Re, this blog post:

https://news.manifold.markets/p/above-the-fold-borrow-away#:~:text=With%20Manifold%20loans%2C%20the%20first,Why%20did%20we%20implement%20loans%3F

With Manifold loans, the first M$ 20 you invest in any particular market is automatically loaned out to you. This means you can keep trading even when you’ve run out of M$! These loans are interest-free, and are automatically repaid when the market gets resolved or you sell your shares.

So Manifold's argument is:

First, this makes it more attractive to invest in long-term markets. Before loans existed, it was hard to justify putting your money into a market which wouldn't resolve for a while. Even if you were very confident that a 50% market would resolve to YES in 10 years, doubling your money over 10 years only represents a ~7% yearly rate of growth. It'd be much easier (and more psychologically rewarding) to make that much on markets resolving in weeks or days.

What I'm seeing is that the space of long-term markets, Sₗₜ has very low volitility (just based upon my observations, could be wrong), and the volume per better should be close to 20 $M, since that's the loan amount, so:

TOTAL_TRADED(Sₗₜ) α (Per Bet Loan Amount) * (Relative Volitility)

That is, people are not likely to trade much on low-volitility markets, there is no incentive to make money trading on something that just stays at X% forever, and in particular if you're only getting $20 M per loan on those.

Therefore:

TOTAL_TRADED(Sₗₜ) << TOTAL_TRADED(Ssₜ)

Basically, loans are essentially worthless, they are just a marketing gimmick to get people to throw money into a pool of money that doesn't move.

If someone can contridict that (by the end of the month, so that in the spirit of the bet, it's a short term market), I would like to hear it!

I will not bet in this market.