TruFut = Truth futures market (in NewEco)

• General idea
• Many benefits/uses
• Policy (labor-cash only, even for short-sales)
• Sequential stages
• Details of accounting

• When somebody finds a serious flaw in text of proposed law or analysis of plan such as high-speed railroad, is it a real problem or just a simple typo? Incentive for anyone who knows the truth and leaks it out by moving the odds in that direction, thereby giving early clue to whoever was asking.
• Big company such as Apple is bringing out new product, holds business meeting to propose name. "iPad" is their choice. One woman realizes this will become "butt" of jokes about "iTampon", but is too shy to mention such a private topic at open meeting in front of men. Steve Jobs posts the "iPad" name on TruFut, and shy woman short-sells heavily to keep the value of that name low. Eventually somebody else catches on why the value of that name is staying so very low, and he joins her short-selling. Eventually everyone is "in" on the reason why "iPad" is a bad name, so the price is finalized at zero, and all the men who bought long lose money while that shy woman gets rich and other later short-sellers also get moderate profit.
• After conducting a survey of which world-news topics people most wish to know about, solicit news items about the most wanted topics, and use truth-futures to reward truth and penalize lies/bias/spin.
• If somebody hears a rumor, and doesn't know whether it's true or not, post rumor to truth-futures market, then watch whether people buy long or sell short.
• Listeners to a radio station, such as KKUP, can submit guesses as to what was played or announced, thereby building a play-list and events calender and database of URLs related to all that. Both people who submit good original material, and people who invest wisely, get profit. Later the DJ/host marks all the good data, thus authorizing payment.
• Services on the Web, either specific kinds of services or just Web sites in general, can be evaluated by people, and then their evaluations can be judged as mostly true (near 1) or mostly false (near 0).
• If you read a book that is crap, you can challenge the false claims and get concensus that their truth-value is near zero.
• If somebody such as Barack Obama gives a speech, and then there's strong reaction with accusations of telling lies flying back and forth, provide a forum whereby people can say precisely what the lie was, and people can buy or sell-short the truth values involved, and people can present evidence whether true or false, and when the issue is resolved those who invested wisely get profit.
• Return on investment can be an effective reward for reporting crimes, and deterrence against making false reports. If somebody is aware of a crime going on, such as when ACORN was using Federal funds to run their operations which included teaching people how to hide illegal prostitution rings, that somebody could post the accusation of criminal activity as if were a question or rumor, and later purchase shares at a low price, and finally collect return on investment when the accusation turns out to be true. Meanwhile, a debate like a court/scientific investigation can go on, with people presenting allegations of facts in support of or in contradiction to the original accusation as if rumors or questions, and people investing in the truth of these alleged facts, thus providing financial return for people who present facts and financial lost for people who present false allegations or mis-estimate the truth-value of such allegations.
• When accusations against somebody are flying around a newsgroup, such as somebody asking for help with homework and others either helping or accusing the student of cheating, the profit to be obtained by regular speculators who have good intuition about who is telling the truth, and also the profit to be obtained by "insider traders" who investigate and learn the truth then invest towards the truth *before* revealing the evidence they have secretely obtained, could provide financial motive to actually do that investigation to learn the truth of the matter.
• In a "reverse tree", the allegation to be valued is "the end-recipient will like to receive this information, will consider it highly valuable", with intermediate values for items that are sorta worth reading but not really super good. People thus provide their opinion whether the end-recipient indeed will like to read each item. Any estimator who doesn't understand what the final recipient really wants to read, will lose funds with bad investments, and soon quit, so that only the best estimators remain in the reverse tree, and because they get feedback as to the true value assigned by the final recipient, they can train themselves to understand that person's preferences better and better as time goes on.
• When there's breaking news, very first report may be incomplete or have spelling mistakes etc., but then later somebody fixes the mistakes or fills in the missing text. Original report gets credit per portion that is correct, then corrected version gets credit per portion that was wrong and got fixed, thus providing incentive both for fastest reporting and for first person who can guess corrections that later turn out to be correct.
• Teacher won't need to spend time grading homework. Instead, present (to TruFut users) the context (what course, what has already been taught, what is being taught now), and the specific question/assignment and the student's completed assignment. Then:
  • Each user then judges the correctness of the answer, i.e. whether the answer is a full and correct satisfying of the requirements, 0% if completely wrong or worthless, 100% if completely correct and the best possible answer, more likely some intermediate value (partial credit) such as 95% for a typical student correct answer. After the judgement-value stabilizes, the student is offered to accept the judgement-value, or dispute it (ask for simple explanation of less than 95% score and/or re-evaluation).
  • Users are paid to write a critique of the student's work, essentially a short essay describing the good (correct, productive) and bad (incorrect, non-responsive, moot) parts of the student's work. A pseudo-Wiki shared-editing converges on a point-by-point critique of the student's answer, using TruFut to evaluate original essays and modifications to them. Then, based on that concensus written critique as a checklist for awarding or not awarding various portions of partial credit, users use TruFut to score the student's work.
• Whistleblowers can profit from leaking true information, while anyone attempting to "cover up" the truth would suffer a loss: Whistleblower leaks the (true) claim, then takes "long" position by posting an offer to buy at 90%, thus establishing 90% as the current truth-value. Person trying to cover it up takes short position, short-selling at 90% to erase the whistleblower's truth-value, then posting a short-sell offer at only 10% to push the estimated truth-value down to that level. But whistleblower, or anyone else wishing to join the whistleblower, buys all that 10% and posts another offer to buy at 90%, pushing the current truth-value back up to 90%. This back-and-forth battle continues until Congress notices the issue and realizes that it's important, holds hearings, and determines the truth of the matter, at which point the claim is finalized at close to 100% true, resulting in the whistleblower and other long investors making a large profit on his long position while the short-seller loses nearly all his escrow funds.
  Update 2013.May.22: To make anonymous report safer, person posting the original "rumor" can specify an amount of time for the system to delay the submission before it's visible to anyone else, thus making it harder for spies to coorelate InterNet connections with appearances of whistleblowing reports.

• Anyone posting an offer to buy some total quantity Q at some truth-value V (0 < V < 1 i.e. 100%) must put into escrow Q*V which is the purchase cost if other person/people sell the total quantity to the person who has posted the buy-offer. At any time prior to an actual purchase (sale by other party), the quantity Q may be changed, returning some funds from escrow to main account when Q is decreased, or the reverse if Q is increased (requiring that this person have such additional funds available already).
• Anyone posting an offer to sell already-purchased quantity Q, when nobody currently has a buy offer at same or higher price, is fine already.
• Anyone posting an offer to short-sell quantity Q at truth-value V must put into escrow Q*(1-V) which is the maximum possible loss if the short-seller later needs to buy back at a price of 1 i.e. 100%. As with buy offers, any time before sale the quantity may be adusted resulting in change of funds in escrow.
• Anyone seeing another's offer to sell or short-sell quantity Q at price (truth-value) V, who has sufficient funds for Q or lesser quantity Q', i.e. Q*V or Q'*V respectively, may purchase immediately by paying labor-cash.
• Anyone seeing another's offer to buy quantity Q at price (truth-value) V, who actually owns quantity Q or lesser quantity Q', may immediately sell at that price and collect immediate payment from the escrow account.
• Anyone seeing another's offer to buy quantity Q at price (truth-value) V, who doesn't have any quantity to sell, but who has funds to put into escrow to cover maximum possible loss for Q or lesser quantity Q', may sort-sell immediately, putting into escrow Q*(1-V) or Q'*(1-V) respectively.

1. Original posting of new statement
2. Another person browses listing of active questions and finds this item
   • Option 1: Independent estimates automatically compared
   • Option 2: User sees current bid/ask range before committing his/her own opinion
   • Option 3: User makes a correction/amendment, which then stands as a new statement to rate.
3. "Final" resolution

1. Original Person submits statement, which may be isolated statement, or contribution toward building database of related information.
2. OP includes personal estimate of truth value as interval, effectively bid/ask prices for buy or short-sell
3. OP puts funds in escroll to support each end of interval
4. OP formally posts completed item for public view

1. Option 1: A.P. includes his/her own personal estimate of truth value as interval, i.e. bid/ask prices
2. O1.AP puts funds in escroll to support each end of interval
3. System compares this with pre-existing best estimate, executes "trade" if intervals are disjoint, else just merges intervals for better concensus supported by more funds in escroll.

1. Option 2: A.P. views current funds-supported interval, decides whether to immediately place a buy or sell-short order at the corresponding end of the supported interval, or not.
2. A.P. may now switch to Option 1 to complete his/her actions on this item