Manifold fixes the "daily free mana" exploit by July 1st.

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Ṁ2150

resolved Jul 1

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YES

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There exists an exploit users can use to farm free mana off their daily market. Will Manifold take measures which prevent this? Jun 23, 3:31pm: Daily free markets have been removed for the moment. If they're still gone at the end of the month I will resolve this YES. If Manifold reverts to the status quo, I would resolve NO, on the grounds that in common parlance, you haven't "fixed" a problem if the fix was only temporary. I wanted to mention this now because I can see someone thinking in that case that it technically qualifies as having been fixed and then unfixed.

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The number of markets made in the past 24 hours was... five. Imagine five new threads on Facebook, or even an ordinary forum. In a day.

@EnopoletusHarding My balance is less than M$300 and so haven't created a market since the price was instated. I'm here to try to make some ROI. Making markets is something I dabble in when it is free. I doubt I'll make many more in the current set up. It seems like the manifold team are attempting to fill the gap this removal has created. One of the cofounders (@SG) has created 5 of the 6 most recent markets. I'm not sure what the equilibrium is.

As someone who habitually abused this system, yeah, it should probably go. That said: there’s an argument to be made for giving people a bit of free mana for logging in daily. The defunct Forecast prediction markets did this, Manifold still does this (though I think weekly), etc. It’s a good (if artificial) incentive to keep coming back, checking what new markets came up, keep up with your invested ones, etc.

@Kronopath 100% this. I still think simply banning market creators from betting on their own free markets would also fix the issue, but a weekly login bonus is my other preferred solution. Removing the daily free markets without replacing them with something else = likely to make the site worse overall.

Sorry, when I wrote “Manifold” above I meant to say “Metaculus”.

Betting in my own market here because you all were late on the draw.

predictedYES

Do you consider the fact that market starting probabilities can no longer be manually set to be a preventative measure? You have to have a few hundred M$ lying around to farm now, can't do it with only M$10 or so any more.

@MattP Free response.

@MattP But you can make the same amount of money ultimately? Wouldn't seem like a major fix. You'd recoup your capital investment in like 3 days.

Should be a decent arbitrage opportunity with this one: https://manifold.markets/MattP/will-the-rules-of-daily-free-market

lol look at @Undox 's markets list

predictedYES

@ian Oh even I think that's a bit tacky! I was thinking (while walking through this beautiful late-May snow): there are more clever ways of printing mana. For instance, I can start one of those Nuno-style "this market will resolve YES in 6 months" markets, but initialize with P=1%. Then I buy a M$50 YES position, wait 'till others buy YES, and then cash out. I get my quick M$, others get their slow mana (unless they arrive early), but the whole thing looks much less shady.

@ian https://manifold.markets/Undox/will-i-abuse-the-free-markets-again

@ScottLawrence tbh I don't find it tacky in the least. It's just responding to incentives created by the system - isn't hurting anyone. In fact, since that $M is only going to charity or is staying in the system and promoting activity, one could argue it is helping. (at the expense of Manifold potentially not selling as many $M, which is why I leave this to them to solve if they want to and plan not to worry about it otherwise)

predictedNO

@Undox looks like you're on the path to reformation!

predictedYES

Even with the proposal of ad-hoc voiding of obviously exploitative markets, this seems like it's going to drive some bad behavior. At least for simple YES/NO markets, perhaps it would be wise to require that the creator not be the *first* to bet? After all, the creator specifies the starting probability. Requiring that probability to be honest would remove a lot of the "money-printing" aspect of market creation.

@ScottLawrence my proposal had been for a waiting period, but tbh that is probably a better rule overall. Just can't be the first to bet on your own markets. Wouldn't even need to distinguish between free and paid markets in this case. Prooobably easier to implement, too?

@ScottLawrence Interesting proposal; I like it. You can still do a fair amount of money printing via insider trading on personal markets.

We reserve the right to N/A markets which look like they're exploiting this behavior, though we have not done so to date.

@Austin If you want a place to start looking for such markets, I'm definitely guilty of this...

@Austin There's a very blurry line between this kind of behavior and ordinary insider trading.

@Austin I think selectively N/A-ing markets which do this would be an unfair (because you won't catch them all) and wasteful (of your time) resolution. IMO either change the fundamental incentives at work or let it be, but trying to play whack a mole seems like it'd be a bit pointless.

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