User Stories

Alice gets information

Alice is interested in presidential elections. There are two candidates that matter. She visits acro.bet to look up the current probability for either. She can see the history in a chart dating back several months. She does not bet herself.

Bob goes all in

Bob clicks a link to a prediction market on the question "If OpenAI has achieved AGI internally by the end of the year" on his X timeline.

Since Bob works for OpenAI, he knows the answer is YES. He should not talk about it yet, but nobody can easily tie his wallet to his name.

The market goes live in 12h and runs for a few months. Bob deposits a large amount on YES. As a consequence, the odds change such that his return would only be a few percent.

Within hours, still before the market has started, enough people have been putting money on NO so that the current return for Bob at the start of the market ends up being 2.5x. The market goes live.

Bob checks every day and sees how a bit of his deposit has been converted into about 2.5x as much bet slips on YES. [Remark: the market has not changed much.]

A few weeks in Bob has converted about 90% of his money, when OpenAI plans to announce that AGI has been achieved.

A few hours before the announcement, the market has moved to 1.8x (probably someone from the news sites). Within minutes after the announcement, the return drops to 1.11x, and the market still gives a 10% chance NO. Within hours this drops further to 2%. Bob withdraws the remaining 10% of his money to bet in another market with better opportunities, since his return on YES orders has now dropped to about 2% (as the internal price of YES has reached 98 cents).

On the next day, NO is at 0.1% (because most people betting on it have stopped doing so). The market resolves to YES. Bob withdraws about 2.4 times of the 90% of his deposit that was converted.

Charlie turns wisdom into gold

Charlie spots a market on the chance that the world will end within 3h in a TG channel. The link to the market was posted by a bot. The argument is that because the Flat Earth got a crack it will fold, making everyone fall off. He has been reading on 4chan that there were strong arguments for a flat Earth, but is not fully convinced about the crack. If he is totally honest, he actually thinks that Earth is probably round.

A marker in the middle on a slider between DOOM and FINE indicates that the market is currently undecided. Charlie moves the slider towards FINE (not all the way), enters some token amount and does not tick "Never buy DOOM" in the confirmation dialogue.

He is now observing live how his collateral is converted into FINE such that for each bit of collateral he gets about twice as much FINE. He shares his position on X.

A few minutes later, he observes that his FINE bar is growing very fast. Charlie adds some funds to his collateral to profit from these amazing returns! Then he calls a friend to talk about football. [Here, lots of people have bet on DOOM.]

Coming back to the app an hour later, he finds that he now has more collateral than he ever deposited, and that he is currently betting on DOOM. The market has totally shifted from being very sure about DOOM earlier to being very sure about FINE now. It has moved all the way to the right, more than Charlie's slider. [As the market starting pricing DOOM very low, Charlie started to buy DOOM cheaply, or equivalently, sell FINE at a huge profit. Once all FINE was sold, he kept buying cheap DOOM]

Charlie decides that the world is still very fine and that it is probably not going to end at all. He checks in his portfolio: He owns a lot of collateral (about 5 times more than he deposited!) and a growing stack of DOOM bets. He decides to go all-in on FINE now. [This time, the change of side happens due to user update, not due to a market price change.]

He watches how his DOOM bets disappear in favor for a small additional amount of collateral [Because the market is quite sure about FINE now, even if less sure than Charlie, there's not much to get here. Each FINE slip costing almost one dollar automatically combines with a DOOM slip and converts back to one dollar].

His DOOM position decreases, reached zero while his collateral peaks, and then flips to FINE again. From here, his collateral shrinks and seemingly converts almost at one to one to FINE (he gets slightly more, of course). Some minutes later, 3h have passed and the market resolves to FINE, turning his FINE bets into collateral ready to be withdrawn

Famous people bet on X (and Bob)

Balaji posts that the price of Bitcoin reaches $1 Million in 2 weeks. GCR comments that this is wrong. Balaji replies he would be willing to bet a large sum at 1:1 odds. Someone @'s Cobie.

Cobie shares a link to an acro.bet market "Will Bitcoin reach 1M by ..." that he just created.

Balaji deposits $1M and sets the slider to the middle position for 1:1 odds. GCR is busy.

Bob deposits $1000 after moving the slider very near to NO and ticks "Never buy YES". The market now has $1000 of Bob staked against $1000 of Balaji and says that the chance that BTC reaches 1M is 50%. [This is because Balaji put so much money he can set the odds for now.]

GCR finds a moment and deposits $19M all-in on NO. The market jumps to 5% on YES, 95% on NO.

All three are fully staked and converting a fixed fraction of their funds per second into bet slips. Other people join, and the market odds are changing as a consequence.

Balaji would be unstaked if the market gave him under 2 YES slips for every dollar spent, but this never happens. YES is never popular enough. Bob however has been unstaked sometimes, ensuring that he always got at least about 8% more slips than dollars spent (since his limit price is how sure he was on the slider - 92.6% in this example). Someone calls out Cobie for collecting 100s of k of trading fees from this that he does not need. Cobie shows on-chain proof that he set things up such that they will be automatically transferred to the wallet of his favorite NGO when the market resolves.

Wager among friends

Alice visits her family for a round birthday.

There are a lot of people.

The question comes up if Dave did a handstand or just a headstand last year. Dave is not here, and a video recording is with someone at home.

The disagreement is wild.

Someone makes a market and shares the link. About half the people take their phone and, using the app store account, put a few dollars behind their opinion.

Later, it turns out that no video can be found. The funds are returned.

Oh, just kidding (but possible). Dave did do the handstand. Winners get paid.