> My takeaway from Vitalik’s journey is that it took $50,000 worth of time and technical expertise to make that $50,000
My key takeaway here, besides the technical expertise required, was that in terms of capital requirements, current prediction market designs make it very easy to push a probability away from 0 or 1, and very hard to push towards it. (Vitalik even responded to this experience with a prediction market design that does not have this problem. Maybe something will come of this.)
Anyway, Vitalik needed a capital of ethereum worth ~1 million dollars to put DAI worth $~300k into the market, for which he got $~50k profit, while those bidding on the other side only had to put in those $~50k. Assuming they had pursued the same DAI-based strategy as Vitalik, which seemed to require holding 3x of the bet amount in ethereum, they still would’ve only needed $~150k in ethereum.
> My takeaway from Vitalik’s journey is that it took $50,000 worth of time and technical expertise to make that $50,000
My key takeaway here, besides the technical expertise required, was that in terms of capital requirements, current prediction market designs make it very easy to push a probability away from 0 or 1, and very hard to push towards it. (Vitalik even responded to this experience with a prediction market design that does not have this problem. Maybe something will come of this.)
Anyway, Vitalik needed a capital of ethereum worth ~1 million dollars to put DAI worth $~300k into the market, for which he got $~50k profit, while those bidding on the other side only had to put in those $~50k. Assuming they had pursued the same DAI-based strategy as Vitalik, which seemed to require holding 3x of the bet amount in ethereum, they still would’ve only needed $~150k in ethereum.