I want to pile some more ideas on top of the vision of Manifold as markets on everything (Manifold Markets Vision - Aug 2022).
Users can lend mana to other users and charge interest. This unlocks banking.
Crucially, capital can be lent out to better traders, increasing the accuracy of prediction markets.
https://manifold.markets/MarketManagerBot/will-manifold-support-generic-inter
Forget trying to buy Ethereum-based NFTs with Mana. The Manifold way is to replicate the idea within the Manifold economy.
Trading and shilling and speculating on NFTs is a favorite past time. It’s just as fun to bid up rainbow colored Manifold paper cranes and resell for 150% profit in a week.
We could even build out a gallery for NFTs on users’ profiles.
To sell an NFT, you might want an auction mechanism, which leads us to…
Austin’s brilliant idea is to bring the best of crypto, including smart contracts (Smart Contracts on Web2), to the Manifold economy.
Smart contracts could make it possible to do interpersonal loans, NFTs, and auctions. Along with any other conceivable contract or mechanism. Our blockchain is merely our database.
It could start with code capable of doing financial transactions like interpersonal loans. Later you could build the contracts in combination with a web app.
It does not rely on exchanging Mana for real money, gift cards, or physical goods. Those are illegal anyway and seem like a dead end.
Even if we got away with it for a while, eventually we’d be hit by a lawsuit and be forced to stop. If this didn’t kill the company outright, it would definitely have distracted us and prevented us from working on getting product-market-fit legally. We’d have wasted time burning our runway for no good reason. (And no, it’s not like how Uber outsmarted local regulations — no local government can give us permission to offer binary options, it’s regulated federally).
So basically, I think we should double down on this vision of Manifold’s virtual economy and making Manifold fun, rather than pursue real money. It’s a unique idea with a lot of promise!