ℹ️Information Seekers

Information Seekers

Information seekers want to estimate the likelihood of some events or convince others that their estimations are accurate. Here are some examples.

Paying to get some information:

• A state actor wants to assess the possible future behaviours of other state actors, such as how likely they are to declare war on them in order to adjust their defence budget.

• People interested in life extension drugs [10] want to know the likelihood that some particular drug would increase the lifespan of people taking it. This can be done with a market estimating the average lifespan of people taking and not taking the drugs. Note that there needs to be an ongoing study about it.

• A company wants to build on an island and wants to evaluate the risks that it would suffer from natural disasters.

• A company wants to know which party will likely be in power in the following years in order to determine in which country they should put their headquarters.

• A journalist wants to determine how likely a powerful state would reveal the existence of aliens in order to use this information in his articles.

• A production company wants to estimate the revenue they would get if they produce a particular movie.

• A Bitcoin holder wants to know if Bitcoin will suffer from an attack after a halving reduces the miner rewards.

Paying to convince others:

• There is currently a debate about the cost/benefit of surgery for teenagers suffering from gender dysphoria. A significant proportion of both “pro” and “anti” early surgery believes that their stance is the objective one and that the stance of the other side is based in ideology. A market on the long term (like 10 years) regret rate of teenagers undergoing surgeries would help them convince the general public whether or not early surgery should be performed. Note that here both groups believe they know the answer to the question and would want to convince others.

• An anti nuclear activist group wants people to know the likelihood of a nuclear power plant exploding in order to alert the public opinion.

• An Ethereum community member wants to show that directing a portion of the block reward to a development DAO (instead of giving all of it to stakers) would be unlikely to reduce ETH value.

• A cryptocurrency enthusiast wants to convince the world that the US dollar will enter into hyperinflation [25].

Initially information seekers would be able to get some information at no cost thanks to token incentives (they’d just need to convince the governance that their questions are interesting). But if they want to get better quality information (and after the token incentives dry up), they can also subsidise markets themselves.