FutarchyCartel (making political decisions via Prediction Markets)

[elliotolds]

Introduction

I'm a cofounder and developer at Atstake. I'm formerly a backend and machine learning developer at Microsoft.

I'm very interested in figuring out how we can get the world to adopt prediction markets as a political decision making mechanism. Essentially I'd like to figure out the best way to move us toward Futarchy.

At the hackathon I'm interested in finding other people who share this goal and who may want to collaborate on it after the hackathon. If we can produce something during the hackathon to demo that's great too.

Idea description

One idea for what we could do is create a simple way for people to donate to important 'questions' (implemented as prediction markets) to improve their accuracy, so this information can be used in political discussion. A tricky part of this problem is how to distribute donations into the market in a way that maximizes its accuracy. An example question that people might want to donate to would be about the GDP of England in a certain year if Brexit occurs vs. if it doesn't.

Alternatively, we could wrote a FutarchyDAO which could hopefully demonstrate that prediction markets are a good governance mechanism.

I'm also open to other ideas, if they seem like a useful intermediate step toward Futarchy.

For an explanation of why prediction markets are so much better than other mechanisms for political decisions, see this wiki.

Skillset

On the tech side I'm mostly a Solidity developer. I could use collaborators with the following skills (and many more that aren't listed -- if this interests you, reach out!)

• Smart Contracts (Solidity, Vyper)
• DApps, Web3.JS (JavaScript, CSS)
• Design, User Experience
• Game theory
• Prediction market theory, economics, product design, general brainstorming

Communication

Telegram: @elliot_olds
Twitter: @elliot_olds
Riot handle: futarchy

[CarboClanC]

Any interest in experimenting with quadratic voting?

[elliotolds]

Unfortunately no -- I think prediction markets have very unique properties that make them a critical component in what I'm trying to do. IMO all voting systems that I've seen suffer from a lack of incentive to "vote well."

[jpkcambridge]

Hi @elliotolds. We just published a roadmap for our work on futarchy at Level K. A couple of us are at the hackathon. Would be great to chat. I'll reach out on telegram.