If Manifold turns off the ability to turn mana into charitable donations or other items of significant value as described here, will the quantities of mana in use on Manifold experience a significant increase, along with a decrease in how much traders intrinsically value 1 mana?
This is common problem in play economies that give out bonuses to reward behavior they want to encourage, but don't have a good way to remove currency from the ecosystem. See the former MTG trading site Pucatrade for a nice case study on how abundant free money giveaways led to runaway inflation and the collapse of the site economy and eventual shutdown of the site.
If Manifold turns off the ability to cash out mana and significant inflation occurs, this market immediately resolves YES, no matter what happens after that.
If Manifold turns off the ability to cash out mana and no inflation occurs for a year, this market resolves NO.
If Manifold turns off the ability to cash out mana and then turns it back on after less than a year and no inflation occurred in the mean time, this market remains open without resolving until the next time they turn it off. (If it looks like the reason they turned it back on was due to signs of inflation about to occur, that will be sufficient to resolve this to YES.)
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@IsaacKing yes. This is a common technique used by governments all over history to get rid of debts. Compare with the Roman Empire reducing the amount of silver in coins but keeping the same face value.
@Odoacre of course at the time they did not even know what inflation was, but the effect was the same: the price of goods rises because the real value of the currency decreases. Stored currency wether in a bank or stored under the mattress loses value, creating pressure to store value in commodities or real estate instead. This causes the actual price of those assets to incrrase as well. In the manifold economy there are no real goods immune from currency inflation, except donations, which have promptly skyrocketed since the pivot was announced
@Odoacre Makes sense to me. I also asked an economics student I know and they concurred that this counts as inflation.
@derikk Wait, and it hasn't even been announced. They've made it easier to cash out mana, not harder.
Recommendation: "Inflation is defined as the average percentage difference of mana balance in [10, 25, 50, 75, 90]th percentile users, as measured at the beginning of the year and end of the year".
If some of those percentiles are different("massive inflation for whales, massive deflation for everyone else that keeps losing money"), then the ground-truth calculation is to resolve PROB to a percentage calculated over all percentiles rather than just 5.
Significant can be whatever you want, but using that metric.
@MichaelWheatley Inflation meaning that mana seems worth less subjectively due to existing in greater quantities.
For example, if Manifold ever changes the cost to buy mana to make it cheaper than 1 cent per mana, that would probably mean this market should have already resolved YES.