Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
Augur will probably be used for betting but really it's a prediction market.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market</a><p>Prediction markets are an interesting tool for determining the most likely answer or result for almost any question. Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions. Many companies already use them internally.<p>Sadly there's only one prediction market that's accessible from the US, and it's an academic project with a 10% fee on profits and a 5% fee on all withdrawals. It's also limited in what you can predict or bet about. Augur or some other decentralized solution is probably our best bet for developing prediction markets further.<p>I really think these markets are the key to overcoming our failure to make good political decisions. It is a wild idea, but I don't know of any other solutions that directly incentivize truth-seeking.<p>Vitalik Buterin actually wrote about these concepts in more length<p><a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/</a>