Will I have to pay Manifold back the free extra loan payouts?
Basic
19
Ṁ11k
resolved Nov 30
Resolved
NO

Manifold had some issues paying out loans on two days in a row recently, resulting in two extra loan payments for most users. These payments are essentially free mana, not actually a loan that needs to be paid back, and they count toward all-time profits and distort leaderboards. I'm up about Ṁ23k because of this.

Will we have to pay them back, within the next month? On Discord there's some discussion about this - the admins would certainly like to reverse the extra payments, but there are some stumbling blocks in figuring out exactly how much to subtract from everyone's balances.

I'll resolve this based on whether I have the extra mana that was paid to me taken from my balance before the end of November in my timezone (AEST).

This is because, in case Manifold only has some users repay their extra loans, I imagine I'll be among the people who do have to pay it back since in my case there's no ambiguity about how much I'd have to pay. So I'm making resolution depend on me.

Addendum: in the case that I have to pay back a fractional amount of the free mana, I'll resolve to min(100, repayment_amount/Ṁ22.5k), where Ṁ22.5 k is roughly Ṁ1k less than the actual amount of free mana I received. This is designed to make the market resolve YES if it's close, and fractionally if it's not close.

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Added an addendum to the description: fractional repayment will mean fractional resolution

Very curious if someone can tell me the details here

@MarcusAbramovitch Discord bug report here, if links like this work: https://discord.com/channels/915138780216823849/1167747252765343786

In short, two copies of the loan function ran simultaneously (no idea why) and one of them resulted in payout but not registering the debt against markets (also no idea why). So it was free mana, affecting balance, profit, and net worth. But not leagues.

You got free mana too, but looks like I got it twice and you got it once. Yours is just after midnight Oct 28th PT. I had two, one at that time and one 24h later in the next round of loans. Again, no clue why.

The difficulty with the admins figuring out how to have people pay it back was in even knowing how much needed to be paid back. The only record of loan payments is in notifications. And there are numerous problems with that (on top of it being obviously not where you would store the information if you were making an active decision).

  1. some people have notifications disabled such that no notification is entered into the db in the first place

  1. if a loan payout is run late in the day PT such that it's already the next day UTC, the notification gets tagged as belonging to the next day, and this causes the next day's notification not to be created (though the loan will still be paid). This has happened a few times recently due to late loan payments being manually triggered

  2. Notifications aren't kept forever in the db, I get so many notifications that any record of my loans is long gone a few days after the fact

Happy to give whatever details.

I'm unclear on why @Stralor has, or thinks he has, paid it back, yet I clearly haven't. I guess it's possible that users who get fewer daily notifications had it debited and those with more notifications such that the notification for that day was no longer in the db didn't.

the earlier ones, yes, I believe we already had them debited. this newest one may or may not have activated as a loan... we'll see shortly!

@Stralor I'm pretty sure I didn't! Would have noticed -Ṁ23k I think. Check out my one-month net worth chart. Oct 28th and 29th are the steps up, no corresponding steps down.

we'll see shortly!

Not free! Still two loans in a day though. Double loans, no loans, early loans, late loans, free loans - has been an interesting week for loans.

@chrisjbillington odd. do you have the notifs? maybe only those of us with them got them debited

@Stralor I had them at the time, but no longer. It seems only a certain number of notifications are stored per user, so as of a few days ago they were gone (from the ui and the database). Perhaps I get more notifications per day than most so they fell away more quickly. When were yours debited?

@chrisjbillington without being able to select the time on my phone, looks like Nov 1st at almost exactly midnight PT

@Stralor looking at it more closely, might have been a negative profit spike. but I do remember it hitting my balance

@Stralor Hm, I might have already lost the notifications by midnight Nov 1st PT. As of Nov 2nd, the earliest loan notification I had was Oct 30th, according to this comment where I was looking into something:

https://manifold.markets/Joshua/how-many-more-no-loan-days-will-the#No6FvU5AwSoucSLJek1N

So midnight Nov 1st I might not have had the 28th and 29th loan notifications, assuming a similar rate of notifications falling out of the db.