Welcome to the dark side of cryptocurrency – a place where you can place a bet on any prediction but only win when it comes true.
One of the top predictions is staking to win if US President Donald Trump is assassinated.
All you need to melt in to the shadows is an Ethereum enabled wallet.
According to the developers Forecast Foundation, the protocol Augur is the next big thing in prediction markets.
The software was written to help with political forecasting, market forecasting and even predicting the weather.
How Augur works
A prediction is floated on the network – like will Elon Musk’s SpaceX complete a manned flight to the International space Station by the end of 2018?
Members then bet on the outcome by trading shares buying is going long and selling is shorting.
When the outcome is confirmed, speculators holding shares predicting the winning result are paid out.
The Augur system runs on the Ethereum blockchain, and is tamper-free.
Developers say Augur has low fees, user-created markets, automated pay-outs and is open to all.
“Augur is built from the ground up to be owned and operated by the people that use it. This is a technical reality enabled by the Ethereum blockchain and open source software,” say the developers.
“Augur is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Decentralized technology means decentralized control: no one person can single-handedly change Augur or shut it down.”
First results pay out
Augur has been online for little more than two weeks and already 460 markets are in play with $930,000 staked against the outcomes.
Open predictions include:
- Will North Korea detonate a nuclear device during 2018? – 10% say yes
- Will Bitcoin price be higher than $6500 USD at end of year? – 90% say yes
- Will Bitcoin price be higher than $6500 USD at end of year? – 90% say yes
Check out the open predictions here
The first markets successfully reached their outcomes on July 19, with a $20,000 pay out.
Augur is completely decentralised, and the Forecast Foundation holds no information about the financial keys of users or their identifying information.
software, and individual users of the Augur protocol are the ones that create prediction markets using the Augur protocol.”