First Experience with Augur, the Predictive Voting Platform Dapp
For any cyptocurrency noobies please check out my article about decentralized applications. It gives a decent background on what an Ethereum application is and why they have value. As always click the links in the article for other great reads!
Disclosure: I own no Augur and have no financial interest in its success/failure.
Augur.io
Have you used Augur yet? It’s not as straight forward to use as MedCredits, but this guide will get you going in just a few steps.
I first heard of Augur via text message. Text is not the best way to explain complex concepts so the usefulness of the platform was not obvious to me at first. I will walk through the value of it first and then go through the how-to second.
What is Augur?
Augur is a “Decentralized Oracle & Prediction Market Protocol.”
…a what?
Ok. Augur is a decentralized application on the Ethereum blockchain that predicts stuff.
Um…what?
If you sat down and googled oracle, decentralized, prediction market, and protocol you’d get the hang of it. I’ll break it down for you.
It is certainly not as complicated as the bitcoin block #528249 mystery aka #00000000000000000021e800c 1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a.
(Click these great links to Coin monk aka 🍜)
The best way to understand these decentralized applications (Dapp / Dapps) is to pretend they are websites, because we know how those work. So let’s say Augur is a website where you can login and cast a vote for or against something that will happen in the future.
For example, Will Donald Trump be re-elected in 2020? In this case this is a yes or no question. On Augur, a bunch of people are going to take a guess for YES and many others will say NO. The way you vote or guess is by locking in Ethereum or Bitcoin. To lock in your Ethereum (cast the vote) you have to send it to an address controlled by no one — just computer code — which will be automatically divided up and sent out to the users who were on the correct side of answering the question. In this case that would occur in 2020 on that fateful day in November.
Short version: you bet on something and if you’re right you get more than you put down in your bet; and with Augur you can bet on crazy stuff!
Lets recap on this “Decentralized Oracle & Prediction Market Protocol”:
- Decentralized: not under the control of a single company. (Bonus reading by Pramod Chandrayan).
- Oracle/Prediction: theoretically, enough voters on a specific subject actually tell you what is [most-likely] going to happen. Next level ideas here.
- Market: many categories exist to bet on (sports, politics, crypto, stocks)
- Protocol: code, rather than a company, holds your money safely, and pays you out if you are correct. Less middle men are involved, which saves money so fees are 1% instead of 10% as they would be in a greedy casino.
How to use Augur step by step:
As you recall, we described Augur as a website. In reality it is a user interface, or application, that functions on the Ethereum blockchain.
There are two ways to access this connection between Augur and Ethereum:
- Test Network: Getting on the Ropsten test network is relatively easy. This is not the live platform but it looks very similar. Check it out here. On the left side are all the categories of outcomes that you can try to predict. Some of the users have created some, shall we say, creative potential-scenarios to guess at.
- Live “MainNet” Augur Network: This requires downloading an app and waiting a fairly long time for the application to sync with the block list, or record of transactions, on the Ethereum blockchain.
There are many more categories within the live, non-test, Augur application. It looks similar to the test site but the live app is worth exploring since you get to see all the unusual posts — well beyond just sports events.
How to download and “vote” on the Live network:
- Go to: https://www.augur.net/ and click on “GET STARTED.”
- Download/install: https://github.com/AugurProject/augur-app/releases
- Open the Augur application: Choose “Mainnet” as your configuration. Do not change any of the settings below. → Click the “Connect,” or it may say “Restart Connection” button. Then it will start to sync.
Sync with the MainNet: Now you wait…like wait a while…maybe a long while…
Once it gets to around 99% it will allow you to…<drumroll>…
Finally, “Open the Augur App”!
Clicking this will launch a webpage in your internet browser (ex. Chrome) that displays lots of categories and “Markets” like the Trump screen shot:
This percentage bar shows a few things:
- The 37.00% means 37% of people think the answer is YES.
- It also means if you want to bet YES then it costs 0.37cents for what will turn into a full dollar later if you are correct. The opposite is true if you bet against.
- The number of people putting their money/crypto down to bet for or against results in the percentage going up or down. By this method, if enough people are betting it can predict the outcome of something like an election. Or maybe an approval rating?
Here are a few additional screenshots of the platform after clicking “TRADE”:
I think it good to repeat here that the voting concept is actually expressed within the Augur website as a either (1) a BUY order: “I think this scenario will happen and I am using Ethereum/Bitcoin to bet on it” or (2) SELL order: “I do not think this exact provable event will happen and I am sending Ethereum/Bitcoin to bet against it.” I hope the redundancy here is helpful.
If you have gotten this far and would like a guide on placing a bid with real Ethereum / Bitcoin, then send up some claps for the article and/or leave a comment.
Why isn’t this gambling?
Honestly, I do not know. Regulation within countries like the US will likely apply to this type of technology, but since it is decentralized that may be difficult for governments. Time will tell.