Futarchy At Devcon

Hi Devcon Community,

I’ve been interested in seeing Futarchy used in practice and I think Devcon could be the perfect place to try it out.

At a super high level, Futarchy is a governance mechanic that facilitates decision-making based on what traders in a market think will happen.

In practice, this works by having a prediction market which asks IF this THAN that kind of questions. For example:

IF speaker A talks at Devcon, Then on a scale of 1 to 10 000 how many views will speaker A’s talk receive on Youtube one month after posting?

According to the theory, if traders stake that speaker’s A talk will get a high number of views, speaker A should get a slot to speak.

Any ERC20 can be used to trade on these markets. I’d like to see tokens which are not linked to real-world value but rather airdropped to ticket holders and the “profits” from trading are used to determine reputation which could be useful in curating the next Devcon.

A couple of projects could facilitate this, namely level K’s work on Futarchy and Gnosis’s Conditional Tokens.

Love to chat about the concept further in the comments and how/if introducing Futarchy could improve Devcon.

If you are interested in learning more here is the OG article on the mechanic: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

Disclosure, I work at Gnosis

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Hello @GraemeB!

Super interesting idea! What other aspect of Devcon decision making / planning do you think this Futarchy concept could be applied to?

As for this ^ example, wouldn’t this sort of become a self-fulfilling market? We’ve discussed before as a team to do something like this, but the problem I see here specifically is: as more people “bet” that certain speakers will have more views/popularity, it becomes in the best interest of future betters to also bet on those same speakers, rather than bet on who they truly think would be the most popular.

Because the outcome (selected speakers) would be directly influenced by the outcome of the ‘prediction’ market, I think there’d be a schelling point on the speakers that others have voted on, rather than those you, as a voter, truly think will be the most popular.

I’m neither a game theory expert nor am I very familiar with the futarchy concept, so let me know if I’m thinking about this incorrectly. In any case, curious to hear where else you think this concept could apply! Very neat concept, no doubt!

—Skylar

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