alt Hacker NewsI hope we manage to leverage prediction markets to actually achieve goals rather than just making a casino out of it.
For instance, if you spot malware in a commit you could bet heavily against it being merged, and that would attract the maintainers' attention, and they'll see what you see and not merge it, and you get paid for the code review--that money would come from whoever bet that it would get merged, which you could require be the author of the malware. I haven't worked it out entirely but it seems that there are opportunities to build games that reward dilligence and transparency and penalize deception and spam.
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It’s not clear to me how you’d get anyone on the other side of that market. Anyone who is capable of understanding the wager would see the same thing you did, and not bet in its favour. Anyone who can’t understand the code will just pass the bet by and play some other market they do understand. The malware author is presumably not someone you can compel to do anything, never mind pay out a losing bet.
Why not just bet heavily against and then inform maintainers? By just betting on it instead it makes you look like you, or someone you know planted the malware
Alternatively, you can bet a few tens of thousand that your enemy is going to be alive in a few weeks and let the market handle the rest.