Time to bet YES on wild rumors of an April 1st shutdown announcement that I'm starting now.

Does this resolve YES if they announce something like "unless something changes we will have to shut down"?

@MartinRandall Hmm, interesting question. I think this question probably should resolve only on an unconditional announcement. As an example, PredictIt basically announced that they would have to shut down unless they could get a reversal or injunction against the CFTC, and then they did get a (temporary) injunction, so they aren't shutting down yet, and I don't think it would be accurate to say that PredictIt announced their intent to shut down.

Thoughts?

@jack It's awkward because Manifold founders know that probabilities are "never zero". There's always a chance!

https://www.predictit.org/platform-announcements

This doesn't read to me as "we intend to shut down unless...". But I'm not sure how to operationalize that.

The original announcement text can be found here: https://manifold.markets/jack/will-predictit-still-be-operating-m. I agree that it's not super clear, but it seems to say that they intend to operate markets until the CFTC's deadline (and stop after) unless something changes.

But I guess my point is more just using a hypothetical examle, if they had said "We will shut down unless we get a reversal/injunction" that seems sufficiently different than an unconditional "We intend to shut down"

@jack I don't read the original PredictIt announcement as expressing an intention on what they would do after 2023-02-15, and I imagine that's deliberate.

Whereas I expect an announcement like this rando crypto one I found would resolve NO: https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/06/21/testnet-deprecation

(in this case the shutdown appears to be happening as announced)

Some grey area between those examples.

What do you gain from betting YES on this market? A bunch of mana on a no longer existing site?

@Gen it pays on announcement so YES bettors can quickly spend their mana on donations, assuming there is a window to do so.

Also the site could shut but reach a deal to transfer mana into Metaculus points, for example.

Manifold's funds were acquired in theft,
But their success hasn't left.
Despite their dishonest start,
They've become a crucial part.

This is way too optimistic. Manifold burns a ton of money and has no simple way to transition into a not-money-burning state. If it doesn't raise more VC money, it will shut down, and I see no reason why it's an 80% favorite to be able to do so.

@mqp How much of the money burning is doling out free mana and shipping new features vs. keeping the website online?

@mqp (crossposting from Discord) Not true. I think we'll be able to raise, but even if we don't we can transition to a lower burn rate, grant-supported model if we absolutely have to. The chance of Manifold truly dying is actually very low now.

@MichaelWheatley Right now we burn thousands of dollars a month just to run the website. I expect that later this year after doing low-hanging-fruit cost savings, this might be "only" about $2k/mo. It could go lower with actual effort -- obviously there's no inherent reason that Manifold needs to be expensive. But I don't think anyone is going to do that effort. Anyone would be better advised to rewrite from scratch, if they really wanted one that was cheap to run.

But on reflection I agree with SG in that we can probably manage to run it on grants at this point, since a lot of people like it a lot.

@mqp how much are the server / firebase / services costs now? $2/month doesn't seem high at all for around 2k weekly active users.

@PatrickDelaney 2k* a month

@mqp If there were any paid staff in low-budget mode, that would presumably be the major budget item, right?

@firstuserhere right, typo sorry

So intentions matter? Someone hacks into the "system" or whatever and posts an announcement saying this happens.. does that count?

@firstuserhere A hack wouldn't count, because that wouldn't meet the "officially announces" wording.

@jack fair

Relevant:

I could see someone buying it and then shelving. Basically an acqui-hire.

Resolving on announcement means that the market does still pay out on YES resolution, so this works better than a question like "will manifold shut down?"

@jack It should still trade way below it's actual probability. I think "Anthropic Bias/Reasoning" comes closest, but not sure what to call this issue.