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An alt has a limited lifespan for anonymity depending on how it is used, and the current community guidelines is a limit of one anonymous alt, all other alts should be publicly declared. Having selective anonymous trades seems it would really increase counterparty risk for trading.

@ShitakiIntaki how so? In non self referential markets the ownership of bets should be independent of the result

@Odoacre What if the market creator has an undisclosed position in the market?

Even in non-game markets, you could cause the predicted event to occur, spend more effort rules-lawyering the market description, create fake trading activity and spread disinformation, accumulate a large position before revealing that the event already occurred months ago, etc.

I wouldn't say anonymous betting is effective, because I could ask someone to do my trades for me if I thought they would arouse suspicion; but I also wouldn't say the issue is irrelevant.

@Mira I don't really get the objection. Manifold has a long tradition of people doing all those things while publicly trading in their own market and the general consensus is it's fine and most users defend the right to do so as if their life depended on it. Why does betting anonymously make a difference? Is it more dishonourable for that market creator to do it in secret? Is it less dumb to be got by these tactics if the trades were anonymous?

Don't you think anonymous trades would help alert newbies that something strange was going on?

My whole point here is to disincentivise the use of alts. If something can be done with an alt or an accomplice there's no reason not to allow it to be done without.

@Odoacre Anonymous betting will enable and potentially encourage behavior which violates the community guidelines. The biggest argument in favor for anonymous betting seems to be that the current alt policy already makes is possible, however I would prefer to err on the side of what the spirit/intent of the community guidelines are. The stated reason for allowing a single anonymous alt is for trading in markets that are sensitive/embarrassing that the prime account would never associate with. The anonymous alt and the prime should be oil and water never crossing paths. To simply allow anonymous betting is far more permissive/pervasive than the intent in the community guidelines.

My take away is that Manifold tries do do as little moderation as possible and so they look to the community to enforce community norms/standards. Anonymous betting would make community enforcement impossible, and would then make Manifold the only ones with the ability to find community guideline violations.

@ShitakiIntaki what guidelines would be easier to violate?

The reason for allowing a "pseudoanonimous" account is not for embarrassing markets but just for bets that you "don't want to be tied to" I'd say market manipulation is exactly what it's for.

And to your last point It's already impossible for the community to know wether an account is an alt or if there has been collusion between multiple users.

@Conflux nice that i can now reply to specific BETS

Another reason to trade via an alt is to farm bonuses. If trades are anonymous, this would be hard to detect.

Another reason is to push the price in the opposite direction you wanna bet in, so you earn more profit. Would be hard to detect if anon trades happen

Once i was looking at some of the earlier deployments of manifold markets (called mantic markets i think) and there was trades like what you described. "A trader bought 10 of NO" and such trades just filled up the entire ledger. I'd take a guess that manifold decided to scrape them away after some discussion

@firstuserhere farming bonuses is explicitly forbidden

Pushing the price in the opposite direction should not work, as markets are zero sum, so you'd be losing mana on one side anyway.

Also since alts are allowed I can right now just make the trades that I wish to remain anonymous through a throwaway alt and other traders would effectively have the same experience as if it was anonymous.

@firstuserhere Yeah, all trades used to be anonymous for awhile! (Unless you left a comment.) I honestly don’t remember much complaint about the switch, so I’d be surprised if they reversed it now.

Since the switch, they added a lot of public info about other people’s balance histories. That’d be hard to square with anonymous bets

@Conflux they don't have to make all bets anonymous, just allow specific bets to be anonymous