delphi.market Mega Thread #1delphi.market Mega Thread #1

lol, I accidentally hit post because the layout shifted when I wanted to click on the info icon after I uploaded my 15 MB+ wallpaper. Now I have 10 minutes to finish this post.

https://m.stacker.news/15897

I realized I could use pins in ~oracle to have a dedicated place to share feedback and discuss ideas for delphi.market. The original goal of ~oracle was to be an interface to delphi on SN anyway. Every post was intended to be a market on delphi and SN could be the place for the social aspect of these markets.

Additionally, I will also share my goals for the next 6 weeks every 6 weeks like this. So that's why this post is just the first of a series of mega threads. This one will be replaced by another post on March 25, 2024.

We can also see this post itself as some kind of prediction: will @ekzyis have done what he said he will do in 6 weeks?

So here are my hopefully humble enough goals in the order of their priority:

Goals for Next 6 WeeksGoals for Next 6 Weeks

1. Use real sats but limit trading volume1. Use real sats but limit trading volume

I noticed that using mutinynet is probably limiting the amount of interest in it as well as my dedication to the project. So I decided that a priority should be to use real sats.

My current idea is to have a global limit and a limit per market. Limits exist to contain how many funds can be lost in case of a bug or exploit. This also allows me to gradually increase my commitment to maintenance of the market. Ideally, the market should just run itself and I don't have to do anything. But obviously, there will be problems in the early stages. I am still figuring all kinds of stuff out (UX, security, infrastructure, ...).

But the more confident I get in my code, the higher the limits will be. This is inspired by Mostro's limit.

2. Better front page2. Better front page

The front page is pretty bad right now. No idea which markets are active, which are already settled or any other information like trading volume, last activity etc.

So this needs to be improved. @kr gave me some inspiration for good front pages by providing links to other prediction markets. Maybe he can drop these links again since I probably won't be able to find these links again. But everyone else is also invited to give me inspiration :)

So far, I might use Manifold Markets as inspiration. Turns out, they even use a similar background color.

3. PWA with push notifications3. PWA with push notifications

A PWA allows push notifications. They can be used to notify about new orders in a market or if your order was matched. That shouldn't be too hard. This was one of the first things I did when I joined SN. However, getting push notifications right on iOS might be a problem since we have this problem on SN since a long time and it doesn't seem to be a priority to fix the shallow support in WebKit for the Apple/WebKit engineers. But let's see.

4. Overhaul UI/UX + code base4. Overhaul UI/UX + code base

Somewhat related to the second point. @Natalia mentioned in the announcement that the contrast is bad and I agree. I like the consistent style of using ASCII art but other things definitely have a lot of room for improvement.

Long Term GoalsLong Term Goals

Some long term goals (also in somewhat order of priority):

1. Implement "self-service" of trades with bonds

My original idea was that in most cases, people would just select the outcome themselves. If both parties in a trade agree, the trade is settled with no oracle required. Only if they don't find consensus, an oracle determines the outcome (me or a fedimint, see below). This oracle then takes the bond of the loser as a fee. So there should be some incentive to not have to use a oracle.

A problem with this is that this only works where outcomes are pretty easy to verify.

2. Private markets

Users can already generate markets but all markets are public. If you just want to wage a bet with a friend about something dumb, you should also be able to create a market with an invite link or something with the same UX as public markets. That's basically aligning with the "P2P vision" I originally had. I want to make prediction markets as accessible as possible. Some kind of "microbetting platform". My priority is therefore not to have huge trading volumes or making a profit one day.^[1] There are other markets that already do this.

3. Look into fedimints and ~ecash for custody, payouts and oracle

Since I got an intro into cashu in btc++ Berlin from @calle, I wanted to look more into this topic anyway.

1. At least currently, can't promise anything about the future. ↩