Futarchy

Discussion

Vitalik Buterin:

"The idea behind futarchy was originally proposed by economist Robin Hanson as a futuristic form of government, following the slogan: vote values, but bet beliefs. Under this system, individuals would vote not on whether or not to implement particular policies, but rather on a metric to determine how well their country (or charity or company) is doing, and then prediction markets would be used to pick the policies that best optimize the metric. Given a proposal to approve or reject, two prediction markets would be created each containing one asset, one market corresponding to acceptance of the measure and one to rejection. If the proposal is accepted, then all trades on the rejection market would be reverted, but on the acceptance market after some time everyone would be paid some amount per token based on the futarchy’s chosen success metric, and vice versa if the proposal is rejected. The market is allowed to run for some time, and then at the end the policy with the higher average token price is chosen.

Our interest in futarchy, as explained above, is in a slightly different form and use case of futarchy, governing decentralized autonomous organizations and cryptographic protocols." (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/)