On Sun, 2 Aug 2015, Gaelan Steele wrote:
> I have an idea for a proposal. If there is interest, I will write a formal
> proposal for it. The idea goes like this:
>
> If a player has a guess on what an action taken by another player will be
> (including a timeframe), they can privately notify all other players. All
> players (except for the predictor and the predictee) then vote on how many
> points this prediction is worth (0 through 10). The idea here is that
> something very easy to predict (e.g. they will post a message containing a
> vowel) will be worth less points than something very hard to predict (say,
> the exact text of a proposal.) If the proposal proves true, they announce
> this publicly (and some number of players state that this prediction did,
> indeed, happen beforehand). Any person who has made predictions totaling
> 10 points FOR EACH PLAYER wins the game.
I've always liked the idea of secret goals, and secret bets, and we haven't
done enough of that in this game. The way you're describing it though, I
think it's just too easy to collude... all it takes is one leaker to the
predictee to fix a bet, and I think that would happen a lot.
We've done secret things in public using hashes before (take the sentence
"I predict Gaelan will vote FOR this", publicly post the md5 hash of the
sentence, then after the timeframe, reveal the original sentence and the
hash can be confirmed). We've done this with Voting, we haven't done it with
bets. But these are individual bets, not betting markets... not sure how to
do a betting market that's safe enough from bet-fixing, unless the subject
of the bet is truly random (e.g. "an even number of vowels will be published
in the forum this month"), and completely random bets aren't that interesting,
might as well just roll dice.
A "secret win" game would be fun. Post a hash of whom you think will win.
If that person wins... surprise! reveal your bet and you win instead.
That can lead to a lot of odd stuff and bluffs (at least I'm guessing
it might!)
-G.
