Augur is a US-based open source, decentralized prediction market platform that rewards you for making accurate predictions about future real-world events. It is essentially a betting site about events that happen in the real world, where you can gain benefits by forecasting and trading. Here’s an honest review explaining how the system operates, its pros and cons.
Purpose
Augur is built on the Ethereum blockchain platform and there are no central servers as such. Augur aims to use the principle of ‘Collective Intelligence’ or ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and gather feedback from a large number of people to make accurate predictions of the outcomes of future events.
How does it work?
The platform’s referees use REPs (the Augur token) to report the success or failure of the predictions made, or, to weigh-in their thoughts. Bitcoin and Ether are accepted for speculations in the markets.
Each bet is a market where you buy shares to trade in a particular event. The total share prices of all outcomes add up to, say, a dollar. So you would buy a share for an outcome at even stakes at 50 cents per share. If your prediction is correct, you get a dollar back for every share of that outcome and if you are wrong, needless to say, you lose your money. The share prices fluctuate with time. As an outcome appears to become likelier, its prices rise while those of the other outcomes see a dip.
What works for it?
- Making an investment in cryptocurrencies is in itself a gamble that people take. They are likelier to be attracted towards this platform.
- There are and will always be only 11 million Augur tokens available in the market. Any development, improvement or expansion of this platform will increase the value of the tokens as there are not going to be any further token issues.
- Gambling will probably be the platform’s primary use but it can be used to make major predictions, using smart contracts, without depending on an individual or an organization.
What works against it?
- You can only make bets using bitcoins or ether. Any volatility in their prices would, therefore, make the platform unstable.
- The Augur website is still in beta.
Every new concept will have its pros and cons. So does Augur. But if the core team can make the experience more user-friendly and add more value to the project, then Augur is in for the long haul.