Currently, mana is only officially convertible into Manifest tickets, poker buy-ins, and charity donations, none of which I sufficiently consider as money. Will someone find a way to consistently convert mana into real money?
The exchange rate may be less than the 1M:1cent charity exchange rate.
The real money must be a top world reserve currency. The trade does not have to be a direct conversion from mana to currency, intermediate stores of value are allowed. The mechanism must be repeatable more than once. No incidental payments, like collecting mana/money as a fee for something else.
Things that would count:
Buying tickets/merch with mana, and reselling them for real money. Must be done multiple times.
Transferring mana to Beeminder honey money, and converting it to money somehow.
Creating a straw project funded through Manifund, for a project that is considered a fraud by most users for the purpose of mana laundering.
Creating a charity, donating to it through https://manifold.markets/charity and withdrawing all of the money from the charity for non-charitable use.
Manifold allows withdrawing mana for real currency.
Things that would not count:
Buying a banana for 10 mana from another user
P2P payments
Converting mana to crypto (but cashing out the shitcoin would count)
Getting a tax credit or deduction for donating mana
Extreme exploits/hacking/breaking the site
Resolves to my judgement, or a council of moderators if I am inactive.
Proof can be private if sent to me
If something like this got popularized somehow on manifold, would this count?
https://manifold.markets/TonyBaloney/should-i-do-a-cheap-outdoor-wedding?r=VG9ueUJhbG9uZXk
It's easy:
Bet 10,000 mana on a roughly 50/50 sporting event.
Bet $10 on the opposite side on a sportsbook.
If you win on the sportsbook, you're done. You've cashed out $10 of mana.
If you lose on the sportsbook, then you accidently "bought" $10 of mana. No problem, simply go back to step 1, doubling your bets this time.
Repeat as many times as necessary, doubling each time. Eventually you'll win your sportsbook bet and you will have successfully cashed out!*
* I take no responsibility for anyone actually trying this.
@travis I think the problem with this is it’s essentially the Martingale strategy, and so would break down after a string of unlucky breaks. Also it doesn’t really require any mana at all. But I still like it as a solution to this problem.
@TonyBaloney Here is 1 difference: with the martingale betting strategy, when you run out of money, you lose everything with nothing to show for it. Whereas with this approach you would end up with very large mana profits. I guess at reasonable values you could "cash out" 90% of the time and 10% of the time you would buy large mana profits. So I'm not sure if that is consistent enough to qualify for this market. If you just wanted to cash out a trivial amount, you could get it up to 98% maybe.
@travis Again. I like this thought a lot. It’s just that, the question hinges on whether mana is essentially worthless, aside from bragging rights. The martingale strategy isn’t EV positive because all gambling sites have some limit to what you can bet. So 1% of the time, you’ll lost everything. If mana is worthless and can’t be laundered back to money, then what does it matter that you’re a mana millionaire.
@TonyBaloney I think some people would pay cash for mana profits.
Using the original numbers I suggested and going up to 7 flips, you would have 127 out of 128 chance to cash out 10k mana for $10 and 1 out 128 chance of buying 1.27 million of mana profit for $1270. The 7th flip would be difficult to find enough mana counterparties. Also I'm assuming you get 50/50 odds on each bet, but you'd actually have to give up EV on every bet, so the real numbers would be worse.
@travis yeah. Thats a good point about mana liquidity too. Youre likely to get to a point where you can’t hedge the mana before you get to the point where your real money bet is capped. . . I haven’t sat down to figure it out, but if the vig was small enough maybe you could argue that this was conversion at a really low rate.