Will MM clients of an improperly resolved market retrieve 90% of their deposits by Nov 30, 2022?
Basic
22
Ṁ6531
resolved Dec 25
Resolved
NO

A market creator may have run off with user funds:

https://manifold.markets/yayawong/will-ftx-clients-retrieve-90-of-the

I promise not to do the same with this market.

Will users be reimbursed within the month?

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predicted YES

What resolves this market?

@DTubbs Thanks for the ping. I decided on NO because Yev's reimbursement scheme did not work out completely.

predicted YES

@lu thanks for clarifying and properly resolving!

@lu So what's happening with this market?

If you tried to get money back via Yev in November and did not succeed, please post evidence of this soon. I will resolve accordingly in the next few days.

@lu I somehow missed this comment and didn't tip them. And I can't tip them now because tips have been removed.

FYI I got tipped for my losses on the other market

predicted YES

I was going to reimburse people even without this market. I've done it before.

If anything, this market made me wait longer before doing so, which was probably not lu's original intention.

predicted NO

I don't think this should count: retrieving the original deposits is very different from being tipped for the same amount because tipping doesn't restore the track record.

@StevenK Another difference is that the scammer accounts still have the deposits.

@StevenK You could also argue that some people didn't get reimbursed because they are both victims of the improperly resolved market, and NO in this market. If we take @Yev's explanation of NO voters here paying for the reimbursement (which was an ingenious self-fulfilling plan by the way, props for that), then these people are reimbursing... themselves? So they are still suffering some net loss.

I'm not confident enough in this explanation to stay in, though. I've taken the L and no longer have a horse in this race.

Also, the scammers still having their deposits is not in the original market description, which is only concerned with reimbursement of the victims.

In hindsight I/we could have realised Yev was up to something given the adverse selection of their incredibly large position and limit orders.

@cy "Retrieve" to my mind means "take from the place where it went back to the place where it should have stayed" and not "take from somewhere completely different to the place where it should have stayed". (If someone steals your car, getting a new car is clearly different from retrieving your original car, though fungibility makes it trickier to interpret in the case of (play) money.)

@StevenK You might want to verify whether the remaining NO position is strong enough to support Yev simply buying up enough additional YES to cover up the cyclic reimbursement, which would remove my objection :)

@StevenK That's fair. I think "reimburse" from the description could go either way though, so I'm not certain how the owner will resolve.

predicted NO

@cy In the context of the question saying "retrieve", I took "reimbursed" as implicitly meaning "reimbursed by Manifold", as shown by my comment that went unchallenged at the time. But maybe there's a case for flipping a coin about whether to resolve according to the question or the description. I'm sorry for being lawyerly about this, but it seems like a necessary counterweight to others being tricksterly.

@StevenK I agreed when I read it. But now I'm not certain, and also not sure what @lu thinks.

Agreed in general that rigorously resolving markets is important.

@StevenK @cy I think that the proposed reimbursement scheme would qualify for "YES". I will wait until close, if anyone provides plausible evidence of not getting their money back despite making a good-faith attempt (enough time, to get it from @Yev, I may resolve to NO or N/A depending on the specific situation.

I interpret "retrieve" not as narrowly as you guys, because

  1. mana is fungible

  2. The original market I complained about was about FTX assets, and Yev's scheme would qualify for the original market IMO.

  3. The OT market was about funds, not about track records

  4. I explicitly stated in the comments "Will resolve to yes if each trader gets (>=90%) of their initial deposits back" and "[...] so I think I'd resolve to yes even if they don't get any M back"

  5. While @StevenK's comment made me update strongly towards NO, I never specified a reimbursment mechanism, so this does not matter for the resolution.

In case you disagree strongly with my reasoning here, I'm glad to discuss this more!

@lu I agree with this reasoning!

predicted NO

@lu One might argue the track record aspect makes mana not fully fungible, and if mana isn't fully fungible, then the situation is analogous to saying I retrieved my stolen car because someone else gave me a similar but much worse car in order to win a bet that I'd retrieve my stolen car.

@StevenK Yes, the track record is a strong argument for "tips are an unsatisfying solution", but this market is explicitly about funds, deposits, and reimbursements.

predicted NO

@lu Specifically, it's about whether these will be retrieved, suggesting that the thing regained should be the same as the thing lost, suggesting that it should have the same properties like being counted in profit statistics, and suggesting that it should no longer be in the hands of the people who stole it. The metaphysics of internet funds is fuzzy enough that I can understand ruling another way, but I was clearly trading on a different understanding of what the terms of the contract were the whole time.

predicted YES

@StevenK If I lost money to a fraudster and then got it back I might still have the reputation of having been defrauded, and you could see the profit metric as tracking that.

The bigger question is still about what Manifold admins and developers do about the problem. Not sustainable to have Yev bail us out every time, though still worthwhile to do the unsustainable thing.

predicted NO

@MartinRandall I obviously don't agree it was worthwhile, since the mana was extracted from me through a deliberate attempt to deceive me about the terms of a contract I was buying.

predicted YES

@StevenK I don't see evidence of a deliberate attempt to deceive you, and previously you said you understood a possible yes ruling, and any hypothetical deception would be on the market creator, not on Yev.

predicted NO

@MartinRandall I think my comment that it "looks like this would require a change in site features and policy" made it clear that I was interpreting the contract in the way that I've been arguing for, and Yev not commenting on this and instead asking "Do you guys really think there is a 50% chance of it happening?" seemed deliberately chosen to cause people to trade people based on this interpretation, and then Yev put the market creator in a difficult position by betting (and distributing) a large amount on a different interpretation that had not previously appeared in the comments. I definitely agree the market creator was not deceptive, but the market creator would presumably have wanted to clarify what the terms were if Yev had given the market creator a chance. It's possible that I've been misinterpreting some of this, but that's how it seemed to me.

@StevenK (I'm sorry if this seems peevish, but the "double whammy" nature of these events, where I was betting on this in part to hedge against the original mana theft not being undone, and now it hasn't been undone and I also don't have the hedge, makes the result feel more unfair than would otherwise be the case, though I realize that shouldn't affect the resolution. At any rate, I've sold my shares and no longer have a stake in the outcome.)

@StevenK @Yev Thanks, I appreciate that.

@StevenK I see an extensive discussion of terms six days ago between Yev and Lu. I think Yev's question more naturally reads as a question following on from that discussion, and the market description, rather than a response to your comment.

I'm late to the discussion, but FWIW:

  • If you want to undo people's losses in terms of their profit number, you could offer to reimburse people via profits on a market. E.g. to reimburse M50: they create a market, you buy M50 NO, they buy M50 YES, and then they resolve YES.

  • I think it counts as reimbursement for sure, and there's precedent for it happening a couple times before. I made a similar market https://manifold.markets/jack/will-traders-be-made-whole-for-mr-s where I called out the possibility explicitly. It's unfortunate that it wasn't so clear in this market, but I wouldn't fault the author for that - there was a discussion in the comment that clarified the rules.

@jack

there was a discussion in the comment that clarified the rules

I understood these clarifications as orthogonal to the assumptions I had expressed in an earlier comment about what it means to retrieve deposits. If those assumptions had been challenged, I wouldn't have continued trading.

predicted NO

@StevenK Yeah, I agree it doesn't directly address the disagreement/misunderstanding and is mostly orthogonal. But it seems clear to me that if Manifold had sent mana to reimburse people ad-hoc (without building a feature for it or necessarily changing any policy), that would count as yes. And a random user doing it likewise seems to me to be a clear yes.

I'd argue this would have been a case of losing mana because of misunderstanding the rules, which isn't great but happens to people all the time and doesn't necessarily mean the rules were wrong.

@jack I guess I'm not convinced, but I'd rather let it rest at this point.

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