Augur's controversy
Ok, so what's Augur? If you're like me, you have heard most of these names being thrown around here and there, but you've probably skipped looking into most of them, as cryptocurrencies and tokens come and go.
Still, some of them do a full circle and hit us in our face again and again, so we would pay attention to them. I probably wouldn't have taken a second look into Augur, an ETH token, if it wasn't for an article on btcmanager.com, rocking words like "assassination", "no censorship" etc.
So, what is it?
Augur boasts to be the first truly de-centralized prediction market. Running on Ethereum tokens, and being 9th by market capitalization, they launched on July 9th with a promise to change the prediction game.
Users can make predictions on any, and I mean, ANY event in the world and buy shares in their prediction. Going long their shares means that they believe the prediction will come true, shorting the shares means they believe it will not come to be.
Due to the de-centralized nature of cryptocurrencies, many influencing factors are cut out of the equation. Organizations, whether government or private, have no control over the predictions made. Users with more REP (Augur symbol) control everything.
While Augur's own website brings a few mild examples, like Political Forecasting, Event Hedging, Weather Prediction and Company Forecasting, according to reports by btcmanager.com, there are already much more controversial predictions set.
I will not share a screenshot, but according to sources, people are betting whether Donald Trump, President of the USA, will be assassinated any time during 2018.
Augur's own team has no control over any of the predictions nor any interest in meddling with them:
“The Forecast Foundation has no power to censor, restrict, or curate markets, orders, trades, positions or resolutions on the Augur protocol contracts. The Forecast Foundation has no more control over the Augur protocol than anyone else using Ethereum.”
Luckily, if you leave aside some of the extreme bets, Augur looks interesting, at least for trying out. At the time of writing this post, I am downloading and syncing my Augur local database with main node, which takes some time. Apparently after that, users should connect their app with a supported ETH wallet, for example Metamask and they're set to go.
People having more experience with Augur, feel free to let us mortals know in the comments section, along with any tips and tricks!
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I'm bullish on augur long term but there are some problems that augur needs to overcome. First there is much competition from existing centralised betting platforms. It's not easy to take their market share away. Marketing is important and also augur is pretty slow right now and there are not enough things to bet on with illiquid markets. The user experience needs to be great or people will use other betting markets instead.
@furious-one
Nice post.
Keep steeming
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