Urgent: Temporarily disabling the referral system on Predyx due excessive frauds \ stacker news ~oracle

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Urgent: Temporarily disabling the referral system on Predyx due excessive frauds

605 sats \ 14 comments \ @mega_dreamer 12h oracle

Hey Guys -

Wanted to keep everyone in the loop. We'll be temporarily disabling the referral system on Predyx due excessive frauds detected. We'll re-enable it once we make success criteria more robust and hard to game it.

-- Team Predyx

cc @grayruby @Undisciplined @BlokchainB @Coinsreporter @NEEDcreations @south_korea_ln @denlillaapan and all the users of Predyx.

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140 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 12h

I was worried that would happen. Let us know if you want to brainstorm solutions. A lot of thought was put into the SN referral system.

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @mega_dreamer OP 11h

Thanks, yes I was worried too and had an internal benchmark that if 1 out of 10 was fraud it could have been acceptable(there will always be bad actors), but it skyrocketed over the last two weeks.

Yes let us brainstorm more on this. We were thinking as follows:

Do Phone + ID verification for referrals (not sure if this is the best, but at some point we'll have to introduce KYC if we want to operate as regulated Prediction Market in USA.)
Put a spend limit. The referred user must spend 100k sats on markets and must hold it in the markets for more than 10 days.

87 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 11h

I'll duck the first point, because I don't know enough about those regulations. Ideally, that would be unnecessary. It should be possible for the rewards mechanism to do all the work.

The way Stacker News referrals function is that you only get a fraction of your referred stackers' rewards. Similarly, Predyx could do something like rewarding a fraction of the referred users' spend (fees + losses).

You don't want to incentivize creating a master account that just receives rewards from active accounts, though, so you may want to also cap the possible earned rewards based on the actual activity: i.e. I need to spend (fees + losses) at least x in order to receive x in referral rewards.

51 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 8h

The best will be like "hey user if you refer someone, you'll earn x % of his fee paid" Make it very low like 2-20%.

For new users (referred or not), just launch a promotional offer like 'hey user you'll recieve x sats if you complete x trades + waggered x amount of Sats + after a fix period of time.

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @mega_dreamer OP 6h

% from referred fees sounds like good idea. @Undisciplined mentioned that as well.

For new users (referred or not), just launch a promotional offer like 'hey user you'll recieve x sats if you complete x trades + waggered x amount of Sats + after a fix period of time.

For the user retention, we'll have something similar to manifold's daily streak - where users gets reward for using Predyx everyday and the reward keeps doubling for every additional days of streak. If they break the streak, the reward resets to zero they have to start over again.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 6h

For the user retention, we'll have something similar to manifold's daily streak - where users gets reward for using Predyx everyday and the reward keeps doubling for every additional days of streak.

This is interesting. I've two suggestions though.

Don't make it sumptuously fat. Start the day 1 with 1 sat and and increase it everyday by 1 sat.
Put an upper limit of 100 sats/day if a user has 100 days streak.

This is just a suggestion/idea. You can also start with 5 sat for the day 1, then increase it by 5 sat everyday, making it 500 sat reward. But for doing so Predyx has to make sure that the user they are gonna reward is creating enough business. Let's say a user's daily wager average is 50000 sats, it won't be bad idea to award him 500 sats daily.

All in all I mean that any reward must not be too fat + it should be most rewarding to those who are big and daily traders.

If they break the streak, the reward resets to zero they have to start over again.

This has to be. This is very similar to the idea of "Cowboy Hat" on SN.

132 sats \ 3 replies \ @south_korea_ln 12h

Shitty people everywhere... maybe even one of us here on SN...

51 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 12h

How many resources are dedicated to dealing with the consequences of shitty people.

There's a lot of literature showing that economies function better in societies with higher moral and ethical standards, probably because less resources have to be wasted on dealing with bad actors

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 11h

In two places I've worked, Korea and Europe, there is an army of people whose only job is to make sure people are not abusing public research funds. Check that people are not paying for personal holidays, home appliances, etc, with grant funds. Yet, the only thing it achieves it's making life harder for honest people, whereas dishonest people still figure out ways to be corrupt and cheat the system. Huge waste of resources overall.

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @mega_dreamer OP 11h

Yeah totally unnecessary headache.

I have personally experienced this first hand, I've lived in highly corrupt economies like India and Mexico and also lived in less corrupt economies like USA. Huge difference especially in term of fraud.

104 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 12h

That’s unfortunate but thanks for the heads up.

51 sats \ 1 reply \ @Car 10h

Sorry to hear. The unfortunate truth in Bitcoin people will always take advantage of something that is free and ruin it for others. Seen this over and over and over again.

Have you thought of doing something like Batch betting or something like a Pooled / Syndicate type of betting system, to me that would be the crown jewel it accomplishes everything your trying to do with referrals and then some.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mega_dreamer OP 6h

Thanks for the kind words and you're right - a few bad actors ruin it for everyone. Not to discount the fact that we did get some excellent referrals mostly from top users on SN.

Have you thought of doing something like Batch betting or Pooled/Syndicate type of betting system

Sounds very interesting, can you please explain more? Like parimutuel betting?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @398ja 3h

Are the users listed in cc the fraudster? 😅