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What we are doing here, designing a Truth-finding mechanism, is only incidentally related to PMs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_game_theory

Thanks for pointing this out. I would even call this REQUIRED READING before tackling the TruthCoin paper. It explains the theory behind what TruthCoin is doing and why you might have formalized it this way. For example, it's easy to be skeptical of the assertion that TruthCoin incentivizes people to vote for the truth, but if you point them to the section on the Revelation Principle and "truthfully implementable mechanisms" then 90% of the work is done for you and the rest is "just code". I wonder to what extent Satoshi used reverse game theory when designing bitcoin..?

Well my question is a bit more general: I feel like maximizing the number of people voting is just as important as encouraging them to vote for the truth, so it feels weird that someone who only votes on one thing should be penalized for it. Rather than vote for more things, they may just quit voting entirely.

William Spaniel's game theory channel is pretty accessible
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDIGW0ywWw9Kh9_vtwqxXA

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. It sounds like I need to sit down and learn more game theory, then simulate/test the idea to see if there's any real benefit. In physics we tend to just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks...

If the goal is to make it easier for voters to specialize when declaring an outcome, then shouldn't the PM Authors play some role in forming ballots?

They do in a way: they select the branch and maturation-time. Eg Decision: "DJIA close on Feb 18th, 2015", Branch: Votecoins_Finance, Date: March 2015, Then the Ballot that that Decision will in is the March 2015 Ballot on the Finance branch.

Right. I'm just trying to think of a way of adding more fine-grained branching than that. One should be able to author a decision that belongs to multiple categories without requiring those voting on it to vote on every category it belongs to. Another problem is that a flood of new decisions could be added to the March 2015 Ballot in the last minute (this could be malicious or it could just be a function of the demand for new decisions) - it seems unnecessary to hurt the reputation of those who have planned to vote for a decision that has been on the same ballot for the last year just because of a slew of new decisions they didn't know about. I'm attempting to solve both problems below.

Read the whitepaper to learn how the Ballot is used (re: the rest of your post).

I think you're referring to Appendix I of Truthcoin_1.1.pdf on missing votes: specifically the calculation of the participation for voter "i" is Sum(VotesCast_i) / sum(VotesExpected_i). I'm suggesting that 1) VotesExpected_i should be dependent on which other decisions i has cast votes for and that 2) this dependence should be set explicitly by the decision authors, so every voter knows which votes are required of them.

The following example illustrates what I mean. Assume all of the following decisions come due on March 2015, but were authored at different times. Decisions {A .. G} are related to general finance and were authored sequentially in time, but the author of G requires that those who vote on G are expected to vote on F, and F's author expects voters to vote on E and so on back to A. Then, a chain of new decisions {H1...K1} are added, which are roughly related to the sub category of assets; here, K1 requires voting on the union of {A .. G, H1 .. K1}. Then, another chain of decisions {H2...K2} are added, roughly related to the sub category of liabilities, such that those voting on K2 must vote on the union {A .. G}{H2 .. K2}. Crucially, those voting on {A .. G} need not vote on {H1 .. K1} or {H2 .. K2}, and those voting on {H2 .. K2} need not vote on {H1 .. K1} and vice versa.

This way everything happens on the same block chain and all categorization is done implicitly. Everyone knows what they're supposed to vote on and can plan ahead of time - they don't have to worry about late decisions harming their reputation. We could even scale to hundreds or thousands of decisions all coming due in the same time period.

If the goal is to make it easier for voters to specialize when declaring an outcome, then shouldn't the PM Authors play some role in forming ballots? Don't know if this is technically feasible, but here's one idea for how this could work:

Let's say Author Carol creates a PM for the Dogecoin price. She declares that "those voting on this PM must simultaneously vote on Author Bob's PM specifying the Litcoin price". Similarly, Bob's PM would require voting on Alice's PM specifying the Bitcoin price, but those voting on Alice's PM could do so without voting on Bob's or Carol's. In other words, the ballot corresponding to Carol's PM is a superset of Alice and Bob's. The advantage would be that individually, gaming Alice's PM would be much harder than gaming Carol's, so Carol needs to include Alice's PM if she wants to maximize her trade volume.

This seems natural to me, since the Author is already responsible for making outcomes easy to evaluate and they should know what other PMs will be similar, though I'm not sure how this affects the strategy of the trader... authors would need to take that into account when choosing which set of ballots to include, and the market would penalize them for not doing so (Edit: in the same way that the market penalizes authors for forming ballots that require too much work for the voters, but rewards them for maximizing voter profits.) Also, voters could choose the amount of work they want to commit to, which would allow the pool of voters to scale nicely with demand. The combination of all of the above would make branching much more dynamic and market driven.

Btw, I'm looking forward to your interview on Let's Talk Bitcoin!