It's been interesting, educational, and frustrating in equal measures to see the cryptocurrency competition play out. As of Nov. 10, we have:
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6 questions resolved
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16 questions closed, mostly waiting for resolution time to come.
The leaderboard has been quite active, and scrambled with each resolution. Most of the predictions have been reasonably good, with one particularly hard hit from The surprising rise of bitcoin to the NASDAQ's index.
We've also seen a scheduled then canceled fork, and a disturbingly opaque ICO by Paragon.
Some takeaways so far I'd say are:
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Like all financial markets, this one is pretty hard to predict. But it's also much less transparent than many others, with information sources much less reliable and professional than for larger standing financial markets, so that it's difficult even to always tell what's going on.
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Lots of good reminders that no matter how much you think of all the ways a question can go, there are more you probably did not think of!
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Yet overall, things are predictable at some level. And understanding to what degree things are and are not predictable is, I hazard, quite a useful skill in and of itself. For example, I would strongly consider being on the side of a bet in this arena that accords more probability to "unusual outlier" outcomes, as I think this shows that most people, even talented predictors, can easily underestimate those.
It will be fun to see how it all shakes out, and no matter where anyone ends up in the leaderboard I hope this is providing and interesting intellectual challenge!