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Whitepaper

Drew Stone edited this page Jul 28, 2017 · 7 revisions

Truecoin Whitepaper (TRC)

Truecoin is a peer prediction market and platform for eliciting beliefs. Current prediction markets in the Ethereum ecosystem focus primarily on Oracle based predictions with ground state, truthful outcomes. While these markets are interesting, a lot of predictions in the world have no eventual ground state truth.

The Truecoin platform elicits truthful beliefs from participants on events with no ground state truth. It is designed to properly incentivize effort on behalf of the participants and reduce dishonesty in online prediction settings. Truecoin maintains these guarantees by employing state of the art research in algorithmic game theory and statistics. The platform blends together crowdsourced predictions akin to Amazon's Mechanical Turk with crowdfunding ideas from the Ethereum ecosystem.

  • ADD A SENTENCE OR TWO ABOUT REPUTATION (TRUECOIN IS ALSO A REPUTATION NETWORK)

Background

Prediction markets are platforms for individuals to ask questions and predict events. Participants bet on the outcome of events with reputation or money and are rewarded if they predict correctly. A common example is to predict the next president of the United States. For this event, we can build a multi-sided market for people to bet and submit predictions for the next president. An event like this has a definite ground state truth, a point when the outcome of the event is known with 100% accuracy (after the next election). Given this ground state truth, we can pay out the correct predictors after the outcome of such an event is realized with the bets of the incorrect predictors. The technical challenges with implemented decentralized prediction markets rest on designing truthful Oracles, pseudo black-boxes that share the ground state truth.

One can also consider prediction markets where events have no ground state truth, referred to as peer prediction markets. Peer predictions are actively studied in the academic world for eliciting information from individuals on events with no objective ground state truth. This contrasts with our first description of prediction markets in that there is no time at which the true outcome of an event is known. Peer prediction markets are less about gambling than they are about crowdsourcing intelligence for the market designers. Truecoin is primarily focused on the peer prediction setting. With peer predictions, we can answer questions about arbitrary qualities of content and products.

Markets

Truecoin aims to decentralize peer predictions for all types of interested parties. It is sufficiently generalized to engage developers who are interested in using the Truecoin mechanisms and underlying digital token to build new online prediction applications, businesses interested in eliciting feedback about their products, and digital consumers interested in earning rewards for their predictions.

Developers

Truecoin offers developers tools to build out innovative predictive applications with access to a valuable digital asset with governance capabilities.

Businesses

Truecoin offers businesses the infrastructure to manage their recommendation & review systems and incentivize subjective data collection.

  • Product reviews
  • Quality reviews
  • Labeled data collection

Consumers

Truecoin allows consumers to get paid for their predictions. Additionally, consumers will be able to use TRC as an equitable digital asset for investing in new content built using the platform.

  • Rewards for peer predictions
  • Creation of digital content with complete ownership
  • Investments into digital content (art, news, research)
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