Prediction markets suck at predictions with the timespan of more than a few months because investments in any other asset grow organically with the market, while bets in the prediction markets don't.
There are other challenges for prediction markets, but this is in my opinion the biggest one. @RobinHanson seems to think that prediction market investments should track index funds. The commenters on "/Eliza/recommend-market-structures-that-in" think that there should be some sort of interest on investments.
Will Manifold implement any kind of growth or interest mechanism for invested mana?
The market closes on 2025-06-28 or on the last day of Manifest 2025, whatever comes first.
I do not bet on my own markets.
Manifold currently prints mana for all users. It also wants to guarantee cash withdrawals based on that mana. I think people underestimate how costly it would be for manifold to offer interest on all of the mana it prints, compared to the typical status quo, where betting sites can help fund their operations with 0 interest on all deposits (typically not including “deposits no customer paid for”).
Simple thought experiment: Manifold currently closely tracks how much mana it prints each day. It views it as a serious/substantial cost. Compare the amount of mana currently printed each day, with the amount that would be printed from interest on all invested mana https://manifold.markets/stats. This is not a trivial hit to Manifold's margin, it would be an enormous change.
Conversely the current state of affairs means that the bets are much smaller than they could be.
Consider this question, for example. It's subsidized by 10k mana. Theoretically it means that it should attract more traders than another question subsidized by just 1k mana, since it provides more returns for the time you spend thinking about it. But the current rules disincentivize substantial bets for the events a year from now and this question so far has attracted only a few hundred in stakes. Paying interest on the investments would make bigger bets much more viable.
Of course, Manifold has to somehow pay its bills, but I assume it could operate the same way as the real-life stock market brokers by taking operation and custody fees.
That's fair! Interest on the mana that Manifold prints is expensive. Paying interest on $ deposits is expensive, relative to the status quo. But if $ deposits massively increased because they paid a bit of interest, & Manifold was able to sufficiently scale up so they are still earning enough of a margin on all deposits (paying users less interest than they receive, taking enough fees from withdrawal, etc), that's a credible theory of how they can accomplish this.
But it requires fairly strong assumptions. And I'm extremely skeptical that manifold could pay "interest on deposits" and avoid being regulated like other financial institutions that do this.
I think we've reached the point you can't say Manifold runs on play money anymore. Prize points are here. Manifold cant treat mana as expendable like they previously could.
There are exploits to turn mana into prize points, so I don't think you can view them as substantially different. I think the bottom line is that implementing automatic growth of mana invested would likely mean coordinating real dollars invested in some bond or index fund to back it up. Otherwise it's exploitable.