Resolves yes if at any time before EOY 2030, there is an official and publicly accessible system on the Manifold website and/or app that:
Allows players to lend mana to each other.
Forces the players that were loaned some mana to pay the amount they have to pay at the due date (If they can't pay it off entirely, they have to be forced to pay as much of it as possible). (If the players can renegotiate the terms of the contract before the due date, this will still resolve yes.)
Update 2025-02-26 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Important Resolution Clarification:
The system must force repayment in such a way that the lender receives at least as much as the borrower can provide.
This includes cases where the borrower does not have enough in their liquid balance; methods such as draining the balance to 0 or liquidating assets are acceptable, as long as the lender is fully repaid through whatever the borrower can give.
Both the approach of Manifold insuring the loans and that of utilizing asset liquidation fulfill the criteria for this market.
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There seem to be creative methods of manipulating existing systems to make this virtually work.
https://manifold.markets/nikki/will-tumbles-repay-1005-my-loan-on
I'm personally of the opinion that markets like these that make risk free loans between users possible is dangerous to the mana economy. The risk wager on the probability of default should be what drives the interest rate for mana if it is to maintain its psuedo-fiat value in my eyes.
That being said, I can applaud clever gameplay exploits.
@Quroe why shouldn't there be any risk free interest on mana (disregarding the fact that manifold shouldn't offer free insurance like they effectively did in these markets)?
@GastonKessler Ah, good question. I think that interest free mana from the standard loan program is a good idea to remove the time value of mana factor from long term markets, thus making them better calibrated to their true odds.
The harm on the mana economy comes when a user blows up and goes into negative balance with no chance to come back to the surface. If a user goes into a negative balance, then all of that negative balance was created out of thin air and is injected into the economy, and that's an inflationary risk from what I can see, especially if that account leaves the platform.
This risk still exists with the 0% interest loans, but I think the theory is that you only risk what you yourself have in your account. If you have a larger pile of mana in your account, then you probably earned it and have more experience with managing it, and therefore you are less likely to blow up.
If the floodgates are truly opened and unbounded loans are made more accessible, it becomes easier to leverage mana you haven't earned by getting it from other users (or sock puppet accounts), and therefore the economic damage for blowing up and printing effectively unbounded mana is much greater.
There's a good chance I am also wrong with some assumption somewhere, so feel free to correct me. This is getting into monetary theory, and I am no economist.
@Quroe the rules of manifold are informal, and are figured out as we go. nikki's market almost certainly wouldn't be allowed if it became common (designing a market around the mod unresolve power's ability to push balances negative, that market is fine as a one-of but i do not think it would be allowed more broadly). evan's market is a slightly more subtle edge case, but again if you tried to scale that up i think it would be discouraged/disallowed. i don't think the existence of those markets says much much about what manifold should systematically do.
@GastonKessler that's why i'm asking what the intent is here re: when they don't have the balance to repay? I can't really evaluate the suggestion otherwise, because these three potential versions are each very very different:
Not enough balance -> drain their balance to 0 and that's it (i.e. it's a safeguard against someone disappearing or refusing to repay, but it's also trivially easy for them to lock up their mana if they wanted to avoid repayment).
Not enough balance -> drain their balance & liquidate assets to repay (interesting idea, but the details of forced liquidation would be tricky, many markets aren't liquid + older bets have already been loaned back).
Not enough balance -> force them negative & the lender is automatically repaid in full (i.e. implicit infinite liquidity to anyone who wants it with no risk to the lender—seems like a bad idea to me).
@Ziddletwix The second and the third versions would correspond to the idea of this market. Although the third version would be very bad, the condition for this market is that the lender gets back at least as much as the borrower can give him. The lender getting back more than the balance and the result of the liquidation of the borrower's asset (as in the markets mentioned above) would therefore also fill the criteria of this market.