desktop navigation up to par with a handy left sidebar.
Sell your shares
We recently launched markets with a new automated market mechanism — but the sell option was missing.
Technically, if you wanted to sell your YES shares you could just buy NO shares. Under our new system, these pairs of YES and NO shares would combine to M$ 1 each. However, buying the opposite outcome is definitely not an intuitive way to sell your position!
A further challenge was, after implementing the sell UI, we realized there was no closed-form solution to calculate how much your shares would be worth. Uh oh!
Thankfully, we remembered a couple tools from our school days: binary search plus the guess-and-check method. Yes, this is how we finally got selling to work: there’s a loop that guesses the sell value over and over until it satisfies our constant function equation to 11 decimal places! Whew!
Developer AMA #2
Another successful Ask-Me-Anything with the developers of Manifold. We answered your questions, like:
“What was the genesis story for MM. Where were you when one of you said ‘I got a cool idea...’”
“What is your plan for abandoned markets?”, and
“What's the riskiest assumption you're betting this venture on?”
Links
Finally, one last project we have in the works...🤫
If you’re an accredited investor, and interested in getting this probability to 100%, please contact us at raise@manifold.markets.
Thanks for reading,
James