Eh, how come it's uses Ethereum chain and money is in btc? Can't be right. > On 26 Aug 2015, at 8:20 am, [email protected] wrote: > > Subject: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. > Message-ID: > <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/11/augur-gambling-prediction-ethereum > > > Augur May Become the Greatest Gambling Platform in History. Is There Anything > the Government Can Do to Stop It? > A blockchain-based prediction market that won’t be controlled or managed by > anyone. > Jim Epstein Aug. 11, 2015 12:36 pm > > An online gambling platform could do to the neighborhood bookie what electric > refrigerators did to the ice delivery man. > Coming this fall, Augur will allow participants to wager money on any future > event of their choosing. Software will set the odds, collect the bets, and > disperse the winnings. The price alone should give Nevada sportsbook > operators pause; an estimated one percent of every pot will go to keep the > system running. The average vig today is about 10 times that. > Augur isn't a full-fledged casino. You can't play roulette or poker, and > running lotto on the platform would be tricky. But it'll be great for sports > betting. > Here’s what’s truly novel about Augur: It won’t be controlled by any person > or entity, nor will it operate off of any one computer network.
> All the money in the system will be in Bitcoin, ??? May be in Ether? > or other types of peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, so no credit card companies or > banks need to be involved. If the system runs afoul of regulators—and if it’s > successful, it most certainly will—they'll find that there's no company to > sue, no computer hardware to pull out of the wall, and no CEO to lockup in a > cage.This is new legal territory. If Augur catches on as a tool for betting > on everything from basketball games to stock prices, is there anything the > government can do to stop it? > Augur is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace, a new kind of entity made > possible by recent breakthroughs in computer science. The purpose of these > platforms is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services among perfect > strangers on a platform that nobody administers or controls. Augur’s software > will run on what’s known as a “blockchain"—a concept introduced in 2008 with > the invention of Bitcoin—that's essentially a shared database for executing > trades that's powered and maintained by its users. > Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed as a banking ledger of sorts—kind of like a > distributed Microsoft Excel file—but Augur will utilize a groundbreaking new > project called Ethereum How is it possible to put btc on Ethereum chain? And, even weirder, take them out? > that expands on this concept. Ethereum allows Augur's entire system to live > on the blockchain. That means the software and processing power that makes > Augur function will be distributed among hundreds or thousands of computers. > Destroying Augur would involve unplugging the computers of everyone in the > world participating in the Ethereum blockchain. > If Augur is destined to become the cypherpunks answer to gambling > prohibition—the betting man’s version of the online drug market Silk Road if > you will—you'd never know it from talking with its developers. They work for > a San Francisco-based nonprofit, attend conferences, have legal > representation, and talk openly about what they’re up to with reporters. > Augur even commissionedone of those cheesy motion graphics promotional videos > favored by new tech startups. > About half of the roughly $600,000 raised by Augur's development team comes > from Joe Costello, the successful tech entrepreneur who was once Steve Jobs' > top pick to become the CEO of Apple. > Joey Krug, a twenty-year-old Pomona college dropout and Augur's lead > developer, never uses the world “gambling" to describe his venture. He and > his team of five employees call Augur a “prediction market,” a term that > emphasizes the information generated when a bunch of people have a financial > incentive to feed their expertise into a sophisticated algorithm. > With Augur, as bettors move money in and out of the pot, the odds adjust. > This yields publicly available statistics that should carry weight because > they're derived from the opinions of a crowd of people with a stake in the > results. InTrade, for example, the best-known prediction market until federal > regulators forced it to stop serving U.S. customers in 2012, beat the > pollsters and pundits by foreseeing the outcome of the 2008 presidential > elections in 48 out of 50 states. > Augur’s developers hope that their platform will make it possible to do a > Google search to look up the likelihood of some future event. This could > usher in a better world, with more informed policy decisions and less > malinvestment. > But Augur also serves the less high-minded—though no less noble—purpose of > providing cost savings and convenience to gamblers. Restrictions on gambling > serve to protect government revenue at the betting man's expense. > State-sanctioned casino operators pay high taxes, and state-run lotteries > fleece their customers. But there's no logical or moral case for government > restrictions on gambling, since no third party is harmed when consenting > adults wager money on the future. Augur actually has the potential to make > the world safer by taking away market share in the gambling industry from > criminals. > And yet sports betting is illegal in most states, and prediction markets are > tightly regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). The > agency sued Ireland-based InTrade in 2012 to prevent it from accepting bets > from U.S. customers. (The company folded shortly after.) In 2013, the CFTC > and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) jointly sued the prediction > market Banc de Binary for allowing U.S. customers to make bets on commodity > prices. > The CFTC has approved other prediction markets, such as the New Zealand-based > PredictIt, but only after it agreed to abide by the agency's restrictions. > Krug says the Augur team is planning to meet with CFTC staff go over how > their system works before it’s launched, but says he's not overly concerned. > “Our friends in Washington, D.C. say the CFTC will probably just dismiss > Augur and say it’s not a big deal,” Krug told me in a phone interview. > That doesn’t sound like much of a legal strategy, but how do you have a legal > strategy when you're building something unlike anything that's ever existed? > Federal anti-gambling laws, such as the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling > Enforcement Act, target the companies that facilitate online betting— website > operators, credit card companies, banks—not individual gamblers. > Augur’s biggest legal vulnerability is the community of human “reporters” who > are needed to settle bets on the platform, says Cardozo Law School's Aaron > Wright, who is writing a book about the legal implications of blockchain > technology. Let’s say a group of people wager money on Augur over the outcome > of a boxing match. Once the bout is over, human participants (who receive a > portion of the trading fees as compensation) must report the outcome to the > system before Augur’s software will disperse the money to the winners. > "There’s at least an argument that the people doing that reporting are aiding > or abetting unlicensed options and could be prosecuted," says Wright. > But Augur doesn't collect personal information on any of its users, so > identifying these people could be difficult. And Augur is a borderless > technology, so U.S. gamblers could simply rely on foreigners to report on the > outcomes of their bets. > One attorney I spoke with suggested that the team that’s building Augur could > be brought up on charges for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy. Nate > Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks > that's far-fetched but says he can't rule it out. Cardozo emphasizes that > writing open source software doesn’t necessarily protect the team from > prosecution. > “We’ve taken the steps that we need to take in order to bracket the > individual's risk and the organization’s risk,” says Augur’s attorney, Marco > Santori, who declined to comment further on exactly what those steps might > entail. > Even if Krug and his colleagues were to face criminal prosecution, the > technology would live on. After Augur is born into the world, the development > team could release a software update that would cripple the system. But in > that case, Augur's users could band together to block any changes to the > underlying code, or another developer could copy the open source code and > simply re-launch the platform. > The big question with Augur—and with blockchain platforms more generally—is > whether they can outrun our regulatory state long enough to grow so large and > popular that they're truly unstoppable. My money’s on Augur in that race. > For more on the promises and pitfalls of decentralized peer-to-peer > marketplaces, read my recentReason magazine feature story on the topic. > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > <http://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20150826/81e1f5d5/attachment-0001.html>
