A few people have talked about instituting a way to exchange mana for real money, such as here:
https://manifold.markets/Nils/will-there-be-a-way-to-exchange-man
https://manifold.markets/MichaelWheatley/how-much-is-m100-worth
I don't know anything about this area of law, but if it's illegal for Manifold themselves to buy back mana due to anti-gambling regulations, I imagine it might also be illegal for individual users to do so. (Or maybe legal for those users, but illegal for Manifold to not take action against them.)
The condition is met if there's an easy way for users to turn their mana into USD or another real-world currency. "Easy" meaning that someone with no special technical skills can reasonably do it in under 3 minutes of work per transaction, under 24 hours of latency, and under 10 minutes of effort for any one-time setup costs.
If Manifold themselves finds a way to offer this, that doesn't count. It must be some third party.
If the condition is never met by the beginning of 2024, this market resolves to N/A. If the condition is met and I hear about any legal issues, this market resolves to YES. If I don't hear about any legal issues by 2024, it resolves to NO.
(If someone impliments this but then Manifold asks them to take it down, or they take it down for some other reason before there's a chance to have legal issues, that doesn't count.)
Related questions
@BenjaminIkuta 3 minutes per transaction and 10 minutes one-time setup costs. That's comparable to making a bank account and using it to make transfers - probably more than 10 minutes but I think it's a reasonable bar for this question.
@BenjaminIkuta Opening a bank account isn't a part of the mana exchange, that's just an aspect of having money in general, so that won't count towards the time limit. (And it would be a setup cost anyway.)
@BenjaminIkuta Oh, I think I misunderstood the purpose of your example. Yeah, opening a bank account is not trivial, but it's also a lot more important than Manifold is to people's lives. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to go through that amount of trouble for any site that wants to engage in E-commerce. Amazon, eBay, etc. are faster.
I think generally people who are making a business out of in-game activity do report it as income, at least when they sell the in-game currency for real money. But if it's exchangeable enough that it's considered a virtual currency (unclear what counts), then you may need to report in-game gold earnings as income even if it stays as in-game currency and never is exchanged for real money. But if that's the case, do the casual players in the same game need to report earning gold as income even if they are just playing for fun?
https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/personal-income-taxes/virtual-tax.htm has some discussion of this
An article I found on legality of real-money in games as it relates to gambling: https://artaevatlaw.com/2021/05/19/video-games-for-real-money/. Unfortunately that did not answer any of my questions.
Hmm, do one-off transactions count here? There was a comment thread where someone offered an ad-hoc, user-to-user exchange (dunno if it actually happened). That would be easy if you happen to be offered an agreeable deal.
If not, what about if there's a platform where people offer exchanges? Maybe it gets a lot of traction, maybe there's just a few offers on there.
@jack If those sort of one-of transactions are common enough that I could easily arrange to sell my mana within a day, yes. (I just added a condition of "24 hour latency maximum" to the description to clarify this.)
If I can go somewhere, post "I want to sell M$10000 for $90 USD" (or whatever the going rate ends of being) and have a high probability of getting the deal done within a day, then that counts. If it's scattered comments across the site that may or may not ever get a response, that's not good enough.