Today BitBet has opened a bet on whether Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin forking effort will succeed. The bet which closes to new betting July 2nd, 2016 and resolves on August 1st, 2016 enumerates a number of conditions under which the XT effort could be considered a failure. These metrics include sufficient mining of XT blocks to trigger the fork, the mining of a block over 1000000 bytes with the XT block version number, the mining difficulty of the XTCoin chain, and the price of XTCoin compared to Bitcoin. Back in March the largest Bitcoin bet in terms of value was resolved on the BitBet platform with a total of 5514.62 BTC in wager on the proposition that Bitcoin would surpass Berkshire Hathaway as an investment. At the time of this writing 100.09 Bitcoin have been bet on the side of the XT coup failing, while only 1.02 Bitcoin have been wagered that XTCoin will succeed.
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BitBet is not a prediction market. Where is the order book? Its silly "weight" gimmick is scheduled by a formula.
Real prediction markets are much simpler: an order book displays offers to buy and sell, and the prevailing odds are determined by the point (or spread) where they meet — not by some timer ticking down.
Intrade was a real market. BitBet is not a real prediction market.
"Prediction market" is a "real" item in the sense "hamburger" is a dish and then therefore Chez Victor doesn't have "real" "hamburgers". No, it doesn't. In the sense that it doesn't serve the shit you're used to.
Indeed, confusing prediction markets with mutual betting is not the shit I am used to.
What if there is an later version of XT such that all the bits that the current Bitcoin-XT sets are still high (indicating big blocks are supported) but there are additional bits set as well (e.g., for support of some soft fork as well)?
It would probably be safest to ask this on the Bet's comments.
Then it wouldn't be XT, would it. Just like it's not Bitcoin now, is it.
So then it reads more that this prediction isn't whether a big blocks hard fork will succeed but rather whether this particular client will not be the one used, even if we end up with some other big blocks hard fork by then.
One can't make proposition that fit the vague, meaningless drivel in the heads of "the community" for the exact same reason the pockets of the members of that community are empty. And I do mean exact same reason.
There is already a 2015 bet targeting bigger blocks.