Augur Goes Live

Augur, the predictions platform, has started operating just recently. There's been some payments to the winners of bets and there's information that over 1 million USD is being pooled in stakes on the platform.

Users can ask a question with regard to anything they wish to bet on. For instance, it can be results of the elections or the price for a particular assets on a particular date.

To make a bet, users need to stake REP tokens, which are the internal cryptocurrency on the platform. If they lose, their REPs will go to winners.

I believe that this platform has an important role to play in crypto ecosystem since it will be used to correctly gauge market sentiment and activate hivemind capabilities that society has untapped.

It's expected that only those people who are extremely sure of the outcome will dare to stake their tokens, risking losing them in case of a different result. Thus, it's professional meteorologists who are going to bet on whether forecasts, not housewives who just have "a gut feeling" without no concrete data or considerations behind it. Or, to put it in a different way, housewives might try their luck in betting on weather, but they might go through their funds very quickly, since it's highly probably that in order to correctly predict weather, people need to account for various data. Otherwise, anybody would be able to go on the news shows and share their predictions on the weather.

I like Augur a lot and I am thinking about buying some of the internal token being used there. I think that this platform is a great poster child for real life blockchain use cases.