Some financial alchemy would help. The borrower would need to buy some derivative that pays off if monero goes up, like a call option. Impossible to find today and possibly expensive for low amounts.

We are live again – thanks for all your comments :)

Hello,

Yes we are adding some extra features, most importantly changing the set up from 3/4 multisgs to 2/3. We got feedback that the possibility of Sigmanero being able to “lock” funds was not good. This way users will always be able to get funds back if they can coordinate to find out who was their bet counterpart – which should not be hard since they will have the main address info.

– “Got a question. Is there a way to open requests for sigmanero to open up certain bets? Eg/ US election” Not at the start, but this sounds very easy to implement. We want to offer political markets soon as well, and we can always receive special request if they make sense by way of message. We get asked quite often about political bets so for sure will be made. How you offer bets for events far into the future will be a bit tricky because whoever if placing the bet offer needs to keep its browser window open, since the wallet is locally generated and they need their seed key. This is the rationale for having “bet windows” of 6 hours or less before events. But yes, if users can coordinate the timing, it can defiantly happen.Maybe in forums or users just end up typically checking the website at the end of the day to scout for interesting bets.

– "bad SSL Cert " Thank you! we will fix it!

Yes that is a possible problem and you are exemplifying very good problems to deal with :)

The way we are going to disincentivize this type of behaviour is by limiting user bets in each event. That is, only after we verify that the user has funded the bet, will we allow a new bet in the same market. If the user does not fund a bet, then we will put a temporary suspension in place for new bets across all markets.

We are also moving from allowing users to delay funding the bets until the very start of the events. Instead, we will request users to fund bets within 1 hour of the bet creation with a hard stop at the event start. For example if the bet is created 3 hours before the event, both users need to fund the multisig within 1 hour. But if the bet is created 20min before the event start, then they will have 20min to fund wallets.

We are still experimenting. It can be very well that we reintroduce bounties for each bet and in cases where A does not fund its side of the bet, then we give 50% of the bounty to side B to compensate for his/her trouble. We understand that many users will want to place multiple legit bets in a single market and therefore bounties are a good compromise. However, at this point we recognise that asking for bounties places too many steps to adoption.

We are also expecting order books to be very small at the beginning so, not that many opportunities that justify investment in HFT strategies. Also, at this point we only expect to have users using the web browser to create bets. This is important because Sigmanero will rely on each user’s browser to do the work of creating the multisig wallets automatically. It is therefore somewhat different from a trader placing orders in a centralised broker that can be matched instantly. In our case, a new bet and multisig wallet generation should take ~30 seconds to be completed. The side that makes the bet “offer” will have to keep the browser open until someone “accepts” the offer. It might be that we find ways that reduce the need of such high level of synchronous actions by A and B. But multisig wallet creations do need a level of back and forward.

Hello!

“would Sigmanero ecosystem be easily adaptable to politcal events (eg/ elections) as well as sporting bets?” – Yes we expect to add further options in the future such as election outcomes or other relevant events. Perhaps also making public the odds at which users are agreeing bets and therefore act as reference for prediction markets.

The trusted Oracle problem is always present. However Sigmanero should be 100% neutral regarding the outcomes since it will only have earn a commission after the result is known. Therefore there is no monetary incentive to decree false outcomes. If A or B wins should not matter for Sigmanero, so why ruin the reputation and future fee income just to benefit one party?

The problem that remains is indeed if Sigmanero decides to become a party in bets, including controlling 3/4 of the signing keys instead of just two. In this case if Sigmanero decides to scam users, it would not even need to change the outcome of bets in its favour, but rather just transfer funds out of multisigs. Or perhaps as you hint, a gray scenario would be if Sigmanero doe not simply run away with funds from its multisigs, but rather maintains a facade of trustworthy intermediary while decreeing an outcome in favour of the bets it placed.

One mitigation to the scenario above would be to announce from the start that for the relevant event (for example an election) it will decree the outcome as per a known non-related third party or public source. This way Sigmanero could not deviate from the declaring an outcome in line with the third-party without suspicion.

There might be a cleaver way to increase the level of assurance that users are placing bets with normal users instead of Sigmanero. Every time a new multisig is generated, both A and B will be able to see the main address of the new multisig wallet.This means that both A and B could in theory signal to each other that they are not Sigmanero. This could work in some third party forum where users could disclose this address to other users, and other users would know from reputation tracking or other sources that that user is not Sigmanero. A more simple example would be if two friends, Paul and John place a bet against each other in Sigmanero. They would be able to see that they what they share the same main multisig address, and therefore that Sigmanero cannot move funds without one of their keys. For very large bets users might want to get such a credible signal before funding their side of the bet into the multisig. However we only see this becoming a topic for larger events or bets as you mention, therefore we have not spent too much time trying to come up with solutions for these cases. We are open for suggestions though!

“Sidenote: Does Sigmanero take donations?” – We are not taking donations at the moment. Sigmanero will charge a 1% commission on bets which we hope will be sufficient to keep the website running and provide the natural incentive for Sigmanero to actually work as intended.

Final note: We have received very good feedback so far including from other channels. The website is under maintenance to implement some of the suggestions and hopefully will be live again on Friday 12th April. One in particular, we have decided to drop the requirement for users to have to place a bounty with Sigmanero to initiate bets. This means that we will have to rely more on good behaviour from users. That is, if A agrees to make a bet with another user B, there is no monetary penalty for A not funding its side of the bet. If we see that a particular user is disruptive in this manner we will suspend the user from making new bets for a period of time. That is, if A sends the funds but B does not, we will refund back A and suspend B for a period of time. This means that there will be zero elements of custody of funds by Sigmanero and that the process whole will be much more simple for users.

Thanks!

Great points, thank you!

We will work on a infographic right the way. Agree that deposit/bounty distinction is not clear. -"When funding a wager can the deposit be used as part of the funds? " – this is an interesting suggestion, we will consider adding it at least as an option. One possible downside is that users would need to constantly “top up” their balances with Sigmanero to make additional bets and this can add extra time to the overall process. But if people prefer it, why not.

-“Rug-pull scenario: is there a way to verify the counterparty wallet signatures?” – the only conceivable “rug-pull” scenario is if us “Sigmanero” decide to place bets as counterparty to users and therefore control 3/4 keys from the start. The incentive to rug-pull is very small because it would tank reputation instantly and the gains from the rug-pull would be limited to one bet at a time that gets stolen. We don’t expect any “wales” to start placing very large bets on the website that would economically justify such an incentive.

Additionally, we expect each bet to be of modest size because whoever places a new bet also needs to consider that the counterparty needs to be able to match the opposite side. If there are two genuine counterparties in a bet plus Sigmanero, then a rug-pull is impossible.

Small note: If a user decides to be both parties of the bet (creating 2 accounts in Sigmanero), then he/she would still only have 2/3 necessary keys for the signature in the 3/4 multisig set up. If a user wants to verify that the new multisig wallet is indeed 3/4 set up, then he/she can always recover the wallet locally using Monero CLI and verify that it is indeed 3/4.

-“I don’t see where the active bets are listed on the website” – at this point only open bets are shown, that is, bets waiting for a counterparty. We will add “total bet volumes” shortly.

Thanks!