Truthcoin

Perhaps you remember InTrade? Or there's also a few UK websites like that. The problem is they're centralized, so they can go out of business or a person who judges / shows the outcomes of events could lie to get a payout. As for capitalism, I would argue that greed is one of the most common elements. We rely on people being greedy and, generally, willing to do the least work for the most possible results - aka laziness. It's trustless in the sense that bitcoin is trustless, we're building a platform that unlike the traditional financial system, doesn't require you to trust others. The way the trustless aspect is used is that people are incentivized to vote on the outcomes of events with the consensus, because if you don't, you will lose reputation in the system. This is explained in further detail in the game-theoretical explanation

Truthcoin satisfies 8 of the 22 requests: https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin my implementation: https://github.com/zack-bitcoin/Truthcoin-POW Science/Drug development: truthcoin allows for a new method of funding public goods that is far more impact per dollar than taxes. Government: http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html One million jobs: Successful traders can do it as a job. Every job that involves nothing more than decisions making can be replaced by a trader. Doctors, Governors, CEOs, various boards and counsels, Congressmen, Supreme Court Judges, etc. are all in danger of being replaced by anonymous, potentially uneducated, traders. Diversity/Developing Countries: It will give modern financial instruments to everyone with internet connection. Insurance to hedge everyone's risks. Enterprise Software: prediction markets are very unconn

The problem here is that "trusted" is not intrinsic to the character of some third-party. I might trust someone with $100, but does that mean I would trust them with $1,000,000? The better solution is to not to rely on trust or semi-trust (i.e. trust multiple parties not to collude) at all. Instead, incentivize people to act in their own self-interest (the same game-theoretic assumption underlying the blockchain). This is how TruthCoin incentivizes voters to adjudicate decisions (voters are analogous to miners): https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin

I wish somebody would write a blog post summarizing and comparing all the developments in this field. First I heard about Colored Coins / BitcoinX [1], then Mastercoin [2], then Etherium [3], then CounterParty [4], nxt.org [5] and TruthCoin [6]. Some people think, that Bitcoin protocol can and eventually will be extended for smart properties and there is no need in all of this. [1] http://coloredcoins.org/ [2] http://www.mastercoin.org/ [3] https://www.ethereum.org/ [4] https://www.counterparty.co/ [5] http://nxt.org [6] https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/3_PM_A... "Public Bads, for example “The ‘New Haven Lighthouse Point Park’ lighthouse to be destroyed before date X” are unlikely to be funded this way, because the Winning State must be made public somehow, and criminals must remain private. Attempts to shift the Schelling-indicator from “Number 1/2/3” to something else, such as “on a Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday evening”, have the disadvantage of alerting law enforcement in advance of the likelihood and manner of a future crime. Trades made just before the crime would, for free, alert law enforcement to an imminent threat of crime. Such ‘tip-off trades’ would be made by any profit-seeking members of the crime group themselves. Therefore, (surprisingly and fortunately) this feature cannot fund anonymous goods such as crimes"

You should check out https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin , which builds up on that idea to design a fully decentralized prediction market.