May 10, 2008...6:57 pm
An eBay of Betting…
Yesterday I talked about a kind of eBay for services, as you may know I’m quite keen on gambling, so I started wondering how the eBay model could be adapted to make a gambling website?
I think it would be good to have a betting exchange just for friends. Members could set up password protected markets on absolutely anything. If someone in the office is having a baby, why not bet on the sex of the baby, or the weight, or when it will arrive? Friends playing a pool tournament could bet on who would win the match. Or you could add interest to your poker home game by making odds on who’d win the tournament. You could even bet on a favourite TV show, or whether the boss had a long lunch yet again… I blogged about finding a virtual ‘raindrop rolling down the window’ to bet on, well with this gambling site you could really bet with your mates on a bunch of racing raindrops.
The ‘owner’ of a market (the person who set it up) would have to close the market when a result was decided, and that would trigger the pay out to go ahead. To sidestep complicated legal stuff this site could be set up with ‘play money’ only (in which case it would have to charge a fee for membership rather than commision.) This might work because real money could still change hands in the real world between the friends who are playing the markets. You could run this site without any legal problems if it was done this way. However, it would be a LOT better to operate with members making real money deposits and having the markets settled automatically when they’re closed.
I think it would be nice to have a ‘just for fun’ betting option, to get people interested, and for people who just want to play for ‘bragging rights’. I often have ‘play bets’ with my boyfriend on all sorts of silly things, if we were members of a site like this we’d be able to keep track of who was winning!
The site could start out by offering these private betting markets but eventually aim to offer public betting on markets created by its users. Maybe members could prove they can be trusted by paying out on a set number of private markets before being allowed to create open-to-all public markets?
I am cautious about the idea of a completely open ’betting marketplace’, a completely self-regulating public gambling site would run the risk of results being fixed, and imagine the disputes about unfair payouts in carelessly worded markets! eBay lives by the rule of ‘caveat emptor’ if I knew latin I could tell you the phrase for ‘let the bettor beware!’ I think this idea might only work in small scale markets between friends, even then there’d have to be dire warnings saying ‘only bet when you understand a market and trust the person running the thing.’ Having said that, thousands of pounds change hands on eBay between complete strangers and their simple feedback system does appear to keep people honest.
Hmm, I realise even password protected ‘private bets’ could become public if someone revealed the password on an online forum. Perhaps one way to keep it ‘between friends’ was if it existed as some kind of Facebook application. Bah, I don’t really like Facebook..!
Anyway, I’m done with this invention-a-day idea, I need to check the odds for this evening’s racing…
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