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Ever since the U.S. election, prediction markets have been front and center both in crypto and in mainstream society’s awareness around emerging financial technology.
Even with the massive volumes of the 2024 U.S. election as a distant memory, prediction market volumes today are pushing new heights with the start of the American football season.
As consumer platforms for making speculative bets on real world events, these things are growing fantastically. Events in the zeitgeist are receiving an outsized amount of attention — politics, sports, and pop culture dominate trading volumes on these platforms. Fun!
On this side of prediction market technology, we have entertainment-finance where consumers are free to speculate on whatever pop-culture zeitgeisty event is the "Current Thing."
Yet on the other side of this same technology, we have anti-authoritarian truth-discovering mechanisms that wield financial incentives against autocratic control.
Prediction markets are truth machines — they incent truth to emerge front and center as fast as the free market can price it.
If someone knows something the rest of society doesn't, prediction markets allow them to arbitrage the difference between what they know and what society thinks. Since markets are priced at the margins, the marginal truth of the universe is allowed to emerge and express itself in high fidelity, so long as the prediction market platform is functioning optimally and without censorship.
With this context, we can see two different paths that prediction market platforms can take:
1. Consumer-oriented, entertainment-finance, speculative gambling platforms.
2. Hardened, anti-authoritarian, censorship-resistant, truth platforms.
All prediction markets can be both, and in this dichotomy we see the age-old friction between cypherpunk ideals and consumer UX.
Do we want a platform that reduces the number of clicks to make a bet on the Big Game? Or do we optimize for permissionless, censorship-resistant access so that a dissident of an authoritarian regime can broadcast secrets to the rest of the world?
Truth is often inconvenient
The dystopian trope of a “Ministry of Truth” illustrates how valuable it is for an autocratic regime to determine what's truth from fiction. This is why governments should never get involved in media and journalism, and why freedom of speech is such a critical part of a free society.
Prediction markets are the integration of Speech and Markets — the quality and effectiveness of prediction market platforms will be downstream of the freedom that society has to use them as speech platforms.
If we can only use prediction platforms to bet on who wins the Big Game, but not who wins the Big Election, then their value to society has been severely neutered.
Prediction Markets should not just be the Roman Colosseum to entertain and distract the masses from the reality of the state of the empire. They should be the Global Colosseum where Nation-States and individuals battle it out on equal footing.
“But David, don’t be such a prepper-doomer. Nation-States aren’t going to interfere in prediction markets — that’s so far fetched.”
History shows truth gets punished
Wikileaks, the platform that disintermediated truth and individuals, was built around the fact that truth was getting hidden from the public by editorial filters and state influence. Unflattering hypocrisies, civilian casualties, military misconduct — all things that no mainstream media outlet would dare to report on — were all were shown directly to the public via the Wikileaks platform.
The US tried to silence Wikileaks via financial repression by cutting off their banking access. Thanks to BTC donations, Wikileaks was able to maintain its operations as a platform. These two things, 
Bitcoin and Wikileaks, both represent weapons for the individual to fight against the autocratic tendencies of the state.
Let’s never forget that prediction markets are a weapon for individuals to wield against power structures far larger than themselves. Prediction markets are a new tool being added to the arsenal of the the modern day sovereign individual, alongside encrypted messaging, cryptocurrency, VPNs, and ZK technology.
Let’s make sure as prediction markets are adopted by the rest of society that these tools sharpen, not dull, in their protection of individual rights and sovereignty.
Truth is often inconvenient.
Free markets require free speech.
Arbitrary lines destroy credibility.
History shows truth gets punished.
Markets without truth collapse intro triviality.
