Where Augur’s REP is Accepted Locally and Globally
REP (short for Reputation) is the token powering the decentralized Augur betting and prediction market. Being a crypto token, it’s accepted as payment by some businesses, from a California-based artist creating some very cool crypto-inspired art to an Argentinian web developer.
Who accepts REP…
Should you buy REP?
Betting and prediction markets are a lot more than just places for people to bet on sports, a platform like Augur has the promise of being “the most powerful forecasting tool that mankind has ever seen.” They could allow society to make more intelligent decisions informed by skin in the game bets made with smart contracts — for example, will state regulation of the energy sector result in increased GDP in Texas? Prediction markets may also be a solution to civilization’s “fake news” problem, that’s a very good thing that you might want to get in on…
You can, of course, HODL REP but if you want to get involved in the prediction market, you stake it on Augur and be rewarded from the 1.5% fee they charge betters. Currently, it can just be used to bet on sports so I hope to see their betting markets expand. One of the challenges facing the project is gambling laws which vary in different places. Augur will have to stay compliant with these laws while trying to remain decentralized.
About Augur
Interesting factoid: Augur harkens to Roman times when they would try to predict the migrations of birds.
Augur is a peer-to-peer, decentralized exchange, enabling universal and transparent access to its markets. “Augur is an open, global prediction market protocol that allows anyone to create a market for anything. There is no single entity that controls the protocol; it’s community owned and operated.”
From augur.net
Augur is a trustless, decentralized oracle and platform for prediction markets. The outcomes of Augur’s prediction markets are chosen by users that hold Augur’s native Reputation token, who stake their tokens on the actual observed outcome and, in return, receive settlement fees from the markets. Augur’s incentive structure is designed to ensure that honest, accurate reporting of outcomes is always the most profitable option for Reputation token holders. Token holders can post progressively-larger Reputation bonds to dispute proposed market outcomes. If the size of these bonds reaches a certain threshold, Reputation splits into multiple versions, one for each possible outcome of the disputed market; token holders must then exchange their Reputation tokens for one of these versions. Versions of Reputation which do not correspond to the real-world outcome will become worthless, as no one will participate in prediction markets unless they are confident that the markets will resolve correctly. Therefore, token holders will select the only version of Reputation which they know will continue to have value: the version that corresponds to reality.
From the Augur whitepaper
