Prediction markets 2018: The state of the industry and where it’s headed
The mathematics of statistics has gone a long way towards understanding and expressing odds, helping us understand the likelihood of a given event occurring. But what if the odds are influenced by a dozen factors that math doesn’t yet know how to quantify — human emotion or motivation, for example? Well, prediction markets fill this gap, giving experts a chance to put their money where their mouths are and giving the rest of us a resoundingly accurate picture of the future. After all, thousands of experts with money invested in their predictions are likely to have better foresight as a collective than any individual could.
The market allows participants to cash in on their in-depth knowledge and also serves as an invaluable tool for researchers, statisticians and potentially even policy makers. But prediction markets have an image issue with policy makers, one worsened by the failure to accurately foretell Donald Trump’s election or the vote for Brexit. The good news is that new technologies are about to change prediction markets forever, making them a more useful tool than ever before.
Prediction markets looked poised to go mainstream at the turn of the century when the CIA started investigating their potential to predict attacks and other changes in the state of U.S. national security. The program was eventually shot down by senators who accused the CIA of pouring money into an “absurd… fantasy league terror game.” But even today the CIA’s website admits that, “The decision to cancel FutureMAP was at the very least premature, if not wrong-headed.”
Google then took up the torch and began investigating the capabilities of prediction markets to predict all sorts of useful things. But the markets’ reputation hit two highly-public snags in 2016 with Brexit and Mr. Trump’s election, both of which were considered very unlikely. These incidents revealed a rare flaw in the markets’ ability to give accurate odds: a bias in participants. Those who voted for Mr. Trump or to leave the EU were not the experts investing in prediction futures.
Luckily, Blockchain technology looks poised to help alleviate this flaw and make prediction markets even more dependable and friendlier to users, which could encourage new participants to get involved and widen the pool of expert opinion prediction markets depend on.
myEdge, a new Blockchain-based company, is at the very cutting edge (no pun intended) of these developments. Blockchain allows myEdge to increase mobility across platforms for investors, pulling the balance of power back in their direction and away from isolationist providers that don’t necessarily offer their users the best deals available.
myEdge shows users the best deals from across different platforms and facilitates quick, simple exchanges of currencies and tokens that allows them to take an offering from almost any platform. It’s a revolutionary new model that will bring prediction markets into a new era, making them a safer investment for serious players and a more reliable indication of probability for researchers and/or policy makers.
If the future is big data, then the future in is Blockchain-based prediction markets.
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