Team Whale gets 1 point for each 10,000 YES shares they collectively hold.
Team Minnow gets 1 point for each trader holding NO shares.
The team with the most points at close wins.
The market stops normal trading activity at 18:30 Pacific time on April 24th. At this time, it enters "pseudorandom close mode", where it closes as soon as a bitcoin block is mined with a hash that ends in "00". (With 144 blocks per day and hexidecimal hashes, this means it'll likely resolve within 2 days.) I probably won't be online at the exact time the block is mined, so I'll just resolve the market whenever I get back and see that this has occurred. (It'll resolve based on the state it was in at the time the block was mined; any new investements from team Whale or new traders on Team Minnow afterwards won't count.) The information source on bitcoin hashes and mining times we'll use is here.
All NO shareholders count towards team minnow's points, except:
Any account that has declared itself to be an alt, and is not a bot account.
Accounts that have been banned from Manifold.
A "bot account" refers to any account with the "bot" tag that is clearly not human-controlled and has a good reason to exist as a separate account. (e.g. @acc and @Botlab)
If anyone is suspicious that an account may be an undeclared alt being used to unfairly inflate team minnow's points, (which is a violation of Manifold's community guidelines), they should report that account to Manifold using the "report" button on that account's profile page. Market resolution may be delayed for up to a month after close to allow Manifold to investigate these reports.
The resolution council may choose to disqualify some suspected alt accounts, even if Manifold has not banned them.
Note that I phrased the market description in terms of "points" to make it more intuitive, but the title is the technically correct resolution. i.e. Team Whale can get fractional points, and they'll win a tie. (But a tie is extremely unlikely, since buying just 1 more share can break the tie.)
Given the disagreements and ambiguity about this market's close date and resolution criteria, and the fact that I'm both the market creator and one of its largest shareholders, I have delegated its management to @jack, @Conflux, and @MartinRandall. They have final say over all descisions, and it's effectively "their market".
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ665,792 | |
| 2 | Ṁ597,543 | |
| 3 | Ṁ261,980 | |
| 4 | Ṁ218,705 | |
| 5 | Ṁ211,621 |
This market made it to a post by Scott Alexander: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-52223
Ok, I believe this is the final list of everyone I owe mana to for selling out of their NO position. (It includes all the mooks since I was too lazy to filter those out. They obviously don't get a payout.) If you're on this list, (or aren't on this list and believe you should be), please PM me on Discord so I can send you your manalink. My Discord ID is IsaacKing#7376.
AK: M$1667
Ben Mc Gloin: M$527
Primer: M$992
Bruno Ursino: M$1144
Neon Nuke: M$502
Alt102938: M$550
Humble Farmer: M$793
Williams Keller: M$503
Mohammad Bin faysal: M$503
Carson Gale: M$502
Nadja_L: M$502
TĐľm: M$502
Tassilo Neubauer: M$502
Rik Kolin: M$502
Sam Sarjeant: M$517
aggreeegator: M$513
Kongo Landwalker: M$513
Michael: M$510
Cris: M$502
James Lee: M$558
Berg: M$507
Carla Calero: M$529
EDESIRI SHANOMI: M$528
Gabriel Flores: M$528
Smartlance Agency: M$528
Danielka Espinoza: M$528
Lisa Marsh: M$527
Hazel Vivas: M$526
Scott Lawrence: M$526
Akharume Ak Faruk: M$526
JGY: M$526
Great Enulee: M$526
Jeleelat Bolaji: M$526
Ayomide Olabode: M$525
Dah Blakk: M$525
Safurat Bamigbade: M$525
Adeola Owolabi: M$525
CHIMEZIE ANIH: M$525
Hollahmielekan Aliu: M$525
Adelani Ayobami: M$524
Janjan Alo Cabanlit: M$523
Heis Raphxn: M$523
Samuel Christianah: M$523
Denîse Guevara: M$530
johnlee jumaoas: M$523
Shiena Ilagan Omboy: M$522
Ayiesha Marie: M$522
Adebisi Basirat: M$522
Blessing Eguh: M$522
Tonie Labutap: M$522
Ola Smart: M$522
Hikaru Montejo Kojo: M$522
Kelvin Isibor: M$522
Mario Vallejo: M$528
Jay Jumao-as: M$521
Nina Tanjay: M$521
Paolo Labutap: M$521
Botratombo Fanambinantsoa Anth: M$521
Tricia De Luna: M$521
Kit Ochea Batiquin: M$521
Marie Vanessa Tsarazafy: M$521
Julita Labutap: M$521
Anna Arisoa: M$521
Abubakar Joyia: M$520
Mürinö Yöng: M$520
Arts Dan: M$520
Muhammad Imran Malik: M$520
Muhammad Ahmad: M$520
Omorodion Osas: M$520
Azhar Farooq: M$520
Zion Drake Ecoy: M$520
Mudassir Ali Kulachi: M$520
samarelmansy: M$520
Abubakar Uzair: M$520
SHANOMI PEACE: M$520
Ikhide Helen: M$520
Khurram Rashee: M$520
A Ashfaq: M$520
Isaac Zicko Anthony: M$520
Luke Aigbe: M$520
Russel Resubal: M$520
Mohsin Khan Joyia: M$520
Dilawar Khan Abbasi: M$520
Usama Jabbar: M$520
Nourwalid: M$520
Ch Ùsà ma Numberdaar: M$520
Kashif Khan: M$520
Mohsin Ali: M$520
Rashid Khan: M$520
Hasino Aliyu: M$520
irakli abuashvili: M$520
Muhammad Mughees Farhan: M$520
Jun Resubal Jr: M$520
Arman Ray Nisay: M$520
Abdelrahman salim: M$520
Muhammad Tayab: M$520
Usman Farid: M$520
Ubaid Tariq: M$520
Muhammad Umar Alam: M$520
Muhammad Ali CH: M$520
Sajid Karim: M$520
Junaid Iftikhar: M$520
M Ahmad: M$520
Shah Zaib Rafi: M$519
Glory Ofure Akao: M$519
Bolaji Samuel Abiodun: M$519
Fahim Shahzad: M$519
M Shahzad M Riaz: M$519
Muhammad Umer Ch: M$519
Rana Zubair: M$525
AOun Niaz: M$519
Azam Sandhu: M$519
Rehan Yousaf: M$519
Adnan Ali: M$519
Saeed Anwar Dawar: M$519
Numan Nomi: M$519
Christopher Romero: M$519
Muhammad Zubair: M$519
Melvin Sequeira: M$518
Itz Joezy Eyo: M$523
Akinloye Khadijat: M$523
Idagu Janet: M$521
Eneh Doris: M$522
Kerby Daniel: M$522
Akintunde Bankole: M$522
Edel Jhonrex Santino Sarzuelo: M$522
Kathalella Montiel: M$516
Ramon Galeano: M$516
Key Castillo: M$516
Urakih Wang: M$520
Muhammad Bilal Joyia: M$520
Romina Bemarina: M$520
Gladys Tamayo Resubal: M$520
Ahmad Bilal: M$520
Waqas Ahmad: M$520
Rana Mujahid Hussain: M$520
Muhammad Shahid: M$520
M Wisaal Yar: M$519
M Ayoob khan: M$519
Muhammad Akhtar: M$519
Fidelis Osi Aliu: M$519
Asad Shirazi: M$519
aime anne resubal nisay (aime): M$519
Rose RodrĂguez: M$514
Nino Kapanadze: M$514
Muhammad Hanzla: M$519
Mariam Kapanadze: M$514
Ano Khazhomia: M$514
Marita Demetrashvili: M$514
Joseling Silva: M$515
Tee King: M$556
Shanomi Emmanuel: M$553
Young Gailean: M$1341
duck_master: M$541
Saif Ullah: M$540
Farukh Javed: M$540
joseph odhiambo: M$540
Jonathan Emode: M$539
Higgs Casey: M$539
Hal Davies: M$564
Godswill Ukeagbu Uche: M$539
Festus Osasenaga: M$538
Amayogbe Ernest: M$538
Fátima Pérez Duarte: M$549
Ali Hassan: M$549
Boris Montenegro: M$530
Jamaica Jumao-as: M$540
Sarah Banzon Bartolome: M$539
Innocent: M$539
M Hassan Tariq: M$539
Imran Mughal: M$539
Alejandra Ferrufino: M$538
Nderitu Muya: M$561
Muhammad Touqeer: M$560
Hafiz Syed Yahya Abid: M$560
Liss Sequeira: M$559
Patrick Ani: M$575
Ali Haider: M$572
Isaac Butcher: M$578
zwee: M$597
Dach: M$597
Mf-info Antalaha: M$561
aghu: M$636
Cristhiam Lazo: M$548
T: M$583
Sayad Tarif Hasan: M$605
E. G.: M$667
Chinmay: M$628
Reed Donner: M$829
Kyle Gian: M$605
Betty Nyanchama: M$625
J: M$777
Aaron Williams: M$726
Snowy Hill: M$657
Robert Cousineau: M$1500
Juan Gil: M$722
Nuno Balbona: M$701
Sakib Ali: M$620
Zidny Rayhan Aleen: M$644
Sheikh Shamim: M$628
ALC234: M$612
Aminu Mariam: M$715
Joampry Digitals: M$864
ItzNetwork: M$1544
PersonMan: M$1400
Jonah Krompart: M$1168
AJ JOAMPRY: M$963
Donald: M$783
Pickle: M$2150
Arun Johnson: M$1108
Amelia: M$1496
Kola Abe: M$1120
Christin Abt: M$1832
John Thomas: M$1656
cloe: M$1833
trooper: M$2338
Today in between my breaks, I hacked together this quick narration based on @Conflux's summary below of the Whales vs Minnows market, with ChatGPT, midjourney, and voice cloning adding to the creativity.
In the voice of David Attenborough
To resolve this market (https://manifold.markets/chilli/will-the-whales-vs-minnows-market-b).
Will the "Whales vs. Minnows" market be good for Manifold?
@chilli Hm, my first instinct was to vote No because of the real-world harm that the market did, but given that you specifically asked about whether it would be good for Manifold, I don't think Isaac's loss of RL cash falls under the scope of the question. For the same reason, charitable donations don't fall under its scope as a potential good done by the market. So, I came up with a list of pros and cons that are in scope.
Pros:
Brought new people to Manifold
Caused Manifold to implement new policies about alts, and probably some new policies to prevent excessive spending on whalebait markets, and make the site more prediction-focused rather than gambling focused.
It was fun for plenty of users, including a lot of the new users.
Way more people had profits than losses, so all the profiteers have that as a benefit.
It made money for Manifold (technically good for Manifold, even if the money was made in a bad way).
Cons:
One of Manifold's most prolific creators can't make markets anymore because he has a negative balance (though I think he has a plan to come back).
All the drama made Manifold less fun for some users, and some might be reluctant to keep using Manifold because of the drama.
Makes Manifold seem less focused on actual prediction when this and "The Market" are the biggest events of 2023
The harm caused by this market may be outside the scope of the question, but any bad publicity it causes for Manifold is definitely in-scope.
Some of the pros could actually be bad (e.g., some of the new users come from toxic places online and could make the site worse; new policies might make the site less fun).
@JosephNoonan Some of the cons could be good. Manifold learned that fun markets are catnip to current users and should consider how to balance those with prediction. Drama is fun, all publicity is good publicity, and so on.
@ElmerFudd Yeah, similarly to how I mentioned that some of the pros can be bad, most of the things I listed aren't totally clear cut as all good or all bad
@JosephNoonan Con: A regulatory agency might see the big loss as evidence that Manifold is more like a gambling site or quasi-securities market than it purports to be. (Definitely not legal advice, but I think refunding most of Issac's cash was a wise move from a risk-management perspective. Without conducting further research and examining possible precedent, I'd guess Manifold is in a gray area and is best served by erring on the side of appearing responsible.)
@chilli Experience is the best teacher, not the kindest.
I think there's lots to learn for Manifold devs and the Manifold community, but we're not as well placed to benefit from it as I'd like.
The devs learned some things about handling downsides but they're still trying to get market fit and implement core features (good multiple response markets please!) and pivoting to fix some of these downsides now is badly timed.
The community learned some things but we're not empowered to use that - we don't have community moderation tools, don't have a wiki, don't have good market-tagging tools, etc.
@MartinRandall Hm, that's a good point. Even if the new rules themselves are good, they could be a net detriment if they delay the development of other features.
Con: the economy was screwed up. A lot of people made lots of mana but the value of the redistribution is questionable
Con: manifold refused to step in and fix the mess, creating an unfortunate precedent. You could say this is a pro, but in my opinion for a young community it is important to set guidelines and manage defining events like this one. It seems manifold has chosen to just let stuff happen. And this in now pretty clear to all.
@Jotto999 The Kelly Criterion is based on a logarithmic utility function. If your utility function is superlogarithmic, you should bet more than Kelly suggests. If your utility function is sublogarithmic, you should bet less than Kelly suggests. That's just math.
@JacyAnthis Take the linear utility function, assuming whatever mana you make will be donated anyway. With the consideration that Manifold is going to bail you out and refund you when you lost, it make sense to go 500% leveraged. Should have just gone for the maximum leverage possible
@JacyAnthis I'm very skeptical when people claim to have a e.g. linear utility function. Whatever rationale they give, in the real world, that tends to end disastrously. And the bigger the bettor, the more an excessive bet produces bad side-effects/externalities onto others when it eventually goes bust. Isaac was likely traumatized by his mistake here, and it didn't need to happen at this scale. He may recover but...you have to survive mistakes, for superlogarithmic utility to be useful.
Note that there are situations when going somewhat above Kelly can be better. E.g. in some evolutionary situations when the goal is relative wealth instead of absolute.
But when some people say it's worth to just max out bets in a directly linear fashion for charity, they're kidding themselves. They sound like SBF. They blow up eventually, and the bigger they were, the more of a negative externality their foolishness becomes.
@Frankt In a sufficiently-synthetic list of assumptions, maxing out could be the most-productive thing. But given real-world uncertainty and side-effects, alas...
@Jotto999 nah SBF was just unlucky. Obviously people with actual linear utility function would rationally bet all their wealth (or more than that), and of course you will see 99% of them end disastrously (e.g. going bankrupt) because that's what happens when you bet all your wealth repeatedly. But in an alternate universe, where Bitcoin kept rising, SBF might have already became the richest man on Earth after he doubled his wealth 10 times.
/s
I don't know about all this Kelly and logarithmic, I just like putting money on NO so that what I did. If you always bet everything on the side that is going to win, you'll never lose.
@Frankt They push it well into net negative (for society at large) when they're doing this at big scales. SBF didn't just get rich and donate billions to charity in that 1% of worlds, and then harmlessly fade in the 99%. He cost society billions in those 99% of outcomes.
Usually I think rationalists have great judgment. But this acceptance of destructive position sizing is just nuts (particularly when done at large scale). When they're betting $5 at a carnival, they can get away with "linear utility". The bigger the scale, the more they're just being insane and dooming a lot of value to a negative-sum bet.
@TobyBusickWarner Alas, if someone is committed to nuking themselves, so be it.
@Jotto999 I think the better lesson is, don't get into dollar auctions. Or don't play chicken.
This market brought a lot of new users to the site, so some of you probably don't know that you can donate your mana to charity (100 mana = $1 donation). You can choose which charity you want it to go to and how much you want to donate here: https://manifold.markets/charity
Let's make sure something good comes out of this market.
Does anyone feel a bit compromised for having made mana in this market? Intellectually, I shouldn't because I bought before the big mana purchase and without any reason to suspect someone might do that. In addition, there's no real nexus between purchasing small amounts of NO and encouraging the cash purchase.
I was probably going to donate some or all of my ~4,000 M profit to GiveWell anyway, but my compromised feeling probably contributed to, or at least made made more confident in, my decision to donate it all.
@Jason I don't feel compromised. On the net I lost more mana than I won in stupid zero-sum markets. Even for the markets Isaac was involved in it's break even (The Market).
@Jason Yeah, same feeling here. Feels bad to make a profit in a market that hurt someone in real life, but at least we can make the best of it by donating it to charity. I was just about to post the link for all the newcomers who joined the site for this market.
Edit: I feel bad about what I originally said here after seeing the real emotional effect this had on Isaac. I think Isaac had behaved dishonestly in the past in a way that cost me Mana, but I think I was too mean here. I’m sorry Isaac.
The Story of Whales vs. Minnows
A lot happened in this market, so I wanted to ""quickly"" summarize the main plot points so everyone's caught up. After "The Market" resolved, @IsaacKing "found it interesting that this market ended up getting framed as 'the whales vs the masses,' despite the largest whale actually being on team YES. So here's one where that's actually true." It was framed in terms of Team Whale and Team Minnow, but it quickly became clear that Team Whale was a team of one: Isaac King himself. There emerged concerns about highly ambiguous resolution criteria — initially the market would wait to resolve until no one was betting, except if "after a week it looked like it wouldn't be closing any time soon", at which point it would close once a Bitcoin block was mined with hash ending in 00. A week after what? It also was unclear how exactly alt accounts would be counted and removed from counting for the Minnows. Therefore, Isaac delegated resolution to a resolution council of myself, @MartinRandall, and @jack. We sold our shares to remove conflicts of interest (and I offloaded a private loan that I had that gave me indirect interest in NO). We established when the Bitcoin process would begin and set some standards for determining alts.
In any case, the Minnows had taken a healthy lead — each NO bettor required an investment of Ṁ10,000 on YES, after all — and @tornado embarked on a plan to spend real money to hire people from developing countries to make accounts and bet NO. However, Isaac had also been hiring people, and he had them give him his API keys, allowing him to bet for them using a computer program. He initially had them bet NO, to make it seem like the Minnows' lead was safer, but once the random resolution process began, he had them all sell and bought enough YES to put Team Whale into the lead. He spent USD$30,000 on mana for this market, perhaps thinking of it as an elaborate way to make a charity donation: after all, he couldn't lose...right? The market hit 100.0%. We on the resolution council lamented that we couldn't buy NO, but debated whether we'd sell at 96 or 99.
However, Isaac (and we) underestimated the resilience of Team Minnow's recruiting efforts; in particular, recruiting from the Destiny community, whose conceptually flawed early "stock" markets were often won by Isaac. In any case, he then realized that spending additional thousands of dollars to gamble on Manifold was unwise. Manifold graciously decided to refund Isaac $25k of his purchase, and also announced some steps to turn the website back toward real prediction, such as their new Showcase group of markets with Ṁ10,000 subsidies. (Are you a newly rich user looking to maximize profits? You can now do it with prediction instead of whaling on self-resolving markets!) They also changed their alt policy to make it clear that using alts to manipulate markets is banned.
Anyway, the Bitcoin process. Hashes are in hexadecimal, so the chance of a hash ending in 00 is 1 in 256, and there are typically 144 hashes in a day, so the expected time was about 2 days. Instead, it lasted about 6. The chance of this is pretty low, around 9% I think someone said. But that's how it goes sometimes! The market drifted around 10% during that period, on the outside chance that the Whales would mount a comeback, or that more accounts were alts than so appeared. But such a comeback did not materialize.
Whales vs. Minnows (1366 traders, Ṁ6,341,376 volume) was, for better or for worse, quite epic. There's still a lot of detail I was unable to include in this summary (I also wrote it somewhat quickly), but you'll have to wait for the video essay, I suppose...
My god, this market was such a mess. But at least the Minnows made it easy to resolve!
Resolution Reasoning
Before looking at alts, the Minnows have 949 points and the Whales have around 575. So to resolve YES, the Minnows needed to contain at least 374 alts. The resolution council has done some cursory alt checking, and there simply aren't even close to enough possible alts to make a difference. We said that if anyone was suspicious of an account being an illegal alt, they should use the "report" button to report it. However, we found that there were only about 100 alt reports, before even cross-referencing whether they're on the Minnows team, or doing any checking at all to see if the reports are legitimate. Considering self-declared alts, there are 11 hits on the word "alt" in usernames or bios. Even if these numbers are slightly wrong, they're still not anywhere in the ballpark. In addition, we did some checking of suspicions that a majority of new accounts were alts, but we concluded that they were most likely real new users from the Destiny community who wanted the anime supervillain to lose. In any case, it's a Minnow victory, and a NO resolution!
Official Alt Counting
We're aware there are some secondary markets on the exact number of officially determined alts on this market, or on the exact score. We don't plan to give an official estimate — it's not really in our job description, since the market clearly resolves NO — but we may give an unofficial estimate, depending on demand.
Despite the tumult, I'd like to thank @IsaacKing for making a market that led to fun for many, and for acting in what I believe to be good faith throughout. I'd also like to thank @MartinRandall and @jack for being really helpful members of the resolution council, and the Manifold team for helping out and building a platform that can be used for silly and stupid things alike. Have fun out there, and remember not to spend money you can't afford to lose!
Well, the hash happened! Finally. Ignoring alts, the Minnows have 949 points and the Whales have around 575. We'd be pretty surprised if more than 40% of the Minnows are alts, but we still want to confirm we believe this before resolving the market. It shouldn't take too long!
Thanks everyone for bearing with us, and tentative congratulations to the Minnows! The King has been dethroned.
