It actually is ideal, given trusted API/Oracles, a timeout period to ensure mis-published data is corrected promptly, and a few other non-obvious gotchas.

You could even have trusted middle-men that collect a Fee iff ambiguity is discovered and an appeal is wagered against the escrow.

I'm sure it exists and got rugpulled already.

If it is set up so that the users can put in bets and appoint judges, then it can't ever be rugpulled. Individual judges could turn hostile. But if the judges get paid for their work, a great track record might be worth more than any rugpull.

So a person could build trust and society could benefit from their good behavior and they would make money by being trusted?

Augur tried this and doesn't seem to have gained a lot traction doing so. Any staking schemes that were developed were relatively easily gamed and that led to distrust in the system.

We, like traditional financial exchanges, define the contracts upfront with clear rules on how they will be settled, then follow the letter of the law very strictly when settling a market.

In general, we've found market certainty to be more important that accuracy: ie. having pre-defined rules that everyone can agree on and that are pre-set is more important than those rules being the "correct rules" (not that having correct rules isn't important).

No.

Care to elaborate? Sounds ideal frankly.

Such a thing exists (Polymarket) and the whole setup has probably precluded many, many, many people from using it including myself. I got halfway through setup before giving up.

By contrast, I signed up for Kalshi and bought 3 contracts in the last 30 minutes.

Additionally, smart contracts don't actually solve the primary source of (unaccepted) risk: the oracle.

Did you already have Polygon and a wallet (e.g. metamask)? If you didn't have that, I could see it being a pain too much of a pain to deal with.

It only took me a minute to use Polymarket, but I already had the prerequisites above.

I love Polymarket. It's what dapps should aspire to be

The existing prediction markets have been regulated out of existence thanks to Kalshi.

See PredictIt, Polymarket, YC is doing a great job of fulfilling Thiel's vision of building monopolies. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymar...

https://www.usbets.com/did-kalshi-kill-predictit/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1478370047735341056.html

This is a nice idea in theory, but in practice you have to really trust the judges. Suppose that 99.9% of people thought that X is going to happen, but it didn't. If the judges are a representative sample, then 99.9% of them were wrong and are about to lose money. Unless they cheat.