#预测市场 Seeing Brian Armstrong's discussion on prediction markets, my mind immediately flashed back to several cycles I've witnessed over the years.

The DAO incident in 2016 is a prime example. At that time, no one truly understood how decentralized governance would work, and a technical vulnerability directly destroyed a project valued in the tens of millions. If there had been a genuine prediction market back then, what would the real bets of market participants have reflected? They would likely have sniffed out the risks earlier than the confident analyses in the media. Because liars would face economic penalties, and this incentive mechanism is something traditional polls can never achieve.

The ICO boom in 2017 was similar. I saw too many projects with whitepapers that sounded extravagant, and fundraising numbers looked impressive, but the actual trading prices on prediction markets had long revealed the market's true judgment of their feasibility—many tokens' prices in the secondary market essentially served as the earliest "polls."

Looking back now, the value of prediction markets as information aggregation tools has indeed been underestimated for a long time. They are not gambling tools but honest mirrors of information—each bet involves real economic costs, making it impossible for liars to hide. Policymakers, project teams, and even investors can glean more insights from the evolution of market prices, far more valuable than any media article or poll data.

The maturation of this mechanism could fundamentally change how we judge trends.