Current question trader totals:
Will another question go above 5k traders this year?
Immediately resolves YES if another question reaches 5000 or more traders.
Otherwise resolves NO at the end of the year.
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Some thoughts on how we could get another question with 5000 traders, because modelling this is kinda fun:
The first possibility is that one of the other top questions gets enough traders to go over the number. Below I've plotted the number of traders for the top 5 questions (aside from the LK-99 one) over time, from what I was able to glean from the internet archive going back to march.
Given current growth rates, I don't see this as being even remotely possible. However it's possible that with the surge in users since the LK-99 thing got big these growth rates could change. However even a 3x faster growth isn't enough.
The other possibility is another controversial scientific discovery is made, and the replication prediction market becomes equally popular. One obvious candidate is the new cancer pill news. It's been about 5 days and the main market for this research hes reached 347 traders. Originally this didn't sound like a lot, but 20 hours ago it was 300. If we extrapolate that growth, we'd get ~10,000 traders by the end of the year.
However, we can't just extrapolate linearly. My understanding is that there's always an initial surge of popularity for anything, then it levels off in a logarithmic shape. At least that's the shape that my youtube video analytics take. So we should expect the growth to slow down over time. If it ends up at half what it is now, then it could still reach 5000 traders by the end of the year. I actually think the growth will shrink to much more than half, maybe 1/10th. In light of that I'm still leaning no, though I sold some of my shares because I'm not so sure anymore...
@blackle thanks for this! LK-99 blew up from being referenced on twitter by high follower accounts. It also helped that the first market was well-written (for what we knew at the time).
I imagine there are lots of other interesting parts of twitter where people might want to try this - it's just a matter of having someone tweet out a link and the audience being able to get how it works.
The bias against play money is serious, although misfounded in my view. People care about "valueless" insta, fb, and twitter likes, so why not mana? hn and reddit points are worthless too, yet people care a lot. It could even be argued that mana is more valuable than that, since it not only serves a reputational purpose, but can also be used to actually do things (move prices, create, advertise, etc.)
It would be kind of neat if the other 5000+ user question turned out to be this one.
Reason for no: The LK-99 thing was an extremely unlikely splash that brought a lot of people to the market. My sense is a lot of people joined, dumped their 500 free mana into their guess, and left. I don't see this happening again. Even the cancer pill market didn't do it, the relevant market only has 300 traders.
The second most traded market gained ~200 traders in the last month. If you generously extrapolate that growth to the end of the year, you get at most 4000 traders.
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