Resolves as YES if Manifold has deployed a mechanism allowing users to invest mana (or some other currency/token) in other people's questions before January 1st 2026.
The mechanism must be available to most users. There must be at least 10 questions (written by 10 different users) available on the platform that they can invest in for this to resolve as YES.
The investment must enable the user to (potentially) acquire some sort of reward if they invest in the right questions.
The investment feature must be implemented as new functionality in the interface. The 'reward' must be represented explicitly as some form of currency/token (e.g mana).
The investment/reward mechanism must be distinct from these existing strategies:
Subsidizing someone else's market on the hope that it will close far away from the resolution value (kudos to @Eliza for pointing this out)
Boosting a market and obtaining a more accurate prediction in return (kudos to @KongoLandwalker )
Creating a derivative market B that resolves as "Will market A satisfy criteria X" (kudos to @KongoLandwalker )
This is related to hypothetical solutions to the long-term market incentivization problem. Note that this investment mechanism does not need to successfully achieve this incentivization in order for this question to resolve as YES (kudos to @Daniel_MC).
Related questions
Instead of adding a feature about investment it is trivial to just make a derivative market B: Will A market satisfy X criteria?
Betting on B is like investing into A with the proposed feature.
@KongoLandwalker I think this question needs more specific criteria. I'll give it some thought. Thanks for your input.
I think the only way to get a net positive mana return with subsidies is to use the approach that @Eliza described in the other comment. I'm not sure if there exist other mechanisms within the current manifold system.
@RemNi i still don't understand the incentive for the system to introduce a feature. What does "investment" bring positive, so that it should be rewarded?
Let's say I opened a market. What usage will I or Manifold get from the fact, that you spent some of your mana in association with the market?
@KongoLandwalker Good question. To be clear, this question doesn't center around the incentive, it is conditioned solely on the deployment of the feature.
There are many ways an investment system could improve the platform. The simplest would be to upweight high-investment questions in the user feed algorithm. That way the investment is implicitly doing some of the legwork of the recommendation system. If investors correctly guess that a question will become popular, then both the user and the investor gain through the implementation of such a mechanism.
@RemNi ok, and in the suggested scheme who would lose the mana? Creator has to get more, Investor has to get more, so traders will pay more fees to "thank" them for bringing such a question into feed?
@KongoLandwalker yes, to reward the investors on top it would require doing something like increasing the fees for the traders.
Automatically making the traders investors, so they automatically acquire investment shares or something, when they make a bet, would offset some of the fees they have to pay. So early traders would pay fewer fees in total if they choose to hold on to their investment shares.
@KongoLandwalker This would also have the effect of encouraging traders to bet on long term markets, to "get in early"
encouraging traders to bet on long term markets, to "get in early"
or to not bet at all, because there would be double incentive for short markets: you know it will return more and you know it will acquire traders faster.
To me it looks like thing that would create gravity towards big and fast markets.
Maybe it would be good in case manifold wants people to gravitate towards prize markets.
Here is my idea: investment is spiritually equal to the Yes bet "will this question get 100 traders?".
If it never reaches 100, then investors get nothing.
If it reaches 100, market becomes Prize market and further fees are uncreased and investors start getting income proportional to their investment and weighted by the time between their investment and reaching 100 traders.
@KongoLandwalker That's an interesting solution. I think it could be extended by adding a time threshold such as "Will this question get 100 traders after 3 months?". That way it excludes short-term markets.
Could then have multiple tiers, such as "25 traders after 1 month", "200 traders after 6 months" ...
One way you can already do this: If I add subsidy to someone else's market that I think is going to close far away from the resolution value, I can get more mana out than I put in.
Giving you transaction fees if you add subsidy to someone else's market is obvious, and if they DONT do that even when we've already asked, the only conclusion is they want us to create our own duplicates instead.
@Eliza hmm, I might need to refine the criteria of this question. How does the subsidization of questions that will close far away from the resolution value trick work exactly?
@Daniel_MC in this case it wouldn't (beyond increasing the subsidy) without other elements. There's currently a discussion on discord about this if you're interested.
In the case that the only way to perform this sort of subsidy would be through making bets, then it would incentivise users to bet on long term markets.