Since I started working in crypto, I’ve had a lot of questions from friends and family about how (and whether) to invest in crypto. If you simply Google “how to buy crypto” you’ll get a lot of results that don’t apply to Canadians. A lot of these guides start with “Step 1) make an account on [website that doesn’t allow Canadian users]” and that’s no fun at all.
So for the purposes of this guide, I’m going to assume you live in Canada and that you have Canadian dollars that you want to convert into crypto tokens. Let’s begin.
This episode of Economics Detective Radio features Zack Hess. Zack is working on a project called “TruthCoin,” a decentralized prediction market based on the technology behind bitcoin.
Prediction markets are a highly effective way to bring together dispersed information and insight into prices that reflect the likelihood of any future event. However, recent attempts to create centralized prediction markets have been thwarted by governments under antiquarian anti-gambling laws.
Enter TruthCoin. TruthCoin is a prediction market (currently in beta) that will not depend on any central server or organization. This online market will be dispersed among all the participants and thus more difficult to shut down.
Furthermore, TruthCoin will not depend on a central arbiter. The main difficulty faced by the creators of TruthCoin is in creating incentives for human arbiters to judge the outcomes of bets correctly. The solution is for judges to be set against one another, for each judge to get a higher payoff when other judges are wrong. Then any attempted collusion between arbiters falls apart. Continue reading TruthCoin, Prediction Markets, and Anarchy with Zack Hess→
Prediction markets are a wonderful thing. The only problem is that governments keep shutting them down!
The solution is to create a bitcoin-style, decentralized prediction market that can’t easily be shut down. The prediction market could take bets denominated in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. As with these cryptocurrencies, this prediction market would have a public ledger keeping track of bets, with many computers processing bets and updating the ledger. Continue reading We Need a Bitcoin-Style Prediction Market→
Garrett M. Petersen's blog about markets, institutions, and ideas.
