What is Zeitgeist? (project and concepts)

I discovered this project while hanging out on medium. I see enticing designs and obscure concepts to me: prediction markets, futarchy. Furthermore, I hate to be ignorant, poke my nose in it, dig, and realize that this project could turn into something huge, and I will explain why (in my subjective opinion).

Wholesale Zeitgeist

The project is assembled on Kusama, will launch its crowdloan soon, and develop a decentralized betting platform. The concept is innovative and lends itself well to the era of blockchain democratization. The solutions already exist elsewhere but Zeitgeist, in my opinion, goes further than the others and I will detail everything in the concepts.
I will come back to the ZTG token in a future article, there was a presale recently (I missed the opportunity and I blame myself) but we will be able to get the token via crowdloan on Kusama, like the other parachain projects.

The concepts

The nature of betting
Zeitgeist will not be confined to sports betting. The platform will be interested in all possible types of bets (sports, e-sports, politics, geopolitics, insurance, weather, emergence of new technologies, stock market, cryptos), and users can themselves create a bet if it doesn’t exist. So, you can already imagine that it is in a universe without a limit of bets that one can get started, and thus develop prediction markets.

Prediction markets
Unlike a classic market where you buy or sell a thing, this is about buying the realization of an event or a parameter (victory or defeat of the French team at the 2022 World Cup, bitcoin at more than $100,000 on January 1, 2022).
In this prediction market, it is the aggregation of information by bettors that makes it more reliable than surveys or statistics on small samples.
So we can imagine that this aggregation of information could, by its power and reliability, go beyond the framework of simple bets and this is how we can approach the following concept. (I will come back to the power and reliability of a decentralized prediction market in a future article by hooking up the concept of “skin in the game” dear to Nassim Taleb to the Zeitgeist project, and I will also discuss the notions of “time” and “truth”)

Futarchy
Futarchy is a concept developed by Robin Hanson. It is based on the fact that democracy does not achieve optimal aggregation of information, that wealth correlates with being happy, and that prediction markets are the best means of obtaining information.
The principle of governance by futarchy is that if the prediction market sees an event as beneficial to national wealth if it occurs, then that possibility becomes law. We’re getting away from Zeitgeist I think, let’s come back to that.

Why it can work

We are entering the totally subjective part of this article.
In my opinion, Zeitgeist offers an unstoppable proposal: Combine a technological and moral evolution (blockchain and decentralization) with a parallel governance proposal (futarchy, through the use of prediction markets).
Imagine the power of combining the use of oracles with the perpetual information quest of relentless users to bet on the future. The aggregation of qualitative, comparative, resistant, and uncensored information could one day allow Zeitgeist to become an essential prediction market in all the thematic sectors that the platform will offer (knowing that there is no limit to these thematic since users can create their bets).
It could eventually become a “trend” tool used by the political and media circles of this world to give citizens the most reliable and transparent information (if their goals stay to inform). Otherwise, Zeitgeist’s prediction market could become a sort of parallel media outlet for “truth seekers”.
The project by its concept of “bet” also integrates 2 parameters that I would qualify as fundamental:
-the truth, very close to information and its dissemination
-the time, and to bet is to project oneself and therefore to try to observe and analyze in order to build tomorrow, not to look back.
“And, when you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward” Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist