I have a trading dashboard for Manifold power users. (Not working at the moment, should be back up and running within a few weeks.) I've been thinking about expanding it to include real-money markets, such as Manifold sweepcash, Polymarket, Kalshi, etc.
This would allow prediction market users to see everything from a central location, making arbitrage and news trading easier, and giving them useful tools like built in Kelly bets, staggered purchases, etc.
But I'm worried that I'd be opening myself up to legal issues. Manifold's userbase is pretty chill, so I'm not concerned about making it support sweepcash, but Polymarket and Kalshi are much less friendly places.
There could be a bug in my dashboard that causes someone's account to place a bet they didn't intend.
There could be a feature of my dashboard that working as intended, a feature which is useful for its intended audience, but which a new user misunderstands or misuses, and it causes them to lose a bunch of money.
There could be nothing that went "wrong" at all, but some idiot gets mad they predicted poorly and tries to blame me for it.
There could be no upset user, but the government doesn't like that I don't have the necessary paperwork. (Even though I wouldn't be handling any money myself, I'm just providing a wrapper for other platform APIs.)
I would of course include a disclaimer that I'm providing this software free-of-charge and people have to agree not to sue me, but that doesn't mean they won't.
This resolves N/A if I decide not to do this. Otherwise, it resolves based on whether I got sued within the first 5 years of real-money trading being available.
A threat letter does not count.
A small claims case does count, even if it's brought under an organization that is not technically a court of law, like BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal.
(If I allow real-money trading and then disable it later, it'll resolve YES if I got into legal trouble in the mean time, and if not, N/A if it was only open for a short time, or NO if it was open for almost the full 5 years.)
1,000
3.00Ooh, here's one that might at least reduce user error, sorry it it's already obvious to you:
Dangerous features are in some sort of demo/sandbox mode (or visible but disabled) until a user reads the relevant doc and correctly answers a multiple choice question or two. The user is free to bypass it by installing it on their server and changing the config, but then that's on them
Btw, someone I'm close to who knows this stuff also suggested something like this language: "This is for research purposes only. If you use this product to perform real-money trades, you are doing so at your own risk"
Some thoughts
Definitely put a click-through EULA anytime a new device connects for the first time before they can proceed
Consider having the POST functionality disabled for the free demo so that it can only display data but not make trades. If people want to make trades they can install it on their own server
Or, if it's not open source, they could register for an account or buy it from you or whatever, which would be accompanied by a separate more stringent EULA. Though the problem here is that I assume you can no longer say you're providing a free service as-is with no guarantees of suitability for any purpose
If you live in the USA, then for all its flaws, the incoming government is probably not going to be an enemy of online trading tools.
@AlexBokov The US government is in general extremely hostile to gambling, and I don't expect a large change in that just because there's a different president.