Being able to see the future is one of those things that have been in the public’s imagination for millennia. But it seems to be an impossible task, as in order to predict the future you would need to be able to collect and interpret all existing information. However, we have accidentally already created such a system - markets!
Often you will hear economists talking about the “efficient market hypothesis”, which simply put, means that the millions of market participants nudge the price in the direction they think it ought to move, given their available information. As such, everything we know about the present and future is contained in those prices.
This might be true, but given that we live in the present, our immediate future is prioritized and so the price of something can only give us vague impressions of what is to come. This is why betting markets have been quite interesting for those wanting a possible glimpse into the future.
Betting markets do the exact same as financial markets, in that they compile the information of thousands of participants, in direct proportion to how certain they are of an outcome. The key difference though, provided that the betting pool is large, is they tend to be quite accurate in predicting specific events, as opposed to broad trends. As unlike markets, betting happens under a yes/no proposition to specific events “will this candidate win? Y/N”, they don’t care about what happens thereafter or beforehand.
Yet, what if there was a more accurate prediction system that incorporates both types of strategies for using the “wisdom of the crowds”? The first is broad which takes into account the present and future, and the second is narrow, which only takes into account specific events.
Enter the CRD Network with the Bitclout integration. In case you don’t know, Bitclout is a platform that allows you to mine “Creator Coins” for specific influencers and projects, that go up and down in value to how much enthusiasm people have for them. And the CRD Network is a decentralized finance ecosystem that enhances the functionality of Bitclout by creating secondary markets with short selling, loans and other such functionalities.
Bitclout allows you to use the broad market sentiment that people have for specific creators and ideas by tracking where the price is trending. That said, it suffers from the same issue as the stock market, which while it may incorporate all information, it prioritizes the immediate future.
Enter the CRD Network, via the CRD Token, which you can get here. Through it, users can bet against creator tokens via short sells, where they get lent a Creator Coin and immediately sell it, only to then have to buy it in the future irrespective of the price it’s at; thus they can earn the difference between the price they sold it and the price they bought it at. Given that these short sales have specific dates by which they’re due, we can then begin to get a good indication of what might happen in the future based on the volume of shorts.
For instance, if the price of a Creator Coin starts rising far in excess of what the Creator might be able to deliver with a project they’re working on, people will start to buy short positions on that Creator Coin. Then, you can take this increase in short sales as a guide for what will happen in the future with that creator - they’re unlikely to deliver the project on time and might fail entirely.
In other words, the CRD Network can help clarify what is likely to happen. As with anything in life, the end result is ultimately unknowable until it happens. But, we can have a clearer picture of what is likeliest to happen.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.