$1B is locked in

Only about half way through.... and could see some heavy action in week before the election.

We are at $690M already on October 12th.

$50M per day the rest of the month gets us to $1.5B total, with room to spare

$70M per day gets us to $2B total

With election approaching, I'd imagine we hit some $100M+ days as well

By contrast -- the best part of Manifold might be the highly intelligent passionate community.

Thanks for explaining the bug here. Hope they fix it... at some point.

(I think the UX is also broadly very good as well. It crashes a lot but that's understandable. Navigating the site is fun and fits the vibe.)

Thanks for discussion @Ziddletwix

Honestly my take is that
this sucks

it seems to prioritize some kind of vague "make markets honest" over making them useful (to bettors) especially those who put up the subsidies

But at least now I better understand how it works

All well intended I'm sure but doesn't seem optimal. Especially where "Mana drizzles in over a few days" doesn't make sense at all. And agreed on the market options far from 50/50

And @Ziddletwix this doesn't seem like a corner case... not like we have 100+ options for who will win World Series of Poker. Pretty normal / typical market

@Moscow25 Yup agreed—this is a very reasonable market structure (I've used it myself), far from some edge case. In practice independent MC plus markets with lots of options at the start are ~fairly rare (e.g. the 100+ options for WSOP are normally a lower tier, and basic/standard don't drizzle), so it doesn't tend to scale up so much. But if you want to set independent buckets for predicting some number (super typical use case!), this is the natural way to bump up the liquidity, & unfortunately it's very poorly supported.

We love Manifold but kind of sucks if it's a bug or how stingy the markets get with subsidies even after spending Mana for Plus market

.

Hmm is software buggy again and not using the subsidies correctly -- small bets moving the market...

Have seen this before. Maybe bug came back?

@Moscow25 For a plus market, subsidies take time to drizzle in. It starts with 1000 liquidity, and the remaining 9000 will be added over the next ~day or so.

On the plus side, that means that the probabilities can be easily bet now and then the liquidity only arrives once they're at a sensible point. Unfortunately (and this is like, embarrassingly bad that manifold works this way!!! it really really really needs to be fixed!) when the mana DOES drizzle in, independent MC don't have the clever structure that binary does, so some of the mana will be totally wasted/burned for the options that aren't near 50%

So TL;DR you're right the market starts with 1000M, but that part is intended—the remaining 9000 will arrive soon. This lets people push the probabilities around to start, and the options will have more liquidity once they settle.

The bad part is that you very reasonably used a standard market type as it was seemingly intended, but a fair portion of your mana will be wasted because Manifold very inefficiently applies liquidity to independent MC options far from 50%, and for some reason doesn't return the wasted mana. it's just gone. So most of the mana will arrive, but some fraction of it will be lost forever (& the options that start at 10% and 90% will always have kinda bad liquidity, as those are the ones where it's wasted).

Manifold should really really really fix this! Every independent MC plus question wastes a lot of mana for each option far from 50%, and naturally most people don't realize this (there's no reason they should). If this was a binary market no mana would be wasted.

@Ziddletwix

you can see the liquidity drizzle in here. at some point it'll say M10000/M10000. Given that this is flat out broken for plus markets, I really wish they'd just... disable the drizzler here rather than waste the creator's mana. (just like if you add a new option, it starts with 1000M, and none is wasted)

tl;dr this is my #1 major pet peeve with the site rn and you should join me in yelling at staff to fix this. it's really bad! and quite embarrassing.

#1 gripe

Mana purchases require KYC and being in the US

#2 gripe

Can't send mana to unverified people

#3 gripe

This

@nikki Yeah -- not to be negative but some of the choices don't seem to reflect "what can we do that's not that hard but would delight out biggest customers"

we don't need to be praised for setting up markets, creating volume or buying Mana... but it does seem that at the margin some of these choices discourage that activity

I doubt that Manifold doesn't care... but it comes off as though they care more about other things -- let me put it that way

@Ziddletwix yep

this "crap" about preventing manipulation is kind of insulting when you simply setup a market with 10K+ Mana

like ok... you don't want me to make Plus market? Got it...

@Moscow25 You're not alone in this frustration.

@Moscow25 it's worth noting that if you add an option to this market, it doesn't work this way—it starts with 1000M. In some sense, this is inelegant, it means you need to spend a lot of mana to push it to the right price.

and... it works fine? like, there are versions of this that would work better (initialized probabilities, liquidity drizzle working properly, etc). but no one actually has any problem when each option starts with 1000M liquidity immediately, there's no abuse or anything. it's inelegant but the mana isn't burned. there is no reason for this current status quo, they're forcing you to use an obviously broken system when you create a plus market.

@Ziddletwix 100% agreed -- and that makes sense

I also see your point... I added 10K to start but now we trading 1K across all options which is stupid and less than if I added them one at a time. That's ridiculous.

@Moscow25 Hey all thanks for the v helpful discussion and gripes! We will fix this soon.

@ian Thanks! Much appreciated